Erm, you are standing on the beach of a tropical island, and Natsumi has just been kidnapped by a robotic crab. Is it really the time to be worrying about car chases, Giroro?

Having heard that a decent, subbed release of the Evangelion 1.01 movie had been released in Hong Kong (legally, of course), I ended up heading over to Yes Asia to grab a copy. The thing with HK DVDs, though, is that the releases of Asian movies tend to be pretty cheap (£6-7-ish), and as a result the intention to order just one DVD ends up escalating to more like a dozen, though it is a shame it’s pretty slim pickings when it comes to anime. This probably goes some way to explaining exactly why I have a copy of obviously terrible The Oneechanbara, and is also why I picked up the ended up picking up the first three Keroro Gunsou movies (even though I already have the first on R2).

Anyway, the English subtitles on those HK releases that sport them are a bit of a crap-shoot in terms of quality – those on the Evangelion movie, aside from few minor typos, are pretty good. The same can be said of the subtitles to the first Keroro movie – there’s nothing overwhelming wrong with them.

The same can’t really be said of the second Keroro movie. I’m inclined to think that whoever wrote the subtitle script at least had a grasp of the Japanese language (or maybe Cantonese?), but it’s almost like they based the translation on just the audio without any idea of the context given by the visuals – aside from a few points where they’ve clearly misheard the audio, there’s a lot of lines which would make sense given different circumstances. It just a shame that the movie they were probably imagining was likely more exciting than the one I watched, though at least the subtitles added some additional humour value…