I am a shoujo anime junkie

This bored me as a kid, but I would watch any cartoon back then.

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Out of nostalgia, I saw the 1992 cartoon movie of it, a while back on Youtube. There's only subs for the movie. Though it doesn't appear to be on there anymore. I have to admit, it was actually pretty decent.

 

I'm a big anime nut myself and have a huge post on page 3 of the anime thread. You may be able to find something there that you like.

Shoujo anime isn't my favorite genre in general, though there are exceptions. The top two you listed -- Ouran and Fruits Basket -- have got to be my favorites. Ouran especially. Frickin' hilarious.

The two other shoujo anime I can recommend without reservation are Kare Kano and Lovely Complex. You can watch the first episode of both below, at least until YouTube takes them down for copyright infringement. :grin: They're both very funny and touching. A U.S.-released English dub of Kare Kano exists, but Lovely Complex was never dubbed and won't get a U.S. release until later this year, and even then it will be subs only.

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You might also like Love Hina, Full Metal Panic, Clannad, and Kanon. I've only seen the first of these, but I hear good things about the others.

And although they're not specifically shoujo, based on the others you've listed you might dig Natsume's Book of Friends and Dennou Coil.

EDIT: Oh, and I almost forgot, you might also like Great Teacher Onizuka. Again, it's not typically classified as shoujo, but it's a slice-of-life school comedy, which I'd say is pretty close.

 

This probably deserves it's own thread and by no means am I bashing the OP..

But how can you guys watch dubbed anime? I feel like the emotions are lost in the translation. When you hear the Japanese dialogue (yes I have no clue what they are saying) and tie it in w/ the sub's, you can really "feel" the correct emotional frame. Maybe it's just me but watching w/ subs is the only way I can really enjoy the anime.

 

I have strong opinions on subs vs. dubs.

If it's live-action, then I think subs are always the right choice. It just seems wrong to replace the actor's actual voice with someone else's, and it's impossible to lip-sync live action well anyway.

But when it comes to animation, I'm all in favor in dubs. The fact is that the characters are simply drawings -- they do not have a voice that is "their own," and any voice actor will always be lip-syncing, whether they're talking in Japanese or English or some other language.

I distinctly remember watching a long run of anime shows in a row and then watching one that was dubbed (Ergo Proxy). Until that happened I hadn't realized how much nicer it really is to not have to be reading subtitles all the time. It's unnatural. When people speak, you're supposed to understand what they're saying without needing to read it in a subtitle. To me this consideration outweighs any "authenticity" that you get from hearing it in the original culture's language. Your experience is more "genuine" overall if you understand the speech without needing to read it. Besides, even the subtitles are a distortion to begin with, that's unavoidable.

Of course, it is an accepted fact that anime dubs used to suck. Early dubbing with animes was generally done with radio people (sorry OP), because studios thought that all they needed was a good voice. It took them a while to realize that they needed actual actors. Once that happened, dubs started getting much better. They've been really excellent in general for the past ten years or so, but there are still people who have the idea in their heads that all dubs suck because they used to be done poorly. But in general, you can assume that most animes dubbed after 2002 or so have been dubbed fairly well.

Even then there are some occasional exceptions where there may be good reason to prefer a subtitled version, but in my experience these are rare. One that leaps to mind is Kino's Journey, in which the lead character's gender is supposed to be ambiguous. In the English dub the character's gender is fairly obvious, but with the Japanese voice actor it's much harder to tell. I actually showed a few episodes of it to friends in Japanese, and then when we talked about it, we discovered that all the guys who watched it though the character was a guy, and all the girls who watched it though the character was a girl. That was the idea.

Other times there's just a dumb casting choice that makes me want to hit someone. The English voice actor for L in Death Note sounds like frickin' Christian Bale... he's supposed to sound like a geek.

In any case, I'd recommend you give dubs another chance. There are plenty of them that are done well.

 

LOL, half (or more) of the people posting in this thread have no clue what shoujo means....

Fushigi Yûgi.... Find it, watch it, love it (if shoujo/Twilight is your thing).

 

Yeah, the problem is that you started with the best one. You're just not going to find another one better than that.

If I were you I'd just order the Kare Kano DVDs from Amazon or something, since it's not available on Netflix streaming, and it's also the only one of the two that I strongly recommended that's dubbed. I really don't think you'll be disappointed, but you can always watch the first episode and see what you think. To me it's basically Ouran before Ouran, there are a lot of similarities in style.

Although keep in mind that the version I've embedded is subbed, and trying to watch Kare Kano in Japanese is particularly insane since -- like Ouran -- there's a lot of on-screen text. Trying to read the subs for the speech and the text sometimes just isn't possible, it all flies by too fast.

Anyway, enjoy.

 

I enjoy doing this too. Sometimes it seems that anime voice actors are a very small guild. Certain folks just pop up everywhere, even if they're in very small rolls. Steven Blum is everywhere. So are Crispin Freeman and Michelle Ruff. William Frederick Knight seems to play every old man in every anime ever. And Mona Marshall has lent her voice to a ridiculous number of young male anime characters.

In any case, it's rare these days when I don't recognize at least a few voices.

 

This is the key. You don't know what they're saying, so you don't know when something just sounds really, really weird from the perspective of one who knows Japanese.

I'll say as a whole that Japanese voice actors are better in general ( because there's a lot more effort put into it), but it's nowhere near an universal thing at all. Baccano, Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood, and Durara are three where the English voice actors are far better, for example.

I will note that the need to lip sync does produce some odd moments in English, because the drawings are drawn for Japanese voice actors. I think a really egregious example was Deathnote's "I am L" line. In Japanese, saying "I am L" is seven syllables, ”私はエルです。”, while it's two in English, which requires the L to be slightly changed and made odd.

As for the OP: Don't know whether I'd call it shoujo, and it's not exactly my cup of tea ( romantic comedies in general aren't), but I know some people who's recommended Chuuniboyu Demo Koi Ga ****ai.

 

Yeah, that's true. Besides being designed for the Japanese words, in some cases the voices are recorded beforehand and the image made afterwards so that it more closely aligns (Akira did this).

But as you say, the Japanese voices aren't necessarily better. I've actually been wanting to watch the dub of Durarara, there are a lot of big names in that one: Ruff, Wahlgren, Freeman, Bosch, Lowenthal, Seitz, Blum, Savage. That's quite a line-up. Quite possibly the best English cast for an anime that I've seen on paper.

 

Most have already covered the series I'd recommend in this thread. Shounen series are my personal guilty pleasure (Kuroko no Basket FTW). But I just have to say, regarding the above, get out while you still can. After the Edolas arc it's all downhill. The manga just went off a cliff of plotholes and lazy writing two weeks ago, the anime was announced to take a hiatus, and I'm not sure if the series can recover. Honestly, I think its mangaka Hiro Mashima just doesn't give a sh-t anymore. He's already started another series that he seems much more excited about. The most entertainment FT provides me now is watching hilarious irate rants about how bad it's gotten on Youtube.

As far as the subs vs dubs argument goes, I watch mostly subs because I watch continuing series, and do so as soon as the eps are out. If I could have my choice though, I'd take a good dub any day. This is primarily because I'm a graphic artist/writer on the side and most anime following an ongoing manga move at a pretty slow pace in order not to catch up to the source material. It leaves a lot of dialogue-heavy still-frame time where I can work on my own stuff while the show is on in the background, but with subs I have to constantly look at the screen to see what the characters are saying. It's annoying. Weird reasoning, I know, but eh.. different strokes.

 

never saw love hina but read the mangas and I thought they were great

i like FMA brotherhood and kenshin a lot

i think netflix has a lot of good anime on there but at least when i was going through trying to watch a few they were all dubbed in english -- while it shouldnt really matter i have always prefered to watch anime subtitled

Hayes - i liked fairy tail as well though I am probably several episodes behind now - was probably going to catch up with that show later this year

 

Netflix has actually lost some good stuff recently, though. Most notably they've lost all the Production I.G. stuff, which included Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit, and Eden of the East. Those are big losses. I hope they get them back eventually. I own them all on DVD myself, but I like to be able to point people to things they can access instantly.

 

To be honest, I focused more on what the OP wanted (action romance) and went right past the "shoujo" part. My bad. I don't watch much of it personally. If they like Clamp stuff, maybe try Angelic Layer? Takes place in the same universe as Chobits, but is a stand alone. The romance is toned down and a bit innocent since the characters are in middle school.

 

Rurouni Kenshin is my all time favorite Anime.

 

You can ship anything and everything.