The Story of Saiunkoku v1

During one of Geneon’s panels at Otakon ’07, I caught the trailer for The Story of Saiunkoku (Saiunkoku Monogatari). One of the producers mentioned how addictive the show was and from the trailer it looked amusing, but something I might Netflix instead of buy what with the show apparently taking place on Planet Bishie. Then they whipped out the collector’s box and I wanted it.

The other thing that made me hop on board was the non-school setting. It’s always a nice plus when the story doesn’t take place in school, which as a side note is probably why I’m passing on School Rumble. There’s enough high school on my watch list right now.

I’m not one to do the heavy lifting when it comes to summary, so I’ll just say it’s a drama set in a sort-of Chinese style court. The leading lady, Shuurei is tasked to get the lazy young king in shape to rule before the whole country becomes a mess again. To do this she becomes the king’s temporary consort. He’s a bishie, which of course means he likes other bishies, but just how much? Can she get the king to lead? Can she get him through it in one piece? Can she get him to like women enough to at least make an heir? Comedy should ensue as well as some drama and likely romance.

I think this show is a lot of fun so far even though it’s going through some of the standard gags, though it does actually use them as more than just a gimmick for a quick laugh, particularly when the characters use it as part of a subterfuge. Anyway, it looks like the show has some dun-dun-dun drama coming up. The dvd producer referenced live action dramas when he talked about Saiunkoku and I’d have to agree.

I’ve never actually watched those period dramas with the volume on, so I could be wrong about that, since maybe they’re not supposed to be funny and I just think they’re funny because we’d make up dialog for them. There was this bar I went to that always had those dramas on with the volume off. I have no idea why. Nobody who worked there was Asian. I’d be sitting there in this bar which was about as working-class-Caucasian a bar/club combo gets — like I’m sometimes the only non-full euro stock there — and these Asian historical dramas would be playing at the bar while some cover band was telling the crowd to jump around, jump around, jump up, jump up and get down, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump, jump.

Okay so that had nothing to do with Saiunkoku. I am a little surprised at how much I enjoyed it considering I pretty much thought of it as an animated Chinese courtly soap opera. I just hope it completes it’s run. I know that this was a pretty popular series among blogs, but blog popularity doesn’t always translate well among people who actually buy dvds, so I’ll keep my fingers crossed. The only reason I’m concerned is the show is longer than most releases, so they would have the opportunity to stop the bleeding if sales are awful.

English Dub

Saiunkoku is being dubbed by Ocean Studios with Karl Willems as the voice director. The dub is functional, but I don’t feel an attachment to it.

My standard Ocean Studios complaint goes into play here. Each one of their dubs that I’ve heard over the past year sound like someone stuffed damping material into every one of my speakers in my audio setup. I find it extremely distracting, but I’ve not seen anybody complain about it, so I might be way over sensitive on the audio mix quality, but it’s consistent with every Ocean dub I heard over the past year (Starship Operators, Shana, Black Lagoon). The center channel is mixed at the expense of the other channels providing ambiance.