Friday, 5 September 2014

Currently watching: Nakuna Hara-chan

To be honest, after I'd finished subbing SOIL, I didn't have any plans to do any more subtitles. Although SOIL was a satisfying drama to work on, it left me kind of exhausted. However, two things happened to change my mind. First, I was getting increasingly irritated by the machine-translations that one subber in particular left in his subtitles. I know I should be grateful they're being subbed at all, but at least do a bit of quality control before you release them.

The other thing was finding this drama on a hard drive, and discovering that no one had made English subs for it (in my last post about this drama, I mentioned they were on LiveJournal, but couldn't find them when I searched again). I'd seen the first few episodes before, but this time I wanted to watch it properly, so I sat down and made a start on a set of subtitles for it.


The storyline is about a frustrated manga writer (Aso Kumiko) who, after a series of unlikely events, meets one of her own characters in real life. This character, Hara-chan (played in typical bombastic style by Nagase Tomoya) is very much an innocent in a strange new world, and his lack of inhibitions about how to act make for some interesting episodes.

It requires a huge suspension of disbelief from the viewer. Not just about how a comic character can come to life, but also about how he can meet his own author, and go back and forth into his world at opportune moments. But once you get over that, it's a fun comedy, which also has a fair amount of emotional weight behind it. Certainly, anyone who's let their own low self-esteem stop them from going for something they really wanted should find themselves empathising with this story.


Also, Nakuna, Hara-chan seems like a good drama for anyone just starting out learning Japanese, because Hara-chan repeats a lot of words when asking what they mean.

An amusing comedy, perfect if you want something that won't tax your mind, but will pull at your heartstrings.

4 comments:

  1. It's a sweet series indeed, even when the story is very silly. The cast is good too. Nagase Tomoya's style of acting is quite unique : D and Kumiko Aso is lovely as Echizen san. I always like Yakushimaru Hiroko! (in my opinion she won the battle of the diva's in Amachan : ) even though I really really love kyonkyon)

    Anyways! It seems like a nice project. I did manage to get the subs from the tk0 subbing group on Livejournal at the time, and they were well done. But now the site is dead it seems. So it's good that you're subbing this. Ganbare ne!

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  2. great job with these subs, thank you for doing them

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  3. I've recently started watching this series too and I can't get past Nagase-san's priceless expressions without a giggle. So far I've only found subs for 3 eps but I don't mind watching it without them:)

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  4. Thank you for the Subtitles, I've been searching for them for a very long time. thanx again and keep up the good work^^

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