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Forum - View topicNEWS: Kitarō Tanjō: Gegege no Nazo Film Reveals Main Staff, Teaser Visual
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OjaruFan2
Posts: 661 |
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Just curious, on the visual tagline, "Omae wa, nani mono da?" (おまえは、ナニモノだ？) why is "nani mono" (ナニモノ) written in katakana?
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Dayraven
Posts: 176 |
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In this case, probably for emphasis — “What are you?”
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2558 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Using katakana instead of the kanji can be done for emphasis, but it's also something that's generally used in Japanese media, especially anime & manga, for a variety of reasons. While I'm not fully sure what tone this new Kitaro movie will be going for, it is predominantly a children's series, and sometimes katakana is used in place of kanji simply so that children can know what exactly is being said, especially if the kanji is maybe a little too complex for them, at that point in life.
For example, I recently watched Acrobunch, and there's an episode where Mt. Shari in Hokkaido is visited, but instead of the episode title using the kanji "斜里岳/Shari-dake", which is how it's usually written, the episode title instead used "シャリー山/Shari-san". Discotek actually had a rare goof on the subs with this, since they went with "Mt. Shirley", which isn't exactly incorrect, as "Shirley" is written that exact way in katakana, but considering all of the real-life location context it wasn't the right choice. Regardless, this way younger viewers can learn the phonetic spelling of the mountain, and later in life they can learn the proper kanji. Now, to be fair, the kanji for "nani" is really simple, so in this movie's case it's likely a mix of both emphasis & honoring the children's series history of the franchise. |
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Dayraven
Posts: 176 |
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Might not be a goof. 斜里 doesn’t have a long ‘ri’, unlike シャリー, and 70s/80s SF anime had a fondness for using slightly altered placenames instead of the real ones. So ‘Shirley’ might match the intent here. (EDIT: Actually seems to be シャーリ in the title, still different from the real mountain’s name.) The katakana in the Kitaro poster is more likely for emphasis, since hiragana would be more natural otherwise, and just as easy to read. |
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dm
 Subscriber Posts: 1361 |
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Yes, you can think of katakana as the Japanese equivalent of italics.
In English, we use italics for both foreign words and emphasis. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2558 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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However, Acrobunch is all about taking place in the real world (in the future, but still), relying on actual locations, history, & mythology for its various episodic plots, and "Mt. Shirley" in the series is specifically stated as being located in Hokkaido & references the Kamui, meaning that the episode the mountain was in based its plot on Ainu mythology, even if only tangentially. Considering how literally no other place got a different spelling in the subs, even when they're rather esoteric places & names, it's hard to believe that only Mt. Shari would be left out of this. But this is really neither here nor there for the topic in this thread, so I'll leave it at that. |
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OjaruFan2
Posts: 661 |
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Thanks for the replies guys
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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Kitarou's origin story was animated once before in the 2007 noitaminA series Hakaba Kitarou.
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