Arabic Anime (Alternately: Je Déteste Vous, Gérard Depardieu)

For those of you who know anything about Japanese cartoons, commonly referred to as anime, you know that they enjoy a large popularity in the US under their dubbed versions and that the artistic style incorporates generalized mouth movements so you don't get lip reader's syndrome (did I just make that up? yes I believe I did), which I define as the disconnect between seeing words form on someone's lips but hearing different sounds and different word lengths.

Though I experience this daily with Noor (which as I recently found out is not only dubbed in Syrian Arabic but the character's names have been changed as well -- ex. Noor is actually Gümüş. In Arabic her name means light but in Turkish it means silver...) nothing is as terrible as the French movies. Any and all new releases here are dubbed in French, which means you get terrible lip reader's syndrome AND really awful voice actors. Why do Orlando Bloom and Val Kilmer sound the same??? Probably because they were both dubbed by Gérard Depardieu... The Great French Schnoz.

Seriously, he is the undisputed god of french cinema and I would be hard pressed to name more than ten french movies I have seen without him ("Amélie," "Indochine," "And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen" [which was filmed in Fes and Essaouira!], "Les Choristes", "La Belle et la Bête", "Tout va Bien," "La Cage aux Folles," and "Monsieur Ibrahim et les fleurs du Coran") AND he has also been in quite a few English movies that I've seen (Hamlet, Les Misérables, The Man in the Iron Mask, 102 Dalmatians...) Also, "Manon des Sources" doesn't count as a French movie without Sir Schnoz because he was Jean de Florette in "Jean de Florette", the movie directly preceding "Manon" as Manon's father... plus his wife was in both of them anyway.

That was a pretty lengthy digression. Anyway, what I thought was interesting about cartoons here was that Looney Tunes are played as-is (yay for childhood memories) but anime is dubbed in Arabic. No, I don't get lip reader's syndrome but it does blow my mind that anime can be so popular and, on a slightly more contrite note, it probably sound weird for the Japanese when they hear the English dubs that I am so used to.

I might be just a little more French than I let on....

P.S. - as I was typing this entry, the anime episode ended and now MBC3 is playing Batman... dubbed in Arabic. And the lip movements work suprisingly well. No not that Batman, the cartoon one... Though that is on my top ten list of things to do once I hit American Soil. The other in no particular order are:

• use my own bathroom, including a decadent long, hot shower
• buy & eat a king size hershey's bar and a bag of m&m's
• get a haircut
• hug Matt until it hurts
• catch up with dad about Thailand
• visit Mom & Katie
• eat: homemade spaghetti, a big breakfast, & a steak
• buy a new pair of headphones to replace the ones I blew out in Fes
• drive my car, Vesper, for the first time in 7 weeks
• See: The Dark Knight, The Incredible Hulk, Hancock, Hellboy II, Wanted, Wall-E, Get Smart, Kung Fu Panda, Narnia: Prince Caspian ... hopefully some of those are already at the dollar cinema!
  

Ok, so that may seem like more than ten things but it's my list so... deal with it... or help me do all those things as soon as possible!