The Avengers’ Japanese Release Ignites Controversy

Wow. If that’s the best tagline that Marvel/Disney’s marketing department can come up with, where do I apply for that job? Because I can be commode hugging drunk and still come up with something ten times better than that.

It doesn’t even call the movie to mind. It could be the tagline for anything. “Hey Japan, this is a sandwich!”

It sounds so…meme-ish.  The marketing team has to seriously back away from the internet for a while.  It’s influencing them in all the wrong ways.

Seriously, can Japan go back and retroactively market Ringu and The Ring with a tag that says, “Hey Americans, THIS is horror.” Seeing as so many American horror film since then has utilized the visual of a creepy little girl onryou since, the tag at least would support the resulting injection into the American cultural unconscious.

And can Studio Gibli market it each of its films as “Hey America, THIS is animation.” Given that Disney is their American distributor, the irony would be delicious.

Am I the only one who’s mind decided to completely bypass the horribleness of the tagline because words can’t express it and went straight to imagining a Godzilla vs The Avengers mashup?

Not knowing anything about how tone translates in Japanese, one could argue that it depends on what the emphasis is in the sentence.

For example, if it is just “Hey Japan, this ‘is’ a movie.”

The sentence is just saying, “this is a thing that exists.”

But if the emphasis is on, “Hey Japan, ‘this’ is a movie”, then yeah, it is implying something offensive.

Yes.

Design by committee is the hardest, most frustrating thing you can ever do. I promise that campaigns like this must have gone through many people on a committee that markets the movie and refined it to a point where the marketing doesn’t make sense anymore.

If that’s the not the case it must’ve been a B-crew that had to do marketing after the fact. B-crew isn’t going to do A-crew work and is probably smaller, maybe even less experienced.

How do I know this? As a professional graphic designer, this is how campaigns are made. Unless your marketing team is one very well running machine, most campaigns are so filtered. In the end, they probably thought they were being edgy and clever when in reality they were being stupid, making assumptions.

What Marvel should do next time? Hire a Japanese/Asian marketing company to do the release material. Why go with A-crew or B-crew that’s American when you can just outsource to a company that knows their audience better.

it’s a lowsy tag, but insulting? Stupid and uncreative? definitely.  Offensive? No.  ‘Sides, has any1 watched commercials lately. Really, ALL advertising treats the audience as an idiot.

YES. I LOVE Japanese horror movies; holy crap, they do it RIGHT. Like this comment times a thousand.

Also also, what crap! Worrying if they should be offended or not kinda sounds similar to the reaction we have to trolls. “Oh just ignore them, they’re not that offensive anyway!” Well…still. If someone’s stepping on your foot, for example, I think you have the right to tell them it freakin’ hurts. This is very disrespectful.

What doesn’t offend you can still offend others. We’re all different and have different experiences.

I err on the former because the latter makes no sense. Japanese people need to be told that a poster advertising for a movie is advertising for an ACTUAL film? Unlike all those fake films out there?

I’ll let Stephen Fry comment for me. http://i.imgur.com/EX5v4.jpg

I read on one board that it was a reference to the recent Kamen Rider/ Super Sentai mega crossover movie that came out in Japan earlier this summer with the tagline: “Hey Japan, these are Japanese heroes!”

The joke of The Avengers Japanese tagline being that the crossover turned out to be terrible and that, at the very least, The Avengers will put being a film before being a crossover.

 I thought so.

The Japanese sentence is not ambiguous the way the English translation is.  これが映画だ ”Kore ga eiga da” clearly means “THIS is a movie” (the answer to the hypothetical question “What is a movie?”) rather than “This is a MOVIE” (the answer to “What is this?”), which would be slightly different in Japanese: “Kore *wa* eiga da.” In other words, the difference marked by stress in this English sentence is marked with distinct grammatical particles in Japanese.

Godzilla has fought most of the Avengers already… ahhh 70′s comics!

Way to invalidate other points of view.

One would hope that they indeed had a Japanese marketing team. However with the amount of horrid Japanese-English and English-Japanese translations in Japan (and I live here) I’m amazed at the hype. There are much worse to be seen.

Hey Japan, this is a comment.

Well I can see how just saying “I’m offended” without elaborating is pretty pointless but I don’t think it’s right to dismiss someone’s concern.

I can see society advancing rapidly under the thought that any sort of complaint or concern or frustration is a whine to be ignored.

…I think I confused advancing with devolving, wait. 

Hey Japan, ceci n’est pas une pipe!

I get the feeling that some higher-up said, “I don’t know, say something like, ‘Hey Japan!  This is a Movie!’  Or something…”  and somebody just straight up translated it.

Stephen Fry is delightful, we all know that, but sometimes he can be sooo… So upper-class white British male. Privilege, I mean.

Its one of the biggest movies to be released in a while. Audiences loved it. They are toting how it is definitive towards what movies should be. Grow up and quit being so sensitive.

I wouldn’t overstate this. 2-channel isn’t exactly famed as a hotbed of rational debate and proportional, measured comment.

I asked my wife (who’s Japanese) about this, and her reaction was, “Hmm, a little overconfident, but not patronising. And Japanese action movies are awful. Really awful.” Which is true. The few I’ve endured have been terrible. But, by virtue of the fact she married a foreigner she’s slightly atypical, so factor that in.

You also need to factor in the date (anniversary of the surrender of Japan) and higher levels than normal of nationalistic idiocy from all parties over some uninhabited rocks. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if certain knees aren’t jerking even harder and faster than normal right now

I am not sure that the tagline itself is “flippant, snotty.” 

You note, “hey, it is a good film,” to which I agree.  

And which I also think was the main point of the slogan.

It sounds to me more like someone thought a good tagline would be, “HEY JAPAN!  Now *THIS* is a MOVIE!!!!”  
Which would make immediate and good sense in the English-speaking world.  And would be much better than, say, “Behold! This film, in a certain sense, reflects the Platonic Ideal of all that is suggested by a contemporary, action-packed, special-effects-laden film, and thus you should not miss the opportunity of seeing.”But during the translation, someone decided to take out the “now” from “now THIS is a movie!” which might not have been a terrible thing for a translator to do, but in English, without that, it doesn’t really make sense.  Plus, in Japan, the phrasing might not have made sense, culturally, anyway.  So that’s a real problem, especially when “See the top film in the history of the world (that you are only now going to be able to see in a non-pirated, Japanese-dubbed version)” could have worked just as well.

I wonder how well ”Behold! This film, in a certain sense, reflects the Platonic Ideal…” translates into Japanese?

Regardless, this does seem like it may have been a top-down type of mistake.  And so, while the tagline doesn’t seem snotty to me, the mistake of using this poorly translated thought itself may represent flippant decision making.  Some employee did not get fired for following his boss’s demand, and the boss is probably too high up not to, but perhaps should be.So, bosses of the world, trust your employees.  So you don’t look like an cultural imperialist swine, which, in case you’re unsure, would be bad.  NOTE: That last line was, in fact, flippant and snotty.  

 ”Hey Japan, this is shawarma!”

or how about they (japan) make a new godzilla and say “HEY AMERICA! THIS IS GODZILLA!” that tuna eating overgrown handbag from Hollywood aint godzilla 

Considering how xenophobic Japan can be sometimes this doesn’t surprise me.  It will settle down I’m sure.

Well, yes. Given that this is a movie about super-heroes it could mean simply that “this is a MOVIE instead of a COMIC BOOK”, perhaps the meaning was lost in the translation, american marketing dude says: “this is a movie (meaning: not a comic book)” Japanese marketing dude hears: “this is a movie (meaning: instead of the crap you people call movies, AMERICA, F*CK YEAH!!). It’s a possibility, I don’t know, I don’t speak the language.