Another collaboration with Kineko Video. Today's release is one that has been in the works for a while now 🫣
How about what this movie is, for starters?
Most of you may already know about its existence, but for the ones who don't, Future War 198X is a 1982 anime movie by Toei Animation that portrays a fictional outbreak of a third World War—primarily between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Due to the movie's themes, a lot of people in Japan had protested against the release of this movie, with Toei's own animators even wanting nothing to do with Future War 198X—not only did this result in Toei Animation outsourcing the movie's animation to other groups, but they also had to hastily re-write the script to make the movie less depressing and more uplifting. I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say that the movie consequently reflects this VERY much, and not in a good way.
With the negative attention surrounding this movie, I think that ultimately also led to Toei sticking to releasing the movie on VHS/LD only for a very long time, until they decided to broadcast it on TV and put it on streaming in SD during these past few years. Said SD release is an abysmal tape master BTW, it really looks horrible. It did get an HDTV broadcast on one of Toei's own channels as recent as last year, though.
Having said that (and before I go into the history of this fansub project), what do I think of the movie?
I'll be as honest as possible. This isn't a perfect movie, especially with the re-written script. It has its issues... but I still very much enjoyed watching this. The score is well-composed & fits the movie, the scenic backgrounds in here are beautifully drawn, and I'm also really impressed with how it just visually looks in general, especially with the characters—I'd argue that the characters certainly look "Western" in the sense that they don't possess or carry any noticeable "anime"-like physical traits to them. The storyline, even with its flaws, is good enough to keep you engaged for an average movie night, IMO.
I cannot emphasize enough that I strongly recommend watching this yourself and forming your own opinion from there. There are multiple reviews for this movie that have existed for a long time, and are likely to pop up on your end if you search for a general review pertaining to this anime—some of these reviews are completely unfair and just outright incorrect (it's really only the reviews from Animétudes and Zimmerit). I will not discuss these reviews any further in here since I want to dedicate most of this post to this movie's fansub release instead of some shitty movie reviews on the internet.
So, believe it or not, I had actually attempted to sub this myself in 2015, when I was merely a sophomore in high school... and then quickly dropped this afterwards LOL. My memory's a bit rough, but what I think had happened was that someone on the BakaBT forums was attempting to sub it themselves and I tried to pick up from where they last off since there was no progress on it for a while. For reasons I can't remember, I never progressed on it.
Years later, this finally gets subbed... with machine translation tools, and from Greek subs of all things. The movie clearly needed a new translation. So, this is the time-frame of where things actually began:
- July 2022: Movie reels were acquired
- Dec. 2022: The first scan is done by Kineko
- Oct. 2024: The movie is re-scanned, but with better colors—the Kineko folks are generally pretty busy, hence the delay
- Dec. 2024: The movie is sent to Yume for translating
- Jan. 2025: Translation is finished, and TLC (by perevodildo) is also finished within the same month
- Feb. 2025: QC by imatu is finished
- April 2025: Originally started by me in Jan. 2025, I painstakingly did shot-by-shot manual cropping for the movie's 16:9 version. Also did a quick stitch of the movie's VHS audio to the film scan
And, well... April 2025 has been where the movie's been kinda staggering at since then, for various reasons.
I had compiled a list of visual defects found with the scan while I was working on the subs for this movie, which I had sent over to the folks at Kineko. Due to their busy schedule, the fixes were not implemented until 2026, and I had finally gotten the final encodes for this back in July.
The audio has also fucked me over big time—the SD streaming version of this movie has abysmal audio quality, like someone drowned it underwater. The recent Toei.ch HDTV broadcast of the movie isn't as bad, but it's ruined by terrible mixing and sounds like an FM radio broadcast. Not even the VHS releases are perfect—they cut out about a second of footage (more or less) during the reel changes. To make it as tolerable as much as possible, I stitched the VHS audio of the movie to Kineko's scan and patched in any missing audio with audio from the SD streaming version (it still had some salvageable spots in it). I didn't use the LD audio because the movie fades in & out during the end of Side 1 and the start of Side 2, but in hindsight maybe it would have been better to use the LD audio combined with the VHS, because the VHS was insanely buzzy as hell and it took me a shit ton of time to fix it to the best of my ability. It was not fun at all.
Some final notes...
- The copy of this movie which Kineko had obtained on film came with the movie's first trailer. A listing for the second trailer came up for sale sometime this year, which I purchased. Both trailers have been scanned & subbed. The second trailer was a bit red-faded, so lots of shots within it were switched out with Kineko's scan of the main feature wherever applicable.
- I put up separate 4K & 1080p releases of this movie. Both of these contain full screen & widescreen versions for you to choose from. I recommend widescreen since that was the intended look for this movie.
- The quality of the main feature looks pretty good for the most part, except for one reel change halfway through the movie. Additionally, there is about half a second of missing footage near the end. Unfortunately, we can't patch it in, unless we're lucky enough to get a 2nd copy of the movie that has that shot intact.
I also want to dedicate this last section to thanking the following people:
- The folks at Kineko for giving me the opportunity to sub this movie
- Yume for translation & timing
- Perevodildo for TLC'ing this
- imatu for QC'ing this
- Japanese Hoarder for the VHS audio
- J. Taylor for swapping the messy parts of Trailer 2's scan with footage from the movie
- Krycek7o2 for additional audio fixes
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