Crispin Freeman may be known best for his roles in English-dubbed anime and games, but he isn’t just working and enjoying the shows; he’s also looking at how mythological narrative is brought into them. We sat down with him at Otakon 2013 to find out how.
For those of you who are not familiar with Crispin Freeman, he is most known for his voice acting, particularly his roles as Tsume in Wolf’s Rain and Kyon in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, as well as Hector in Castlevania. Recently he’s also been working on showing how various forms of mythology appear within popular games and anime.
At the mythology panel you hosted yesterday, you looked at the evolution of pilots from Mazinger Z, Gigantor, Gundam to Evangelion. Have you looked at any other recent mech shows?
I haven’t seen any shows since Evangelion with the same sort of innovation in positioning. I mean, obviously I can’t give a retrospective on every giant robot show where the pilot sits somewhere. I wanted to show those innovation points, and I don’t know of any show that has had an innovation in the placement that had the same sort of spiritual message as those four shows did.
Have you looked at Sousei no Aquarion (Genesis of Aquarion) and Bokurano?
I’m not familiar with either of those shows.
Sousei no Aquarion has three pilots and has them combining spiritually.
Yea, multiple pilots is sort of its own ball of wax. I was looking at shows that only have one pilot. I do do a presentation on Sentai (Power Rangers) and how they have their roots in anime, specifically Gatchaman and then you have other combining robots like Voltron. In that presentation I talk more about the combining of robots from multiple robots. I also didn’t get into Getter Robo in my presentation at Otakon.
I know you also look at video game mythology as well.
Right. That’s a little more recent. I haven’t put together a presentation yet, but I hope to in the future.
At your Otakon Q and A session you said you don’t get much information about the characters that you are going to voice.
That’s right. Video game companies don’t like giving a lot of information because they’re afraid of it getting out. So we all have to sign non-disclosure agreements and we very often don’t even know very much about the game that we’re going to voice the characters in.
What video games are you looking at to pursue for your presentations? On your website you list Ico, Journey and the Western RPG versus JRPG.
I put a lot of information about the panels I hope to do in the future on my website, but I don’t know if those are exactly the ones I’ll do, because sometimes as I do research I have to reshape my focus. I think it’s possible to talk about video game mythology now in ways that I’m not sure it was possible to in the past, or at least it was a little simpler. Video games are doing more storytelling, as not all video games need storytelling or benefit from it. Tetris doesn’t get any better with a story added to it. Neither does Monopoly either. I’m interested in games that have a coherent mythology, a metaphysical framework they’re working inside of. Team Ico is very much that, they take place in the cursed lands. Ico and Shadow are the ones that really fascinate me right now.
If I were to do a big comparison, it would have to be RPG. I don’t know any other genre defined by it’s cultural roots. We don’t say JFPS or Japanese Strategy, but we do say JRPG. When you look at the original Final Fantasy you can see that it’s using a lot of Tolkein tropes, something that hybridizes Anglo-Saxon mythology and Catholicism. I need to look more into Final Fantasy, but it’s my sneaking suspicion that it doesn’t use Catholicism.
More on Crispin Freeman’s work in mythology in anime can be found on his website Mythology and Meaning. You can keep up with the rest of his work at his homepage here.
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Exclusive interview with voice actor Crispin Freeman & his take on anime/games [Otakon 2013]
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