News
Going on indefinite hiatus
A new project
So, have you ever heard of the 1981 anime "Ai no Gakkou Cuore Monogatari"? You probably haven't. This is a long-forgotten anime that just started having clear images and information dropped online about it fairly recently.
Based off the the 1886 novel by Edmondo de Amicis, "Cuore, Libro per i Ragazzi" (Heart: an Italian Schoolboy's Journal), the story follows Enrico Bottini, a young schoolboy living in Turin, Italy and his daily life going to school, enduring hardships alongside his friends, and learning important life lessons from his new teacher, Mr. Perboni.
If you're a fan of the lesser known "World Masterpiece Theater's" stories such as "Girl of the Alps: My Annette" and "Romeo's Blue Skies" then you'll enjoy the look and feel of this story with its limited animation but charming character designs and atmosphere. Probably because the series' director, Eji Okabe, was a prominent episode director on "Attack No. 1".
You're really not going to find too many anime exactly like this out there. Nowadays it seems like there are plenty of slice-of-life shows with all-female casts but not too many just showing the everyday struggles of boyhood. It's definitely the main appeal of this anime! So please check out the almost forgotten "Ai no Gakkou Cuore Monogatari"!
Merry Christmas!
Another long year behind us! In 2021 we worked on the following titles:
- Fables of the Green Forest with South with Subs
- Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair
- Wandering Girl Nell with South with Subs
- Corrector Yui 1
- Corrector Yui 2
Sadly we didn't have the time to prepare anything for Halloween, but we got a small surprise for you today. It's a surreal love story in form of a short music OVA. Normally I'm not into romance, but there is something about this movie that I really like. Is it because of its resemblance of Interstella 5555? Is it something in Virgin VS's lyrics? I don't know, but I hope you'll enjoy it :)
We'll announce our next project in 2-3 weeks. Stay tuned :)
Merry Christmas and a happy New Year, everyone!
Improvements to the requests section
Since a great deal of guestbook comments were related to the anime requests, we decided to show the requests section a bit more love. Each anime request can now be commented on individually. We've also added automatic pulling of pictures, synopsis, airing dates and synopsis from AniDB of each title. The form no longer asks for a comment on the request. The comments that we collected so far were made under the promise that they wouldn't be shared publicly, so we didn't turn them into regular comments. But from now on, each comment is going to be available for everyone to see. You can now also search the anime requests and sort them by a few properties. Finally, it has its own place in the top navigation so that it is no longer hidden in the guestbook.
I hope that these changes will lead to better communication and clarity :)
Wandering Girl Nell
In parallel to our work on Yui, we started helping out our friend group, South Wind Subs, with finishing Wandering Girl Nell in terms of translation checks and editorial advice. The releases are handled entirely by South Wind, so for details, we encourage you to visit their site :)
Corrector Yui 2
Those of you who follow our guestbook probably know it already, but it's time for an official news.
Today we released the 26th episode of Corrector Yui. We'll now take a small break to release the batch, and then we'll resume our work with season two! While some combine these two seasons into a single whole, we decided to divide it into two separate seasons due to a clear distinction between their plots. We hope you'll enjoy it (personally, I liked the second season even more than the first!).
See you in ComNet :)
End-of-year summary
What a year. Despite numerous adversities, we managed to roughly maintain our weekly pace and release quite a few titles. And so, this year we have been working on:
| Saint Tail (remaster) | continued from 2019; finished |
| Paris no Isabelle | continued from 2019; finished |
| Noroi no One Piece | finished |
| Ashita e Attack | finished |
| Horror News | finished |
| Fables of the Green Forest (remaster) | ongoing |
| Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair | ongoing |
Let's hope 2021 will be as fruitful in terms of anime releases as this one! Regretfully, we didn't manage to prepare a surprise for this year's Christmas. But nothing of value is lost, because as of today our weekly schedule will be expanded by one more title: Corrector Yui!
It's a series about a girl who must save the world from evil artificial intelligence by turning into a heroine of justice in virtual reality. Sounds silly? Because it is! I strongly encourage you to watch it :) For now, we will start to release only the first season of the two, which is a complete piece, and then we'll see. The first 18 episodes of Corrector Yui got official subtitiles, which we will leave untouched and just refresh their appearance. Traditionally, new episodes will be published every Monday. Happy New Year!
Introducing "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair"!
Hello everyone, we're starting another new project! No, this is not the 1992 Nippon Animation adaptation "Girl of the Wind: Jeanie with the Light Brown air" that most people know of. This anime, simply titled "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair", is the long forgotten 1979 version!
If you remember "Paris no Isabel", which we released around this time last year, then you'll be familiar with this production company, DAX Productions. Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair" aired just as "Paris no Isabel" was wrapping up in the late summer of 1979. Jeanie is based off of a 1854 song of the same name by Stephen Foster, and follows the story of a young girl named Jeanie who struggles to do good during the beginnings of the violent American civil war.
It's a charming 13-episode anime with some beautifully painted backgrounds. While it's made by a different team than "Paris no Isabel", both anime carry similar feel. But, of the two, Jeanie is definitely a little less obvious in it's portrayals of good and bad than Isabel. The "bad guys" in Jeanie don't have green skin, for example.
So, please check out "Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair", another hidden gem from 1979!
Small tweaks
Just a small news that we've made some small tweaks to the projects page to enhance the clarity on our releases:
- We've added links to AniDB, which is to help distinguishing the series, especially in the case when two series came out under the same title in different years;
- We've also added flag icons to indicate which languages given release uses.
The way this information is presented might change in the future. We do not plan to add the year of publication of a given series to our release filenames; such practice doesn't seem to be common, and it would also introduce inconsistency to the naming of our previous releases. We probably will present this on the website at some point :)
Halloween 2020
It's been already a year since last Halloween. I can't believe time flies so fast! Anyway, we have a surprise for you this year as well and, frankly speaking, we've been working on it tirelessly throughout the last month. We will leave it up to your judgement whether it turns out be a trick or a treat, but we just hope you enjoy it :) The surprise will be released on October 30th, just like last year. We encourage you to place your bets in the guestbook as to what the project is!
Edit: it was Kyōfu Shinbun (1991)! The OVA also includes a live-action special featuring Tsunoda Jirō, who is the author of the original manga. We have translated and bundled that special with our release as well.
Fables of the Green Forest
Our next project that will let us catch some breath will be a remaster of a World Masterpiece Theatre series, "Fables of the Green Forest". It is our second joint release together with South Wind Subs and it will be released in four languages: English, Polish, Dutch and Romanian :) Here is how South Wind Subs summarizes this beautiful series:
The young woodchuck Rocky (Johnny in the books) leaves the nest to build a home of his own in the distant Green Forest. There, he meets a pretty girl woodchuck called Polly, and other characters like: curious Peter Rabbit, who is always scared easily, gossipy Sammy Jay, Chatterer the Red Squirrel, who is the forest prankster, wise Old Grandfather Frog, and many others like Bobby Raccoon, Jimmy Skunk, Buster Bear and Uncle Billy Possum. All strive to live in harmony and to avoid dangerous enemies like Reddy Fox, Mean Weasel, hawks or man. Fables of the Green Forest is an adaptation of several children’s books about animals, written mostly between 1910 and 1920 by American writer Thornton W. Burgess. The stories in these books were inspired by the writer’s own childhood in Massachusetts, where he grew up surrounded by nature and wildlife. This environment induced a conservationist spirit in the author, that is felt throughout his works, which were meant to both entertain as well as educate about the natural world that surrounds us. This love for nature is also very much present in the anime and the tone is quite similar. Noteworthy are the naturalistic descriptions of animal behavior (an example of this is the episode “Paddy Builds a Dream House” about the building skills of Paddy Beaver), the sense of community, the beautiful colors, and the lovely background music.
IRC XDCC bot
Short stop to announce that a guest by the name of "O-C|Ayuhara" has joined our IRC channel. She'll be there to dilgently serve all of releases. Massive thanks to Xerus for helping us to show her the ropes!
Ashita e Attack
After finishing Paris no Isabelle, we briefly stopped to release a small OVA titled "Noroi no One Piece" with the help of TougeWolf of InkaSubs and R-Raws. It's said to be the first significant work of Kyōtō Animation, so if you're a fan of that studio, be sure to check it out :)
But the main news that we wanted to share today is that we've started subtitling Ashita e Attack, our second volleyball series! We know, we announced it as early as in January 2019, over 14 months ago. It's a lesson for us not to officially announce the projects we want to work on too early, so as not to tease too much. But now that the first episode is out, it should now go smoothly :)
Short break
The next week I'm out of country, and probably won't be able to release the final episode of Paris no Isabelle on Monday. I should release it by the end of the next week, though. Apologies for the delay!
Merry X-mas!
Merry X-mas, everyone! It's been a busy year for Old Castle. This year, we have worked on the subtitles for the following series:
| Attack No. 1 | finished |
| Attack No. 1 movies | finished |
| Ichigatsu ni wa Christmas | finished |
| Wandering Sun | finished |
| Umi no Yami, Tsuki no Kage | finished |
| Famous Dog Lassie | finished |
| Paris no Isabelle | ongoing |
| (remaster) Glass Mark | finished |
| (remaster) Saint Tail | ongoing |
And today one more title is added to this list – our X-mas gift of this year: "Gensei Shugoshin Pi-hyoro Ikka!" It's a 3-episode-long comedy OVA about Buddhist exorcists. It features a Christmas episode, too!
As some of you might have noticed, starting with "Umi no Yami, Tsuki no Kage" we stealthily started doing dual language releases (English + Polish). The initial motivation was to make our work more accessible to our families :) But we've discovered that it also improves the quality of the translation, since Polish (which is the native language of our translator) maps to English much better than Japanese. This makes it easier to "organize" the dialogues first in a language that we know the best, and then map it to English which is in the same Indio-European language family.
A bit of technical news, but we'll most likely miss the release cycle on 9th of February due to vacation. In addition, the work for "Ashita e Attack" is going well and we expect to start releasing it after "Paris no Isabelle".
Last, but not least, we already have a couple of exciting ideas for the next year! We're not ready to share anything specific yet, but we hope you'll enjoy them when the time comes. Thank you for being with us through all this time and all of your comments on Nyaa and the guest book – they mean a lot to us. We wish you a wonderful holiday season and all the best in the year to come.
– Old Castle
The city of flowers
For some time, we've been working on a project that we haven't yet announced publicly. Today is the time to unveil the secret – it is a 13-episode long series entitled "Paris no Isabelle"! The story, loosely based on facts, tells of a girl named Isabelle, who unwillingly gets all tangled up in a political intrigue that will determine the fate of 19th-century France. We've already published the first episode :)
We also haven't forgotten about "Ashita e Attack" that we promised to start working on after Wandering Sun. We got RAWs of acceptable quality only a little while ago. Our estimate is that we will start publishing the first episodes in the few first months of the upcoming year. Thanks for your patience!
Halloween spooks
With Halloween around the corner, we have prepared a surprise for you! That surprise is by no means only the change of our site's graphic design. On the night of October 30 (so the day before, because of our international friends) we will release an atmospheric OVA from the late 80's that should make this spooky holiday even more enjoyable.
Can you guess what title it is? :)
EDIT: It was Umi no Yami, Tsuki no Kage. Congratulations to Erza who seems to have guessed it in the guest book :3
Other than that, we'll be releasing Saint Tail twice a week, starting this week. Woo!
Nyaa.pantsu integration
Not much to say, but we have set up an account on nyaa.pantsu.cat, so if that's your favorite anime torrenting site, we hope you'll be happy to hear this news :) We have uploaded all of our work, too.
A small bonus
So the last Attack No. 1 recap movie is out, which ultimately concludes our journey with this great series. There's one final thing we'd like to share with you, though! We found some silly Attack No. 1-themed commercials on the web and decided to translate them and put them here. They're very cringy – you have been warned :D
Oh, one more thing: we'll be doing a mini non-translation side project – a Bluray release for Saint Tail. We'll retime and style the existing subtitles and fix any typos along the way. (This won't impede our work on Lassie.)
(click on the thumbnail to play the video)
Of dogs and hills
With the last Attack No. 1 movie around the corner, it is time to announce our next project! We will be doing a joint work with South Wind Subs on a World Masterpiece Theater title "Meiken Lassie". It's a sweet series that is loosely based on "Lassie Come-Home" by Eric Mowbray Knight. We hope that you'll enjoy it :)
Good bye, Attack No. 1
It all started on a sunny day almost two years ago. June 19, 2017. That was the day when we released our first episode, bewildered that we are actually doing anime fansubs for something that was never translated to English. And now… it's over. The series the group was founded for is finally finished, after around 104 weeks.
It also concludes a certain period. During those two years we have improved our technique in every area: timing is now aligned to video frames and keyframes/scene changes, we have optimized the line breaks and improved our punctuation, the translator no longer translates every "fufu" and "hehe", our translations are hopefully more creative. Naturally, not everything is yet perfect – for instance, the choice whether to use "-san" / "-kun" or to go with Mr./Mrs. is as tough as it has always been. However, we notice a lot more than we used to, and we have faith that we deliver subtitles of better quality now.
Keeping that in mind, it was really tempting to redo the quality check for the entire series, to deliver the best content we possibly can. But considering that it would take a good chunk of time (100+ hours) and there are other exciting projects for us to take on, not to mention that we still surely would not catch everything, we decided against this and released the series as is, only bundling some small corrections that were applied to almost every episode after their respective releases. We leave further improvements to other groups :)
We would also like to thank everyone who has been supporting us. You people… are amazing. Some of you have been with us since our very first day. There was hardly any release on nyaa that went without comments expressing gratitude and support. Please know that it means a lot and your support is a source of great motivation for us.
Thank you so much.
Our adventure with Kozue and Midori is not quite over yet, though! We still have four recap movies to release, using the raws provided by Johnny (thanks!). Unfortunately, the BD box releases are of very poor quality, so please don't get your hopes up too high.
Other than that, we are going to announce our next project soon, so stay tuned! :)
Website changes
-
We now have a favicon (the small icon near the address bar).
Can you guess who it is? :) Hint: it is not the main character of any series. - There is now an experimental dedicated page for anime requests, available from the guest book. Let us see how it plays out.
- The website was rewritten to Flask, which lets us make changes to it more easily.
- The guest book is now handled by Flask rather than Isso, which means much faster loading speed.
- The option to vote for posts in the guest book was removed.
- Due to technical reasons (making the website dynamic rather than just .html files), we had to move away from Neocities. Their service is excellent like it has always been, but it does not suit our needs anymore.
- The website along with the menus were provided with fallback colors, and the background images should load faster, which ought to improve experience for users with poor connection speed.
- The website is now completely Javascript-free (it used Javascript to transform table cells in the release tables, now it is done by the server).
Our next project
First of all, we'd like to thank you so much for all of the requests! It's amazing to know that there are still so many gems not known to the Western world. We're definitely going to take a close look at some titles from that list :)
As we said in previous news, in our next project we wanted to finish the work we had started all the way back in 2017. The show is…
…Sasurai no Taiyou / Wandering Sun (which incidentally did appear in one of the requests). Here's an excerpt about it from Wikipedia:
Wandering Sun tells the story of two girls switched at birth by the nurse Michiko, out of a grudge against the parents of one of the newborns. Miki was born in the poor Mine family but is switched into the rich Kouda clan, and Nozomi the opposite. Fate cannot separate the two girls who compete to become successful singers after meeting at high school, with the girl-next-door Nozomi working hard and on her own to be the best pop singer in Japan and the rich girl Miki using her family's status to reach the same goal.
This series was itself a ground-breaker in that it was perhaps the first anime series to depict the entertainment industry—specifically popular music, which would be a major plot point in many anime to come from Creamy Mami to Perfect Blue. The voice actress for Nozomi Mine, Junko Fujiyama, was an actual singer who used the series as a launching pad for her own real-life singing career, releasing several singles while the series was still on the air. As a bonus, Nozomi's character design was modeled after another enka singer named Keiko Fuji, who would later be the mother of Hikaru Utada.
After this project, we'd like to sub Ashita e Attack! / Attack on Tomorrow (unless someone else starts to work on it in the meantime).
A Christmas in January
A surprise release and late Christmas gift – we've subbed A Christmas in January / Ichigatsu ni wa Christmas! Unfortunately the quality of the video is rather poor, but it was the only version we could find. I hope you enjoy January this year :)
End of the year update
Yesterday we've switched to a cheaper service. The short downtime of the guestbook was caused by server migration. We've managed to reduce server costs more than threefold, from about 450 EUR a year to 120 EUR a year, at the expense of having the bandwidth reduced from 1 Gbps to 100 Mbps. I don't think it ultimately matters much from the perspective of a seedbox, maybe it'll take a few more minutes to download new episodes.
We had also finished Glass Mask recently. Unfortunately, episodes 17-23 are missing corrections from our editor, who can't work on it at the time. We'd like to release a batch eventually, but we'd also like to have his edits in it. If we don't get this sorted out in time, we'll release the batch as is.
This brings us to what we should sub next!
Before we get to requests from the guest book, we have already started two projects back in 2017 that we were unable to work on because of Glass Mask and AN1. We'd like to finish these projects first. Both are around 25 episodes long. We might make an exception for some short OVA, but no promises.
We'd rather not announce the projects officially just yet – I'd like to translate a few episodes more to make sure I can translate the whole thing before we start with the releases :)
Anyway, below we have compiled a list of requests so far. If your request is missing from this list, please let us know in the guest book. Please note that we don't commit to anything, but we'll definitely consider titles mentioned here when we find the time.
- Ace wo Nerae!
- Animal 1
- Ashita e Attack
- Attacker You!
- Captain Tsubasa J
- Cinderella Monogatari
- Coji-Coji
- Corrector Yui
- Cutey Honey Flash
- Fighting Beauty Wulong
- Fighting Beauty Wulong Rebirth
- High School Aurabuster
- Highschool Kimengumi
- Ichigatsu ni wa Christmas
- Joou Heika no Petite Angie
- Kyojin no Hoshi
- Lady Georgie
- Mahou no Mako Chan
- Nobara no Julie
- Onegai! Samia-Don
- Paris no Isabelle
- Sally the Witch
- Samurai Giants
- Shirayuki Hime no Densetsu
- Shounan Bakusouzoku
- Tanoshii Muumin Ikka
- Tiger Mask
- Umi no Yami Tsuki no Kage
- Zambot 3
Gravatars
We've added Gravatar support to our guest book. It uses nicknames when no e-mail is provided, which makes it easier to tell people apart just with a quick glance.
If the page looks weird, please reload it with Ctrl+F5 :)
Staff change
We warmly welcome Greg, who will be helping us out getting subs for Glass Mask into shape :) Meanwhile, Blackrose will continue to look after Attack No. 1.
Glass Mask (1984)
We've picked up "Glass Mask" – we'll be recycling VHS hardsubs by Oppai onto a BDrip from Moozzi2. As always, we don't have any particular release schedule.
MHS:RO batch
About a week ago we've finished MHS:RO last episode. Today we're releasing its batch release. Enjoy!
We'll probably settle on another project soon. Stay tuned.
Sequence (1992)
As a side project we decided to sub a science fiction romance OVA from 1992, "Sequence". We used Renascent's RAW. The OVA is available on the "releases" page.
Enjoy and happy New Year!
Changes to website structure
This has been on my mind for a while and I finally got down to it.
List of things that were changed:
-
Removed news about releases
Most of the news about releases didn't contain any substantial info other than a nice image. Info about releases was moved to its own "releases" section (read below). -
Introduced splash page
I really like images and I'd like to be able to put up a kind of a "featured image" once in a while. The splash page is a nice place for it now that release-type news are gone. I know this is an extra click for the visitors, but some might enjoy these pictures like I do, plus people that actually are interested in some fansubbers' website will probably poke around it anyway – an extra click shouldn't bother them too much. -
Moved most news comments to guest book
I decided to simplify things and let the users comment in a single place (the guest book) rather than all over the place. I believe our website is small enough that it is a change for the better in terms of user experience. -
Revamped "releases" section; introduced "anime" section
Prior to the changes, the "releases" section was a list of anime, each of which had a huge table with episodes under it. Now each anime has its own page and can be accessed from a new "anime" section. The "releases" section was retained, but contains only plain list of all files we released sorted by release date.
I believe this is the best of two worlds: people interested in only one show can bookmark the page with that show, whereas the rest can check the "releases" page.
If the website looks wrong, please try reloading it with Ctrl+F5.
Monster Hunter Stories
As some of you may have already noticed we've picked up "Monster Hunter Stories: Ride On" season 2, which Crunchyroll stopped releasing due to licensing issues. So far we've released 7 episodes.
We don't have any particular release schedule for this show. We'll try to release each episode as soon as we can, but please be advised that we're nothing like modern fansubbers who release within hours after airing. Please expect delays.
We thank DranzerX13 for providing high quality RAWs.
Anidex support
Thanks to a suggestion, we'll be uploading our releases not only to nyaa.si, but also to anidex. We'll see how this plays out.
Staff change
We warmly welcome BlackRose108 in our team who will be keeping an eye on our translator's English grammar and vocabulary. Thank you for your work! (It can be seen in today's release already :)
Release schedule change
I'm out of country (work stuff) for the next few weeks, but I'll do my best to deliver the subs on Sundays or Mondays.
Site changes
We found some time to show our website the love it needed. We tried to make it more fun by:
- adding a calming blue background
- removing other backgrounds and borders altogether
- improving button appearance
- making the top more lightweight
(If the site looks glitched, please use Ctrl+F5 to reload it.)
The comment system didn't go untouched as well. We decided to replace Disqus with isso for the following reasons:
- it looks better
- it doesn't track our visitors
We've also introduced a guest book :)
Release schedule change
I'll be offline the entire next week, so it's double release today.
Attack No. 1 source change
Changes:
-
Updated source to 720p BD rip (thanks, metalotaku)
We've started using high quality RAWs grabbed from nyaa.se while it was still alive. We didn't reencode anything for a few reasons:
- We don't have any experienced encoder.
- We didn't want to decrease the audio/video quality.
- Our previous source seems to be badly reencoded video from the current release.
A single episode weighs about 600 MB which in our opinion is acceptable.
-
Replaced font (thanks, rpgmaniac)
We decided to fix the issues with the font rpgmaniac has pointed out, and this time we proceeded much more carefully with our choices.
After many trials and errors, we arrived at bold Gotham Rounded Medium, stretched horizontally to 94% with the size of 43 libass units. We changed the font color as well, but have decided against making it completely white and kept it slightly yellow to match the tint of the video (extra points for providing the retro feel).
Hopefully it won't be an eyesore for the modern watchers like the previous release. We're quite satisfied with the end results :)
- Fixed Ikizaki → Ikezaki
- Changed wording here and there
Visual comparison:
Hello world
The group is founded. We hope to provide you with high quality subs :3
We'll be doing subs for Attack No. 1. We're aware the show's already being subbed by Live-Evil, but there hasn't been any progress for 2 years.