Review for Welcome to the NHK: Complete Collection (Review)
Monday, 26th December 2011, 14:47

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Introduction
It's taken over four years for Welcome to the NHK to finally make it to UK retail. The thing is that we could have had it long ago; indeed we should have had it long ago. The first time that I saw Welcome to the NHK was at the start of the legal online anime streaming experiment. Just after Crunchyroll had aired The Tower of Druaga and Blassreiter, ADV put the first half of the series online in its dubbed form, and the show was quite an eye opener at the time. It was quite obvious then that ADV would be releasing the show onto DVD, and they started to do so in the US. When the UK release was announced for the summer of 2008, I had already put the money aside for the discs. And then ADV went bust. The online stream never went past the halfway point, and the US releases ended just one disc short of conclusion. In the UK, ADV was wound up as an active concern the month before volume 1 was scheduled for release here, and that, I thought was that.

Thankfully for US fans, where ADV faltered, Funimation was there to pick up the slack. They released the final disc of Welcome to the NHK, and then they straightaway re-released it as two half-season boxsets. By this point, my need for the show was rapidly becoming an obsession, so I pushed the import button, as did several Region 1 capable fans. Of course a show as brilliant as this one wouldn't be left lying fallow for too long, and a Region 2 release would happen in short order, or so I thought. The trouble is that a Region 2 PAL release requires a Region 4 PAL release first, for the discs to be mastered and authored for the format. UK companies usually work hand in hand with Australian companies to do this to share the costs. And for 2 years it seemed that no Aussie company wanted to touch Welcome to the NHK. It was as if a conspiracy was keeping this series from UK fans. Fortunately, last summer Siren Entertainment stepped up to the plate, which is why MVM are now, finally releasing Welcome to the NHK in the UK. The thing is, this release may just convince us early Region 1 adopters to double dip. It's a conspiracy to part us from our cash, I tell you!

Conspiracy lies at the heart of Welcome to the NHK, although it may all be in the mind of protagonist Tatsuhiro Sato. Sato is a NEET, he's not in employment, education or training, and hasn't been since he dropped out of college four years previously. In addition to that, he's a hikikomori, suffering from acute social withdrawal. He's basically locked himself away in his apartment, rarely venturing out, and shunning any human contact whatsoever. Fears of failure, rejection and ridicule dominate his life, and he's paranoid to the point of hallucinations, seeing conspiracies against him in every corner. In fact, he attributes his isolated state to the NHK, the Nihon Hikikomori Kyokai, an organisation that through an endless diet of anime, manga and merchandise wants to create a legion of self-loathing otaku in the world. The only human contact Sato has is with his next-door neighbour, even if it is just through a thin separating wall. All day and every day, the same anime theme blares from a stereo, and Sato nurses illusions of going round in righteous fury to confront him, only to chicken out as soon as he gets to his front door. Then one day, there's a knock on that door. Fearing an irate utilities bill collector, Sato opens it. It's his first meeting with a young girl named Misaki Nakahara, and it may be his one chance at a cure.

MVM presents this 24 episode series across 4 discs thus…

Disc 1

1. Welcome to the Project!
2. Welcome to the Creator!
3. Welcome to the Beautiful Girls!
4. Welcome to the New World!
5. Welcome to Counselling!
6. Welcome to the Classroom!

Disc 2

7. Welcome to the Moratorium!
8. Welcome to Chinatown!
9. Welcome to a Summer Day!
10. Welcome to the Dark Side!
11. Welcome to the Conspiracy!
12. Welcome to the "Off" Meeting

Disc 3

13. Welcome to Paradise!
14. Welcome to Reality!
15. Welcome to the Fantasy!
16. Welcome to Game Over!
17. Welcome to Happiness!
18. Welcome to No Future!

Disc 4

19. Welcome to the Blue Bird!
20. Welcome to Winter Days!
21. Welcome to the Reset!
22. Welcome to God!
23. Welcome to Misaki!
24. Welcome to the N.H.K.!

Picture
After a minute or so of inescapable logos, we get to the animation, and it's a world away from the Region 1 release that up to this point I had been cherishing like a prize possession. The Region 2 discs, sourced via Australia's Siren Entertainment, get the PAL conversion treatment that so much modern anime gets. That means a 4% speed-up to be sure, but it also means smooth animation, the use of the higher resolution, and a lack of ghosting and judder. It's also a revelation compared to the Region 1 NTSC discs. Those discs suffer from interlacing artefacts, combing, and aliasing. The colour balance is oversaturated, shades appear neon, the contrast is excessive, there is a haze of overexposure that obscures the image, all flaws that I was happy to live with knowing there was no alternative. Well, now the alternative is here. There's no interlacing visible on the PAL discs, the resolution is higher, detail is better recreated, and the colours are sensibly balanced. Also, the episodes take up more room on the disc, and the average video bitrate is some 20% higher. I was seeing detail and depth that I never knew was there, the artwork in Welcome to the NHK finally became apparent, and it's a far more intricate and finely wrought animation than the R1 discs display. The better contrast levels also diminish that odd vertical banding that is so obvious on the US discs, although it still becomes visible when these discs are up-scaled. The only issue here is some odd moments of shimmer on fine detail. I doubt that I'll ever watch those Region 1 discs again.

Welcome to the NHK is a remarkable animation, although it is starting to show its age, with the limited TV animation budget showing up in characters that occasionally drift off model. It's very much set in the real world, with realistic character designs, and a marvellous attention to detail, especially when we venture into the world of the otaku. Yamazaki's room is a cornucopia of fandom delights, an Aladdin's cave of games, manga and figurines, and it must have been a nightmare to design and animate. Sato's apartment on the other hand is a run down, trash filled environment, discarded Kleenex and cigarette butts, which must have been just as complex. The animation is lively and vibrant, with a distinct absence of static scenes, and of course there are the various journeys into hallucination, paranoia, and the edge of sanity to make things even livelier. The one flaw is a certain inconsistency in animation style, but it almost seems to suit the volatile mood of the show, switching from euphoria one instant, to dark depression the next.

Sound
You have a choice of DD 2.0 English and Japanese, with optional translated subtitles and signs. I didn't listen to much of the dub for this one, having heard it when ADV initially streamed the first twelve episodes on Crunchyroll in 2008. It's a pretty good dub though, well acted and hitting the right emotional notes, although Yamazaki's voice is a little stereotypical. As usual my preference is for the Japanese track and I had nothing to complain about here.

The music for this show is really quite special, with a couple of memorable themes first and foremost. However the incidental music works wonders in establishing an atmosphere and reflecting an emotional mood, going from gentle acoustics to orchestral pieces, with some choice songs as well. It's all very evocative.

An odd observation here is that the DD 5.1 English track has been down-mixed to DD 2.0 by Siren Entertainment. Obviously it would have had to be reworked for the 4% speedup, but given that the materials existed (as far as I know) only as a 5.1 audio track, the extra work to actually 'degrade' the audio seems excessive and wasteful. That said, ADV would have created the 5.1 mix from the stereo elements supplied by the Japanese licensors, and as such is really just the 2.0 mix given extra room. Certainly, I gave both the 5.1 and 2.0 audio tracks a spin, comparing Region 1 and Region 2, and while the 5.1 audio does have a greater spacial separation to it, giving the audio more room to breathe, the 2.0 stereo mix when pro-logicked up is pretty close behind when it comes to bringing across the mind-warping hallucination sequences.

Siren Entertainment's authoring has also changed the subtitle streams on these discs, now in a smaller, more discrete white font, closer to the bottom of the screen. Their ethos appears to be to obscure as little of the onscreen image as possible, whereas ADV had no such compunction. ADV's subtitles are big, bright and yellow. More noticeably, for their caption streams they create captions that mirror the style of the text they are replacing, and are directly overlaid over the Japanese text, obscuring it completely. Siren instead simply translates that text to a small, white italic font, placed to the side or above in a clear area of the screen. It's a better way of doing things, although once or twice the font was a little too small to be easily legible.

The dropout I experienced on the Region 1 disc 1, in episode 5 doesn't happen on the R2 disc. I did notice this time around that on Disc 1, 1.11:36 into the programme, a line of Japanese dialogue was distorted into a squawk. Looking back at the region 1 disc, I realised it happens there as well, and appears to be an error from when the actual Japanese dialogue was originally recorded.

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