Tokyo Pig. All Tokyo Pig images © Miramax Television, in association with SME Visual Works, Inc.

I’ve just finished watching the Japanese anime TV show Tokyo Pig (ABC/Family, most Saturdays and Sundays at 11 am) and I feel like you do when you come off the Tilt O’Whirl: dizzy and nauseous. In a good way. As my nine year-old describes the show, “It’s whacked, bent and frantic but I wouldn’t miss it!” Okay, maybe she says that partly because I’m a regular on the show as the weather lady/narrator, but Tokyo Pig writer, director and actor Steve Kramer (best known for Robotech and Transformers) says, “We were encouraged to keep the pace fast with lots of jokes,” so she isn't making it all up.

Steve Kramer is the writer, director and an actor for Tokyo Pig.

Adapting A Show
Because the show was originally animated to Japanese voice actors, we have to re-dub which causes some interesting challenges. I asked Steve if he stuck pretty close to the original scripts and dialogue lines and he says, “No, in Tokyo Pig we didn’t because there are really two attitudes you run into from producers. The first is, they want it just like the Japanese — they don’t want to change anything, just want it to fit somehow. If they could, they’d take the translation, stick it on a page and record it. But the truth is, that’s not going to work. You need to adapt it to fit the mouth movements and the pacing of what’s happening on the screen. If you don’t, it's Kung Fu theatre, where you have someone talking straight through when the mouth has stopped moving.” When Steve started explaining about fricatives and bi-labials I blushed, but it turns out those are just the fancy names for consonants that require our lips to come together. Hmmm….

Finding the right balance between Japanese culture and American sensibility was a challenge in establishing the tone for Tokyo Pig. Author Diane Michelle serves as the weather lady/narrator on Tokyo Pig. Photo Credit: Michael Helms.

“The second thought producers have is to rewrite the show completely,” he continues. “I actually agree somewhere in the middle. When you get a Japanese anime like Tokyo Pig, usually the translations are pretty literal and you just can’t use them. I mean, to have someone look at the guy who just attacked him and say, `How dare you attack me in such a disrespectful and impertinent manner!’— you can’t use that! It makes sense to them culturally but it’s not accessible to a Western audience. What they’re laughing at over there isn’t what we’re laughing at over here. Part of it is our tradition of humor all the way from vaudeville on down. It’s a little faster paced, it’s set up/pay off, set up/pay off.

“That was the hardest thing to do on Tokyo Pig. We had to impose that pacing of humor on a show that maybe took more time or didn’t have as many individual set up/pay off jokes. The writers were encouraged to find every humorous moment they could milk, and if they didn’t then I was encouraged to try and do it in the studio [as the director].”

Pratfalls, slurping food, homework and crushes hit the target audience of kids between six and 11. In the show eight year-old Spencer, played by Joshua Seth, sketches a pig and it comes to life. He then spends each episode getting into a predicament from which only Sunny Pig, voiced by Mona Marshall, with it’s magical powers, can save him.