Rose of Versailles
 

Now that the two fansub groups covering this series have started releasing again, I thought I'd get a thread going. This is a GREAT series that is sadly overlooked due to it's age. For those who haven't seen it, I'll put it lightly - Utena without the headtrip. You'd never think the French Revolution would be exciting, but Oscar makes it worth the trip. OSCAAAAAAAR!

Rose of Versailles rocks. I love Oscar. xD

here another new-rose-of-versailles-fan ;)

I love the series, I wanted to see ROV since like 1997 when I saw an article in some Spanish mag telling it was one of the influences of Utena. I think animation is quite good for it´s time and the plot it incredibly interesting, very well told and way better than any of our best soaps here in latAm (and we do some quite fine soaps in here :D hehehe)

As an Utena fan and a fan of older anime, I too am happy :D to see this great series.
All thanks to :bow: Live-eviL for realsing first 12 episodes in a batch the other day.

I'll second that. :bow::bow: Also a big thanks for releasing more - the Affair of the Necklace arc, despite it's total divergence from actual French history (particularly with Jeanne's fate), is great drama.

I've been a huge fan since it was aired on public TV in my country more than ten years ago under the title "Lady Oscar". I love the costumes, the character design and how it mixed fact and fiction. It was so dark and dramatic, and was dumbstruck by the ending.

Oddly enough, I really loathe Utena :eyebrow:

I always meant to ask: is Anime-Urchins version a DVD rip? Their filesizes are huge :confused:

Actually, it's Live-Evil using the Japanese DVD rips. Anime Urchins is using old VHS fansub releases for their sources, and the only way they can get the quality to be any good is to make gigantic encodes. They say on their site they may do a release based on the DVDs (and thus would have smaller files), but that wouldn't be until they finish encoding the VHS rips.

Yes, RoV is a definite classic, well worth the time to check out.

From an annoying historical stickler standpoint, I should point out that most of the uniforms, with the epaulets and knee-high boots, are actually much more from the Napoleonic era than pre-Revolution France. But as a lover of cool looking uniforms with epaulets, who cares? :)

On the topic of "what would I have done if I were writing this show"... since he is my favorite character from american history, I was always a little disappointed that Ben Franklin never showed up in the show. He was our representative to Versailles and was hugely popular in the royal court. With being a scientist, statesman, and something of a womanizer, can't you just imagine some of the story possibilities if old Ben had spent a few episodes hanging out with Oscar and Andre? :D

To conclude with a standard plug - if you like RoV, with cool looking uniforms, high drama, and grounding in history, you may also wish to check out Legend of the Galactic Heroes. Science fiction as opposed to historical drama, but in my experience people who like one often like the other.

Yeah, I really liked the uniforms and stuff in this series. ^^ I don't know too much about french history though so I can't really tell what's right and what's wrong. It doesn't really matter though, does it? :p

I plan on checking out LotGH one of these days. ^^;

Funny, I always assumed that the higher the quality, the bigger the filesize. I was dismayed to see that Live-Evil's version has so low resolution, I thought they were LD rips. I wonder (not a critic or a complaint) what's the point of using a DVD source then? :confused:

I don't think putting it at a much higher resolution would increase the quality tremendously. Remember this anime is from almost 30 years ago. The encoder for ROV is the same encoder as Creamy Mami, and we've been using that encoding formula for every ep of both shows :)

When we began subtitling ROV, encoding at 640x480 was still considered extreme, and xvid was in alpha stages :P Keep that in mind ^_^;;

-Tofu

I love Rose of Versailles as well!! ^^ It's such an addicting series.. x_x Even my friend Kevin likes it, and he usually mainly watches action or comedy anime. The funny thing is that I used to hate it when I was in elementary school. I hated the art style and I thought it looked too "mature". I still sort of think that, but I guess I hadn't watched enough of it to like it.. I really like old anime series like that.

I wonder why everyone compares it to Utena though.. I think Oscar and Utena are two completely different characters, even though they both raised themselves as a guy.. Is it because Utena is drawn a bit "old style shoujo" like Berubara?

I'll give this series a try, even though I'm usually not much into Shoujo.

Great to see an older series subbed (and in such high quality), there's way too many of them left unsubbed.

Utena comes up so often because it's often undeniable that Utena is inspired by RoV. There are a number of cinematic shots that appear in both series, especially when it comes to uses roses for symbolism (Utena won't let you forget them!) and of course the obvious fact that both Utena and Oscar are women with deliberate masculine traits which causes them both grief as they try to find their own identities.

Count me in with the group that doesn't like Utena but loves RoV. I got sick of the weirdness and the fact that just about everyone on the show was utterly unlikable (save for Utena and Anthy) and quit after the Student Council arc. Still, there's no denying that Utena gets a lot of people interested in RoV, if only because of the comparisons.

Wow, really? Happy! I thought I was the only one :heh: Only thing I liked from Utena was the opening.

I guess RoV gets compared to Utena also because RoV was such an influential manga, popular at a time when the shoujo genre was pretty much being re-invented by a new generation of popular female manga creators. The very first shoujo manga were written by men.

If one is going to go back to the earliest example of a main character with gender identity crisis, that should be Ribbon no Kishi (Princess Knight). Like RoV, it was also aired in my country :D

I loved it when I was a kid. Fortunately, I could tape the "movie" (actually a 90min complation of the series) in Beta. One day I'll rip it and everybody will envy me, even if it's the lousiest quality :cool:

Interesting tidbit of info, but the reason that we (live-evil) picked up Rose of Versailles back when we did was because we had just finished subbing the final 13 episode arc of Utena and were looking for something to fill the void, so Rose of Versailles was the obvious followup :)

We even used some of the same typesetting from Utena in ROV to pay a homage to it ^_^;;

-Tofu

Utena's inspiration most definitely came from Rose of Versailles, there's no denying that.

Every single shoujo manga/anime has roses in it. It's the law. (apparantly) ;)

Rose of Versailles worth downloading?
 

Ok i haven't seen a ep of this show. Live evil has a batch like 1-12 i want to know is it worth downloading it at all or no? Can someone give me info and their own thought on this anime thanks. I like drama and romance stuff so if thats in it i'll get it soon.

If you like drama and romance, you will LOVE Rose of Versailles. Just don't be put off by the older-style animation, please ^_^

-Tofu

Well if you like drama and romance, RoV is a great choice. It is 20 years old now, but for me a good story has always trumped slick animation, and that is certainly true for RoV. This is also one of those groundbreaking shows that set the pattern for a lot that was to come after (like what Gundam was to the SF robot genre), and was a huge influence on many shoujo manga artists. You can see its influence in many shows, from inside joke references (in Ranma 1/2) to full scale homage (Utena).

For some good info on the show I've found that this is a good place to look.