I have previously reviewed both the first and the second seasons of Miraculous Ladybug, the popular magical girl show out of France. A few brief additional comments worth making:
First, I mentioned before that plans for a live-action film were in the works, to be released through Lionsgate. That would arguably have been the first, or maybe just the most prominent, live-action magical girl title from outside Japan. However, the movie has, in spite of the cartoon’s popularity, died in pre-production hell. That is perhaps no great surprise: crowd-pleasing though the cartoon is, the film would probably have struggled to find a sufficiently large audience outside of France.
Second, for whatever reason, Netflix only has the second season available in English, but the first is available in multiple language, so I find myself rewatching the first season in French—which I assume is the original French and not a Netflix re-dub. I have mentioned before that the English voice cast of this show is excellent, and now I am astounded to find that it in fact closely matches the original. The characters for the most part sound largely the same in both languages, though I admit I prefer both Adrien and his kwami Plagg in the English: The French Adrien sounds whiny, and Plagg has a voice that’s surprisingly deep for such a tiny character.
My only real complaint about the French version is with the subtitles, which are a transcription of the English dub rather than a direct translation of the French. My French is admittedly rusty, but even I can tell that the subtitles deviate considerably at times from what the characters are actually saying. I don’t know if this problem is unique to Netflix, or if one would find it on the DVDs as well.
