English Dub Review: Hetalia – World Stars Episodes 1-4

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

The nations of the world gather once again in cute anime forms to cause mischief. Later, a brief animated history of the divorce of the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

OUR TAKE

Hoooooo boy, this takes me back. All the way back in 2009, there came about a show about countries being resprented as cute anime characters and playing out bits of history in cute anime ways, known as Hetalia: Axis Powers. Naturally this attracted many people to this fun and probably harmless concept between their re-reading of Homestuck Acts 1 and 2. The internet and anime fan communities were quite a bit different than they are now. Back in my day, we had to find our subs made by fans and not some formally trained translator! And one of those things I would watch with fansubs was Hetalia, which was pretty fresh at the time and fit in pretty well with what people were looking for in anime, namely cuteness and slight meta commentary, which would only become more prevalent in this show when it got its first English Dub. But slowly the hype died down and the series ended for awhile, coming back in 2014 for more manga shorts which were eventually adapted into this new show, World Stars.

And frankly, for better or worse, it feels the show never really left. Better in that the people who may have dropped off and be nostalgic for it might come back and enjoy their old favorites and worse in that it’s basically the same schtick it’s had this whole time. The pacing is erratic, mainly because they’re five minute shorts, the characters are pretty one note, and the perspective on history is pretty much entirely sanitized, and isn’t exactly in vogue at the moment considering how some nations including the US are taking a more critical look back at their own histories. It’s especially weird to see Russia and China here being treated as comedy characters considering what’s now known about goings on over there. In that sense, I guess picking something with little controversy like the history of Czeck and Slovakia was probably a good call. I have no idea how historically accurate this is or not and I don’t have the time to really look into it, but it at least got the points of that history across well enough and made the characters personifying those countries into relatable and understandable people. We got four episodes at once this week, basically balancing out to a full episode of a regular series, so now my challenge comes in talking about these episodes with only five minutes to analyze!