English Dub Review: Milky☆Subway: The Galactic Limited Express – the Movie
One of the joys and burdens of being an animation enthusiast like myself is being on the hunt for different projects and stuff to watch from anywhere I stumble upon. Sometimes it’s cool to find something not a lot of people know about and you get to put a spotlight on when reviewing said work or just recommending it to people. But there is also that lingering feeling that because there is so much new animation coming out from all angles, it can be difficult to keep track of it all and their specific origins, let alone make time to watch it.
Enter Milky☆Subway: The Galactic Limited Express – the Movie. Which dropped this week on Netflix (June 1st to be exact), but not as an original. The story behind this is that it started as an online animated short (called ONA, original net animation, in Japan) that was uploaded to YouTube in February of 2022. It was the brainchild of one man named Yohei Kameyama, who directed, wrote, and co-produced the short as both a graduation work and personal project. The short got enough attention from both inside and outside his home country, that 3 years later, he would develop the characters and story to be part of a 12-episode miniseries, with each episode lasting 3 to 5 minutes.
I recall seeing these episodes pop up on my recommended feed as they were releasing weekly, and I kept telling myself I would make time for it to possibly review on this website here, but that never game to be. Enter the current year of 2026, and we get to this compilation movie made out of the series, lasting 47 minutes, plus credits; it had a theatrical run in the country of Japan back in February, and now it has been released on Netflix, with a new English dubbed adaptation.
The story goes that 6 convicts get grouped together by one police officer to do community service by cleaning up an old railway train; but suddenly, the train itself starts running on its own with them inside, leading to them figuring out what is going on and how they’ll get off.
Part of the charm of this series is in how they reveal dimensions to these characters through dialogue or body language. Depending on who you are, these instances can be either funny, sad or both. It’s that kind of film where all the dialogue feels as if it could’ve been improvised.
It makes sense that this would gain a following in our current times; each of those original episodes being at 3 minutes works well as short-form content and storytelling, making it perfect for impatient zoomers in the attention economy. The way they go about turning this into a compilation movie is great; I watched the original episodes in order to prepare, and this isn’t just simply a miniseries stitched together. There are added scenes with new characters like Asami (voiced by Luke Bollman), Ryoko’s co-worker, and Haga (voiced by Royston Stoffels), her boss. It adds more to this space world being lived in, even if we only get to be with all these characters for under an hour.
As for the English dub, this one is an interesting beast. They have the right idea, but it’s stuck with unfortunate circumstances. The first is the fact that much like the acclaimed animated film AKIRA, all the mouth flaps match perfectly with the Japanese audio, I’m assuming because the lines were already recorded before they started animating, or because CGI lends itself to edit the models in real time to better match the audio. As someone living in the Anglosphere.
The second is that unlike the original Japanese audio for the miniseries, which was entirely composed of professional voice actors (the original graduation film had amateur voice actors), the English dub has mostly amateur onscreen actors. We have Anja Taljaard (Chiharu Kujo), Nancia Dorland (Makina Kurusu and ATOM), Bella Donna Draper (Akane Daidoji and Ryoko Kanazaki), Jada Dreyer (Kanata Iwao), Conradie van Heerden (Kurt Cramer), and Clayton Alexander (Max MacCallister). (The only character that didn’t get dubbed was Minami Minase voiced by Japanese singer Yukari Tamura).
None of these actors have any dubbing or voice acting experience, with the exception of Jada, Conradie van Heerden, Clayton Alexander, and Luke Bollman, who have all voiced previously in anime like Fist of the North Star (2026) and The Time Detective. Like this movie, both of these were coincidently dubbed at the dubbing company TransPerfect Media. On one hand, it’s good to see studios train new talent. On the other, it still feels like their reading off a script. There isn’t much natural flow to the way they deliver these lines that makes it seem believable. There’s also the fact that at certain instances, the music would overpower the dialogue, and not always in a comedic way. I had to turn on subtitles to understand what was happening in certain instances when I could easily have picked up on it in another production.
I don’t want to be hard on this one too much, mostly because the more probable way to watch this movie IS through a dub. There is a LOT of talking going on between characters, some of which talk over or interrupt each other multiple times. There is a certain rhythmic humor that is lost in dubs like this, but if you’re reading subtitles, there is a great chance you’ll be missing out on some neat body language or expressions up top that add to the humor or overall characterization going on. I have no idea what was going on at Transperfect Media, but considering the list of anime they’ve dubbed stuffed like Digimon Ghost Game, which from what I’ve seen is decent, there’s a case to be had that they were tasked with a unique project that needed a unique approach, which probably can’t be helped with how quick these dubs get made sometimes. There’s also the fact that the dubbing and casting director, Tetiana Solodka, appears to have no other projects like this that I could find, possibly making this their first time doing dub work.
Overall, it’s a fun short film to put on and get invested in, which is saying something for someone’s pet project.
