Who are we?

As a doujin circle focused on French voiced adaptations, we mainly produce dubbed video from animation.

Our very first project was the French dubbing of the Memory of Phantasm series. This was possible thanks to the derivative work-friendly nature of Manpuku Jinja’s series.

 

As recording schedules became a bottleneck, we started looking at more series and types of projects to keep us busy. That’s how we started working on YouReimu (Osana Reimu, 幼霊夢) and later SuiKasen (萃華香仙).

 

As an extension of animation adaptation, we also started voicing 4koma, by making simple animations out of the original material. And due to our musical roots, we covered some Touhou arrangements in French.

 

We gradually switched from using community-provided translations from Japanese to translations made by ourselves (several group members are studying Japanese and our most reliable one is a bilingual living in Osaka for years). As adapters of artistic content, we aim to convey feelings to our target audience like the original author intended for their initial audience, even if it means straying away from the most “correct” translation.

And to keep in touch with the Japanese Touhou subculture, we got interested in modern doujin 4koma, as can be found published by mangaka on Pixiv or Twitter. Once the translation was done, it wasn’t much extra effort to edit them and publish translations for non-Japanese speakers.

 

All those adaptations were done with prior agreement from the original author (either due to them explicitly allowing it, or after being contacted).

 

Some groups later reached us to translate non-Touhou works, which gave us new ways to explore and keep honing our skills.

A free animation studio (free as in “free speech”) came to us, asking for help dubbing their own animation series, Morevna, the story of which is an old Russian tale. This request came perfectly aligned with our technical choices, where most of our production pipeline is based on free software.

 

More surprisingly, we’ve been contacted to dub a retro-console game’s cutscenes, Robot Aleste on MegaCD. This triggered a will to further dub video games, even outside Touhou project lore, and we got interested in Visual Novel adaptations.

 

To create more Touhou content and not just adapt existing material, we launched two original Touhou projects. Their gestation is rather long, so it may be a bit premature to discuss them in detail, but we can say that one will be a short visual novel and the other a story told in YouReimu style.

 

With the very recent announcement from Manpuku Jinja to end the Memories of Phantasm series, our 3 main dubbed series (YouReimu and SuiKasen being the 2 others) are reaching their end. Fortunately, there are other quality materials in the Touhou Project lore. Other animation authors have agreed for their work to be adapted, and there are others we haven’t tried to contact yet.

 

Our time is currently split between finishing existing series dubbing, starting new Touhou series, covering songs, translating, animating 4koma and also dubbing Visual Novels when time allows it.

 

A series of blog posts with behind the scene explanations of our work is also on its way. Our choice of tools, homemade scripts, and applications could be useful to other groups performing adaptations. Documenting one’s own workflow for others is also a great way to make it cleaner and more streamlined.

Our general history

In 2016, the founder’s young daughter had to stay still every Sunday for lice treatment and was allowed to watch YouTube during this time. After several weeks, we gave Memory of Phantasm a try, but without an existing French dub, the only way for her to understand was for him to read the subtitles live. This sparkled the idea for experimenting with proper feminine voices, with proper synchronisation and mixing.

 

Fortunately, at this time, with the proximity of several Youtaite (amateur YouTube cover singers) groups, it has been relatively easy to find interested people, already equipped with proper audio setup and caring for their voices, to be part of the journey. It’s a fun parallel to draw, with many Japanese VA’s often also having careers as singers.

 

After 8 months of work and fun, the first episode of Memory of Phantasm was published. Despite its flaws as a first attempt, we received enough positive feedback to push us to do more, and we haven’t stopped since then.

 

Shortly before publishing our first video, the group name question arose.

We were trying to figure out how to mix “Touhou” and “French” or “dubbing”, and in the middle of the brainstorming, a self-proclaimed breast-lover proposed “touhoppai” as a joke. We kept thinking about a name without luck and the joke name remained the only viable option. As an afterthought, the goofiness of the name was a gentle reminder of the lack of seriousness we intended to put into our projects.

In the next few years, the group acquired a legal structure through registration as a Non-Profit Organisation and members count rose to almost 30, most of them being VA’s.

What we plan to do

Like most similar groups, the main motivation is having fun during the creative process. Seeing an anime episode coming to life, starting from a mute version and being voiced, day after day, with words you picked and voices you directed is like a child’s dream coming true. 

 

Some of us are also enjoying these opportunities to acquire professional experience. But more importantly, as adapters our goal is to make available to most Touhou fan works which could not be enjoyed otherwise. Unsurprisingly, the huge majority of Touhou stories (doujinshi, fan-made animations, …) are created by Japanese authors and not enjoyable by western audiences. For both Japanese authors’ reach and western fans’ work access, we want to be part of the groups who connect those two “worlds”.

 

Besides the online publications, we also try to help Touhou be discovered by new fans by attending conventions where we broadcast our Touhou adaptations, display posters about youkai, Touhou Project, and answer newcomers’ questions about it. There are few things as satisfying as being told that we were the first step for someone to become addicted to Touhou 🙂

 

During these conventions, we now have an arcade cabinet with a few Touhou games so that visitors can enjoy some danmaku or the spinoff fighting games hands-on.

 

But our main attraction remains an otaku-centric karaoke, which we sometimes interrupt by showing one of the fandub ready scenes that we prepared so that attendees can practise live dubbing.

 

A small part of the booth is also dedicated to Touhou merchandise that we created and which is used to fund our group and provide brand new Touhou goodies (charms, illustrations, T-shirts, …)

Where to find our circle

Our main distribution channel is our YouTube channel, https://youtube.com/@touhoppai. It contains all of our animated projects: anime, shorts, comic dubs, covers…

In order to alleviate the risk of having all content in a single place and also to provide a free/libre hosting solution, we also host our videos on our own peertube instance, https://peertube.touhoppai.moe. We also offer the use of it to the Morevna studio and free comic author, David Revoy, who can freely distribute their own videos.

 

When it comes to 4koma translations, we usually share them via Twitter on https://twitter.com/touhoppai.

 

All important works, either animated or not, can be found on our website, https://touhoppai.moe. The series of blog posts about behind the scenes’ workflow will also be published there.

 

We try to publish something about once a month, but as projects become more and more complex, the publication pace is diminishing. 

 

Every six months, roughly, we’re present at a convention in Toulouse, in the south of France. From now on, we’ll try to enjoy our presence there to organise a small Touhou cosplay meetup. We noticed that, over the course of the years, more and more Touhou cosplayers were present, but rarely at the same place and at the same time. We’d be delighted to have the opportunity to take a big photo of the rare Touhou cosplayers roaming in the south of France.

Contributors: zeograd
@POfBoundaries
Editor: Nimrod