Video: Moozzi2
Editor: Paul Geromini
Translation: Perevodildo
Checking: Ziusudra (Episodes 1-9)
Misc: History Asian

Episodes:

1. Surprise Attack on Pearl Harbor
2. Battle of Midway (Part 1)
3. Battle of Midway (Part 2)
4. Blitzkrieg on Malay Peninsula
5. The Fall of Singapore
6. The Fall of Hong Kong
7. High Seas Naval Battle for Malaya
8. Battle of the Coral Sea
9. The Fall of Java
10. The Navy Paratrooper Corps
11. The Fall of Bataan and Corregidor
12. Submarine I-168
13. First Battle of the Solomon Islands
14. Kato’s Falcon Squadron
15. Rabaul Air Corps
16. Evacuation of Kiska
17. Birth of Kamikaze Corps
18. Operation Vengeance
19. Battle of Tassafaronga
20. Battle of the Philippine Sea
21. Battle of Leyte Gulf (Part 1)
22. Battle of Leyte Gulf (Part 2)
23. Battle of Iwo Jima
24. The End of the Combined Fleet
25. The Final Decision
26. Manager Kawakami’s decision

TL notes | DDL | Subs only | AniDB

One more important note I’d like to add about this show: this is not a perfect documentary. In fact, no documentary is perfect and just like with everything else, the perfection lies somewhere in the middle. Having watched tons of history documentaries while making this fansub, I can assure you that the only way to reliably know something resembling the truth about one event or another is to get acquainted with different viewpoints and decide for yourself which one is closer to the truth, because as the saying goes, "History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon."
In this sense, Animentary offers a unique insight into the Japanese point of view. But that’s about it. If you want to have a holistic view of the situation, watch 3 more other documentaries about the same subject, then draw your own conclusions.
While this show took me a monumental amount of work to translate, surprisingly, the most frustrating part was not even the navy jargon (in fact, I learned to pincer movement and love it towards the stern of the show) and various other Japanese terms that you won’t hear in any other show ever, but the fact that sometimes the show’s perspective was different from that presented in other sources. And then I have to go through even more sources just to know the truth, even when it becomes completely irrelevant to translation, simply out of spite. This was even more frustrating when I needed to know the truth, simply because I couldn’t properly hear the line myself. All in all, the bottom line here is that you shouldn’t take anyone’s word for it. Neither mine nor this show’s.
History Asian’s MTL subs that this project was largely based upon were of huge help. Even though most of the lines in it were gibberish, whenever there’s a line too noisy for anyone of us to hear, HA often hit the nail’s head. But tbf, most of the time he didn’t, and even despite him probably being a native Japanese, my extensive TLC disagreed with him on more points than one. For example, in episode 1 he translated senka as battleship, while actually “ravages of war” was clearly implied, the list goes on…
Bottom line: our recon plane reports that if we made a better translation than an assumed native Japanese, we did a pretty good job.
As far as the encodes go, Moozzi’s one is suboptimal, but so far nobody cared for this show enough to make a proper encode, while us two have neither the access to the BDMV nor the encoding expertise. We also didn’t include the BD extras from Moozzi’s torrent.
It’s probably going to be Sorcery’s last release for a long time, if not forever, with Ziusudra gone on an indefinite hiatus.

A word from our editor:
im just happy to be here
-Paul