Bowdlerise / Anime & Manga

Note that many of the anime edits only apply to the television broadcast version of the show^note  Reasons for this include network executives' view of cartoons as still being part of the Animation Age Ghetto and their fear of Moral Guardians (due to their tendency to either start boycotts or, in America's case, lawsuits); also, the government broadcast authorities—FCC et al—usually have very strict regulations on content meant for children. This also gives the anime companies the chance to sell uncensored DVDs and Blu-rays.. The home video version of that same episode will usually be unedited (exceptions include the English-only versions of Zatch Bell! and Digimon until Dicotek offered the uncut versions of the Digimon Movies, as well as the entirety of 4Kids's output besides the first nine episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh! and two uncut Shaman King (2001) DVDs).

In general, the anime adaptations of manga are slightly Bowdlerized, cutting down on violence, rude gestures, etc., but not taking too much away from the main story.^note Mostly, these changes apply to shonen and shojo anime adaptations airing in Sunday morning, weekday afternoon, or prime time timeslots. Of course, there are cases where these anime have to be moved to a late night timeslot if things get too tense to censor (e.g. Hunter × Hunter (2011) which moved to a late night slot during the unusually graphic Chimera Ant Arc) Of course, there are times when things are lost in the transition.

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Examples:

Series with their own pages:

• Bleach
• Dragon Ball
• Hello! Sandybell
• Naruto
• One Piece
• Pokémon
• Sailor Moon
• Yu-Gi-Oh!

Other Series:

• Anime & Manga A-I
• Anime & Manga J-R
• Anime & Manga S-Z

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Parodies, Inversions, & Miscellaneous Entries

• The practice of Bowdlerization is mocked in the Kill la Kill parody Bully La Bully, which, among other things, gives all of the characters Western names (for example, "Ryuko Matoi" becomes "Riley Matthews" and "Senketsu" becomes "Sam Ketchup"), changes Ryuko's backstory so that her father was put in jail rather than murdered, and changes Ryuko's and Satsuki's Stripperific Kamui outfits to much more modest hot dog and hamburger suits, which are made to look poorly tacked onto them.
• Parodied mercilessly with this blog, a fictitious "kid-friendly" dub of Revolutionary Girl Utena.
• Funnily enough, there's also a much rarer but still used inversion of this sort of editing called "Fifteening" — upping the language content of a dub to make it seem edgier. Manga Entertainment used to be the biggest offender, but there's still others.
  • For example, Cyber City Odeo 808 barely paused for breath between swears, though the main characters were convicts fitted with an Explosive Leash.
  • End of Evangelion, also by Manga Entertainment, dubbed Shinji's "I'm the lowest" as "I'm so fucked up".
  • Another case is the Italian dub of Slam Dunk: as this was the first time dub director and translator Nicola Bartolini Carrassi wasn't asked to soften the language, he let everyone in the cast improvise and add gratuituous profanity in the dialogue, delivering the finished work only a few hours before each episode's airing so that nobody would have time to review and notice what they did.

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