Auto-tuning can be fun, but it can also be annoying if not used judiciously. I understand that some artists use it in their music, and some people just use it to make themselves sound better in their recreational singing that they then post online. I wouldn't mind it so much if it hadn't over-saturated the media. Also, I'm of the belief that most singers should be able to sing naturally and make a career for themselves that way - if you auto-tune everything and your real singing voice sucks, you shouldn't be a professional singer, IMO.
At the Oscars one year, they had a segment where they took scenes from four movies and made auto-tune songs out of them (much like the viral news video). Some liked it and some really hated it. My feelings were mixed. I liked how it began: James Franco announced that there was a musical category, and Anne Hathaway said there hadn't been any musicals this year. I thought that was at least a little funny. The first one was from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 with Ron and Hermione entitled "Tiny Ball of Light." I have to say I loved it. The rest of them, not so much. I wanted to like Toy Story 3, but Tom Hanks does not sound good auto-tuned and it just sounded disjointed. Justin Timberlake, although albeit not singing in The Social Network, does not need auto-tuning. The worst one was Twilight Eclipse, where they only incorporated one line of dialog about Pattinson not liking that Lautner was topless only to be counterpointed by a female chorus disagreeing with him. Blegh. None of those words were in the movie, therefore it is cheating.
I'm not as engrossed in Japanese pop culture as a lot of people seem to be, so the Vocaloids are still somewhat a mystery to me. I've seen some of their music videos and heard some songs, which I found to be pretty catchy. However, the ones that tell stories about the characters themselves confuse me a bit because I have no idea who these people are, let alone the voice artists who were sampled to create them. I just hope they're not all like Tsubake of the D2 Brigade and try to take over the world. Yes, that's just a bit of dry humor, but I don't really have much else to go on.
Thanks to the Teen Titans cartoon, I do know of the duo Puffy[AmiYumi]. J-pop music group Puffy had to change their name to Puffy AmiYumi (a combination of their two names) thanks to Puff Daddy copyrighting all forms of his name rather than just picking one and sticking with it. They had a show on Cartoon Network, part live-action with them at the beginning and end with three cartoonsegments in between. Again, your mileage may vary, but they used songs from their albums in many episodes: "Puffy's Rule," "Sign of Love," "Spring Morning," "Sunday Girls," "True Asia," "Wild Girls on Circuit," and "That's the Way It Is" from An Illustrated History; "K2G," "Urei," "Sayonara," "Planet Tokyo," and "Long Beach Nightmare" from Nice; "Sui Sui" and "Into the Beach" from Spike; and the album to the show, Hi Hi (includes songs that weren't in the show including others that were, especially repeats from other albums). If I had to pick favorites, I enjoyed "K2G," "Urei," and "True Asia" the best as well as others. It doesn't matter whether the songs are in Japanese or English because these ladies have awesome singing voices.
Other shows the two are involved in include Teen Titans (sung both in English and Japanese but only appears in English on the album, and the full version at that); "Friends Forever" from the Hi Hi album appeared in Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed; and most recently they have sung the theme song to Usagi Drop, an anime that came out last year in Japan. Even if their show was too corny for you, their music is great and you should definitely check them out.
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