Hell, I loved it. I saw it in the cinema, subtitled, and having gathered that it was a kung-fu, hunting, mystery, romance thriller from the reviews, I was quite prepared to let it do its thing and see if it could drag me along in its wake. Which it did, absolutely. I mean, it’s a kung-fu, hunting, mystery romance thriller. What’s not to like?
It took a hell of a long time to get a video release, but when it came out quite recently I hied me to the local rental place and demanded their finest copy. Hurrying home with it clutched in my hot little hand, I could barely contain my glee, and settled down to watch it with pizza and beer. I cannot convey the plummet in my emotional state when the first words were spoken - in English. They’d only gone and given me the dubbed version! I didn’t enjoy it at all - the mental disconnect between the mouth movements and the sounds, the shocking voice acting and above all the bad translation turned the movie from cinematic gold into VHS lead.
My French isn’t good by any means, but I did remember the scene where noble savage was telling everybody their spirit animal; the one-armed bad guy is drunk, and starts misbehaving. “Sorry,” he says in French and the subtitles, “have I been gauche?” thus making, as you all know, a bad joke on the loss of his (right) arm. That suggested, to me at any rate, that he was using the fake lost arm as an excuse for weird behaviour, such as training an armour-clad beast to hunt peasants and trying to sleep with his sister. Dubbed, he asked if he’d been impolite, conveying nothing. If that level of attention to detail was typical of the whole dubbing project, it must have crippled the chances of the film carrying its message (such as it is) to the poor saps who didn’t use the subtitle option.
And it’s so clearly a lion, with the roaring and the pouncing and so forth, that that’s not even worth arguing about.
Wanna know something weirder, amrussell? When I switched the DVD to French language/English subtitles, in that particular scene, even though I clearly remember that Jean-Francois said the word gauche and that was the word they used in the subtitles, the DVD version used the English word, probably the same one you heard in the dubbed version. For some odd reason, they actually rewrote the translation.
In the very good silent horror movie The Unknown, Lon Chaney plays a man who’s impersonating that he’s lost both arms. Creepy, disturbing, and good fun. Plus, it takes place in a circus, though I can’t recall if there was a giant wicker-wearing LionBear (probably not).
I know this becuase my Chow if very cat-like. He has paws similar to a cat, he washes himself like a cat (I kid you not) and he leaps up onto the bed at night in a very stealthy manner and curls up in a little ball JUST LIKE A CAT! When Bear, my Chow’s name, wants to sneak back outside after being reprimanded for barking, he slinks. That is the only way to describe it. Therefore, the creature in the film must have been a lost prehistoric ancestor of the modern Chow, which is a very ancient beasty itself!
They did that in a couple other places, as well. In the scene where Mani is telling folks their animal spirits, one fellow’s he (originally) said was a boar. The re-written subtitles say “bull”, rendering Mani’s gesture in that scene (mimicking tusks, not horns), and the following line about pigs, somewhat confusing.
In another place, the question Comment? was translated as “Come on!”.
No, there were plenty of wolves in the movie. Mani’s wolf spirit is a beautiful white wolf you see several times in the movie. There’s also a wolf hunt (the nobles were convinced it was a wolf causing all the mayhem) and hundreds of wolves were killed. The leaders of the Brotherhood were encouraging the belief that a wolf was causing all the mischief.
Just for the record, most French historians think that the animal was a striped Hyena. Since this movie was (very loosely) based on a historical incident, I’d say that the animal in the movie was also a hyena.
Buzz, wrong again. Cute little kitten-cats have retractable claws, its true, as do your smaller feral cats (lynx, ocelots, bobcats, that sort of thing). However, your big game cats, tigers and lions specifically, cannot retract their claws. (Not sure about panthers, leopards, and the like.) So large pawprints complete with long wicked claws could still belong to a lion.
Buzz, wrong…er, now. Among the big cats, only the cheetah lacks the ability to retract its claws. And even in that case, they are slightly retractable.