I guess. Just watched it again last night, actually. It’s great, but I think Spirited Away is just a notch higher for me.
Porco Rosso was the weakest one, I think. I have not seen The Castle of Cagliostro, however.
Is there a DVD of it?
His movies are great, but the stop motion effect of Japanese animation ruins the experience for me. Why such a slow frame rate? It is like watching cell phone video.
Well, my experience is mostly with anime series, which probably do not have the resources to do what Chronos mentioned. Heck, most anime traditions started out with techniques used to cut corners: unanimated scenes, repeated animation, removing backgrounds, etc.
Miyazaki = genius.
Subtitles in animated movies? That is completely ridiculous. They’re all dubbed. That’s how they get sound tracks onto animated films: they dub them. Watching an animated film in a language you don’t understand and using subtitles is beyond pretentious, it’s just ridiculous.
They’re animations. They’re all dubbed by voice actors, whatever language they were written in. You cannot possibly get more out of a film that’s primarily visual by reading the subtitles and listening to voice actors talk in a language you don’t understand. It’s not “more authentic”, it’s distracting from the imagery which is the whole point of the film.
In a live action film with human beings in it, the actors voice is part of the performance, and subtitles are sensible. Animations are not real people. The Japanese voice track is no more “authentic” than the English voice track.
I can’t imagine Miyazaki himself wanting his brilliant animations covered up with subtitles, distracting from the visual effect. I’m sure that watching the films with subtitles was not the way he’d want you to be seeing them.
Most of the time, Anime is draw on “threes,” meaning a single drawn frame is shown for three frames on the final reel. At 24 frames per second, that comes down to 8 drawn sheets per second.
By contrast, Most TV animation is on twos, but at 30 fps, that’s 15 sheets per second. Western film animation is on ones (full 24 fps).
The reason for this is there tends to be a higher amount of detail in each individual frame in anime, and backgrounds are often fully animated as well. With things like floating castles, massive machines, and freakish monsters, drawing too many frames can be taxing on the animators. (Animators are paid by the frame, too, so a lower frame rate keeps costs down.)
I don’t think it’s the sound quality that makes some people prefer subtitles, it’s the quality of the translation.
Although there are some pretty bad subtitles out there (I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve heard that there are two English subtitled versions of Let the Right One In and that one has terrible subtitles that leave out important information), it’s possible to take advantage of subtitles to provide a more accurate or easier to understand translation of the original dialogue.
If a movie is dubbed, the translated dialogue can’t take longer to say than the original or the characters are going to be talking over each other. It also looks weird if the translation takes less time to say than the original. So unlike with a movie or even a play, the translator/adapter has to attempt to convey the meaning of the original dialogue in a pretty firmly fixed length of time. The translator will at times need to compress or pad the new dialogue to make it fit the timing of the original. And I’m not even talking about trying to sync mouth movements here, but just coming up with a translation that can be spoken in a natural manner in the same amount of time as the original.
If the audience is reading subtitles then there can be a bit more flexibility. Since most people can read more words per minute than is normal for speaking, the subtitles can be a bit wordier than the original dialogue. If the best translation is actually briefer than the original, it’s less awkward to keep the same subtitle up a few seconds longer than it would be to have the dubbed character pad things out with meaningless exclamations (something that seems common on English-dubbed Japanese children’s TV show) or to have the soundtrack go silent while the character continues to flap its jaws.
Since Japanese doesn’t translate very cleanly into English anyway then I can understand why some people would prefer the format that allows the translator slightly more freedom. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in an English-subtitled film, but when I lived in Japan I noticed that in Japanese-subtitled American films the subtitles would sometimes indicate when there had been an untranslatable pun in the original dialogue. There’s no real way to do this kind of thing in a dub. Subtitles also allow a mixed-language group to enjoy the same film. This probably doesn’t come up for a lot of people, but it definitely has for me.
I’m sure some people have also been put off English dubs by the terrible voice actors used in some productions. I don’t think this is so much of a problem now, but I remember in the early '90s dubbed anime was justifiably reviled for the lousy voice acting.
I cannot abide dubbing in a live-action film, but animated films are different. As has been pointed out above, they’re ALL dubbed, even the ones from Disney. Those animated characters aren’t REALLY talking. I don’t mind dubbing at all in animation.
Apparently his retirements work like Bret Favre’s. Miyazaki retired after making Princess Mononoke, then he came out of retirement to make Spirited Away and then retired again. Then he unretired to make Howl’s Moving Castle and retired again afterwards. Then he unretired to make Ponyo and now he’s retired again.
I’m convinced that Spirited Away has quite a bit of depth; to me it looks like an extended metaphor for a young girl’s coming of age (including issues of sexuality and menstruation). Not sure if anyone else has picked up on that, though.
I can’t agree that the English dubs are terrible. Maybe in some anime films – I admit I’ve been turned off by some badly dubbed anime, where even the adult women all sound like they’re 12 years old. (But then, that’s how the women sound in the originals, too.)
But look at the cast in Howl’s Moving Castle: Jean Simmons (Grandma Sophie), Emily Mortimer (young Sophie), Christian Bale (Howl), Lauren Bacall (Witch of the Waste), Billy Crystal (Calcifer), Jena Malone (Lettie), Madame Sulliman (Blythe Danner)… these ain’t no slouches.
Same for the cast of Nausicaa, which includes Tony Jay, Alison Lohman, Patrick Stewart, Uma Thurman, Chris Sarandon, Edward James Olmos, Shia LaBeouf, Mark Hamill, Tress MacNeille and Frank Welker.
I certainly don’t mind reading, but with subtitles I find myself paying more attention to the words than I do the action. Every frame of a Miyazaki film is important, and I don’t want to miss a second.
No, as far as I know, only one film has ever been hand animated at a full 24 fps, which was Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Classic film animation, from *Steamboat Willie *on is intended for 24 fps projection and animated on the twos at 12 fps. And, a considerable amount of anime is at a dramatically lower frame rate than 8 fps. Couple that with all the other “cheats” (like cycling through two or three stills to show “anger”) and the utterly moronic tradition of animating first then dubbing afterward - see Steamboat Willie to see how long it’s been done. Difficult to believe that nobody in Japan has yet figured out how to use a dope sheet.
As I’ve said before - Miazaki has a brilliant imagination and a great sense of design. But every Studio Ghilbi films I’ve ever seen is, when you get right down to it, crappy animation.
Maybe if you’re overanalyzing it with a technical eye, but in my layman’s opinion, Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle are two of the most beautifully animated movies ever.
Welcome to the club! I like Miyazaki but I would disagree about Howl’s Moving Castle - I found that it offered nothing new and it was rather boring, even though I remember trying to like it. It is possible that I went in with abnormally high expectations, but I was rather unimpressed. It’s not that there’s anything particularly bad with the movie, it’s more that it lacks examples of the amazing vision and imagination behind titles like Nausicaa, Mononoke, or Spirited Away. It didn’t seem as gently meaningful as Kiki’s or Totoro either… it just struck me as bland, like it could have been made by any other director.
By the way, I usually try to watch this kind of stuff in original language version with subtitles, unless I know that the translation and dubbing work are top notch and that the movie has not been edited. I find subtitles an acceptable price for avoiding incongruous accents or seeing a master’s work cut/rearranged to suit the audience.
Nausicaa bored me, to be honest, but I haven’t revisited it yet since my revelation. I will be going back to it.
I really didn’t want this thread to be about subtitles vs. dubbing. Each have their place, I guess, and everyone has their personal preference. And I tend to agree with Shakester that Miyazaki would probably want us to watch the dub . . . he’s not sending his movies here for money-- they don’t make a ton here compared to what they make in Japan-- and surely he oversees or signs off on them. This is a guy who shipped a samurai sword and a sign saying “no cuts” with a print of one of his films.
I never heard that anecdote, but I do remember Miyazaki was furious when Nausicaa was released in the US in the '80s with chunks missing, changed characters and dialogue, and diluted themes. Makes sense he’d send a sword along with the next reel. Since then he has pressured his distributor to be more faithful to his work.
I’ll give you an example of why I am (although I do like the dubbed versions of Miyazaki films and agree that dubbing in animation really isn’t a big deal considering the actions aren’t speaking anyway).
When I watched Crouching tiger hidden dragon for the first time I watched a subtitled version of it, and I was completely blown away. Even with all the action going on I had no problems keeping up with the subtitles, and one of the things I enjoyed a lot about the film was the regal setting of the film and the flowery language.
A couple of years later I caught a bit of the film on TV but this time it was the dubbed version, and I plonked myself down to watch it for a bit to see if it was any different. It was. It really really was. Case in point: in the subtitled version there is a scene where the young lady has run away and pretended to be a boy and is being harassed by two men. In one swift motion she pulls out her sword and cuts through a length of wood they’re leaning on and sheaths it again to their amazement, and they exclaim “Are you related to Li Mu Bai?” meaning “do you know him?”. She smiles thinkly and before calmly drinking her tea says “He is my vanquished foe”. In the dubbed version when they ask that question she says in a peppy American voice “Yeah I just beat him”.
If this is representative of the difference in translations, they might as well be different films.
I also agree that official subtitles, not dubs, are they way to go. With official subtitles you get an accurate translation (with exceptions due to need for brevity. avoidance of confusion etc.) and you also get to hear the emotion of the delivered original lines, even if you don’t understand the meaning. Those two aspects together give you a much better sense of the original work.
To the OP, congrats on coming around to Miyazaki. In general I’m not a big fan of anime or even animation, but I am a big fan of Miyazaki’s work. Just bear in mind that his work spans a long period of time so older works of his are informed by an older mindset for the craft and for pacing.
I think Spirited Away is a great film, not merely a great animated film, but I can’t be sure how much of my opinion is because I’ve stayed at places like the hot baths hotel in the movie, and I know the language/culture.
Anyway, have fun, there’s depth there if you care to look.
In a previous life I was a professional Japanese-to-English translator, and one facet of my job the last 10 years or so has been to oversee translation teams. So let me weigh in on the issue of dubbing/subbing.
Subtitles are probably the most difficult translation jobs around - imagine trying to fit in entire story lines, nuances, jokes, accents etc in 5-7 words or less. Done well, subtitles are amazing - but subtitle translators will tell you most of the time they are forced to cut corners. People simply can’t read as fast as they listen. A well-done sub-title translation coupled with the original actor’s voice is really an experience that can’t be topped - but it is unfortunately pretty rare that this is possible. For example: Firefly and The Wire have been shown in Japan with subtitles the past couple of years, and after watching them I think that - while still excellent stuff - Japanese viewers aren’t going to get enough of the peripheral stuff to really get hooked unless they go to dubbing.
I usually start out with subtitles, but will sometimes go back and watch the dubbed version (if available) if I think I’m missing something. And there have been occasions when I definitely preferred the dubbed version.
Just as an anecdote that is the opposite of Illuminatiprimus’s example: apparently someone was in France at some hotel, and they flipped on the TV to some old black-and-white spaghetti western. The scene opens with a cowboy plodding down the middle of main street, sun blazing down. He slides off his horse in front of the local saloon, pushes through the swing doors. Takes one step in - he’s hot, dirty, dusty, looks tough as nails. The entire saloon goes quiet to watch him. The cowboy slowly looks around, walks slowly but purposefully over to the bar, fixes the bartender with a steely gaze, and says in a low, menancing voice, ‘howdy’.
The French subtitle was “Enchanté”
I’d argue it’s the same issue - the difference between the original and the translation is so big that it actually changes the whole tone of the scene (it’s just in the opposite direction).
But the problem there is the difference in translation, not in the difference between dubbing and subtitling. The dubber could have said, “He’s my vanquished foe” too.