It’s funny you should mention Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. When I saw it on DVD, the default on the disk was for both the subtitles and the dubbed soundtrack. Let me tell you, that was disorienting, hearing one thing and reading something a little different at the same time. It took me a few minutes to realize what was going on (especially since there’s not much dialog right at the start), but once I did, I switched it to just the subs.
Maybe some people can’t, but I can read about twice as fast as I can talk. Anyone trying to dub as fast as I can read would end up sounding like those speed-talkers they use for “fine print” in radio ads.
I must be an outlier, but Kiki’s Delivery Service is my favorite. It focused more on the transition to independence and adulthood, and was a more tangible and grounded fantasy world. Kiki also seemed the most fleshed out personality of his main characters.
You might think so, but in practice it doesn’t work that way. I’m basing that on my experience over the past 16 hours, as I was watching a DVD and turning the subtitles off and on.
Most people can read faster than they can talk, but when you’re trying to follow the visuals and the subtitles pop up on screen in 15 word segments it’s not the same.
Several times in the movie people would have very fast exchanges of dialog and even though the subtitles shortchanged the words,they were still moving too fast to easily follow.
One of my favourites is My Neighbor Totoro, and that’s partly because it’s set in the real world – not a fantasy world – even if it’s a world with spirit beings like Totoro, the Cat Bus and the dust mites. And it’s a real world with dangers in it, such as Mei getting lost, and Satsuki and Mei’s mother being in hospital ill, so we are relieved when Mei is found again, and the mother’s relapse is not as serious as it might have been. (I don’t think I need spoilers for that). Part of the charm of Totoro is just the everyday life in the Japanese countryside in the 1950s, about 30 years before the movie was released.
I recommend Castle in the Sky for this; It’s not really very japanese in feel - it’s a rollicking great adventure, but it is clearly Not Japan, and there aren’t really even any Japanese cultural dynamics present. Also the source material, such as it is, is based on a western story, so… yeah. No weird love stories between children, just two fast friends. Really, it’s my favorite Miyazaki film. It suits my temperament better than the others.
I come down on the subtitles side of things, simply because having the english voices just doesn’t work for me. It’d be like watching The Empire Strikes Back and having some very talented but very much NOT James Earl Jones actor doing the voice for Vader. There’s no technical reason for it, but anything else is JUST NOT RIGHT.
Princess Mononoke is by far his greatest work, at least to me. There’s something overwhelmingly grand and epic about its scope and visual presentation, and the storylines and themes are complex and handled with a real nuance and finesse often lacking in his other work, and in most other films as well. The different sides to the conflict present different uncensored facets of humanity and how it interacts with the world and the resolution is natural, unforced, and emotionally satisfying, with no clean-cut ending but rather a kind of re-settling of the different forces and characters. Even the main “love” story ends without a firm “will they or won’t they”, but rather respects the differences involved and not just their personal connection.
Well, yes. My point was that dubbers and subtitlers don’t seem to use the same translations. My bias comes in by believing that the subtitlers use a better translation than the dubbers do (although to be honest I don’t have enough experience in this area to really know for sure).
This isn’t true, at least in Western animation. “Dubbing” refers to recording dialogue *after *filming/ animation is complete. In non-Japanese animation, the voice actors record their dialogue before the creation of the visuals, such that the animators are actually animating to their performances.
This was true in the heyday of Disney fairy tale features, and it’s true for Pixar or Dreamworks today.
Japanese animation companies do dub everything. It’s the one thing about anime I’ve never managed to understand. I think a huge part of Western audiences’ difficulty “getting into” anime has less to do with cultural differences in the stories, or the slower frame rates, and far more to do with the inherent oddness of watching animated characters move their faces in a non-naturalistic way, because (a) the animators don’t know what the dialogue is actually going to sound like when they draw, and thus end up creating facial animations that seem stilted and repetitive (b) the voice actors end up having to work around said crappy facial animations once they actually record the dialogue.
Far better to take the Western approach, IMO. It’s both easier for voice actors to create a character on the fly if they don’t have to sync it to existing footage, and it’s also easier for the animators to create naturalistic character movements when they have the voice actor’s performance (often both vocal AND visual) to “guide” their work. Not to trivialize the animators’ role in creating a character performance, by the way - it’s just the nature of their respective contributions. Voice actors record their lines in real-time and benefit from having some freedom to improvise their timing and delivery, while animators spend hours upon hours perfecting each motion, and thus have the luxury of being more detail-oriented.
Most live-action films are heavily dubbed as well. It’s called ADR, and it is used in pretty much every live-action movie made (since the boom mic often picks up background noises, or doesn’t record the actor’s voice with enough fidelity).
Whisper of the Heart and Princess Mononoke are my two favorites from Studio Ghibli, but I think I would give the nod to the latter.
My favorite Miyazaki work overall is his debut as a director, Future Boy Conan. It was his first chance to do everything he wanted, and a lot of the ideas in his later work were done better here.
I just wish someone would make a dub of Conan on the same level as his recent movies. I think the quality has been good enough that the dubs are better than subtitles.
I also didn’t like Mononoke all that much and haven’t seen *Ponyo *yet. My favorite movies by Miyazaki are My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away. They’re both very Japanese, more even than Princess Mononoke, however I don’t believe that the cultural differences are of the kind that bothered you on the other movies. Totoro I consider the best children movie I’ve ever seen and there’s no love story or weird stuff going on with parents. There’s sorta, kinda of a love story on Spirited Away, but the main character is 13 or 14 years old, the other character looks to be about the same age and the relationship, if indeed it is romantic, is very innocent and platonic. There’s nothing icky about it all and as I remember it it’s safe to conclude it’s just friendship.
Porco Rosso is also one of my favorites and didn’t seem very “Japanese” to me. It is very, very weird, however, for other reasons. It’s about an airplane pilot that gets magically transformed into an anthropomorphic pig and there very definitely is a love story in this one.
I just finished Castle in the Sky. Cool story, nice aesthetic, but now I’m going to flip-flop again and say I think the dub hurt this one. I didn’t really get the feel that the actors “got” it. Mark Hammil was over-the-top and Dawson was completely flat and soulless. Most of the other performers spent the movie barking like Speed Racer characters.
There was a part that was obviously supposed to invoke awe and wonder, where they come to the giant tree, and Potzu says “look, this one must be a thousand years old,” as if to say, “look, that plastic cup is blue.”
For those who haven’t watched a dub since the Castle in the Sky era, try out the newer ones. They are infinitely better. They’re even far better than the dub of Princess Mononoke (which Billy Bob Thornton and Jada Pinkett-Smith made a mess out of, but everyone else did ok IMO.)
I actually enjoyed Porco Rosso quite a bit, but it’s hard to compare to some of his other movies as it seemed more light-hearted and played for laughs. Fine with me.
Speaking of light-hearted, The Castle of Cagliostro is probably his most “normal” story. It’s almost a James Bond-type storyline. I enjoyed it, but it’s nothing like most of his films. And yes, it’s on DVD - I found it on DVD at the Corvallis library. I had never even heard of it before I saw it on the shelf. A nice surprise, indeed.
Yep, Cagliostro is on DVD, and it’s good, and it’s very accessible. Reminded me of The Thomas Crown Affair and National Treasure together. There’s standard action movie implausibility, but no fantasy or magic IIRC.
This used to be CRAZY common, even in supposedly “professional” dubs, and it’s STILL WAY closer to the norm in dubbed anime than the so-called “good dub”.
Fact is that American voice actors as rule just don’t have the training, experience, and respect that the profession gets in Japan, and that means that you either end up with “real” actors who don’t really know how to do voice work, or ‘has been/never been’ actors who do voice work because it’s better than not working.
Maybe the next step in making American dubs suck less is to get some directors who actually know what they’re doing to coach these supposedly good actors… but if the processs for American animation is, as someone else described, normally done voice-recording-first, animating afterwards, then there may not be anyone who knows how to make this stuff come out right… so we just need to keep churning out bad dubs while people learn how to make them better. (Hint: The actors should be required to watch the original material with subtitles so they can understand what’s supposed to be happening. They should also do their utmost to try to make sure the actors understand the circumstances of the lines they’re delivering - this seems to be a common issue where an actor delivers a line that is obviously supposed to be said one way, and they say it another, because they just don’t know. That’s unforgivably bad direction.)
Me too. In fact, there’ve been in times when after a long stretch of reading subtitles, some character will say something in English (without subtitles) and I won’t understand the English. It can be embarrassing to ask someone what was said and they respond quizzically “Uh, that was English”.
I can read much faster than I can listen, too. I wonder if ease of reading subtitles is a big factor in people’s preference of subs vs dubs. Unless the dialog is coming really fast, I have plenty of time to both read and view the scene. But I could see other people not wanting to spend so much time reading words, especially if they couldn’t enjoy the scene as well.
