Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. What's next?

[Lantern]

@MrDibble

Although I’ve been hearing good things about the latest one, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (I’m glad he decided not to stay retired for one last movie)

I hadn’t realized that Miyazaki’s latest has already been released!. I have been reading reviewsand watched the trailerand it sounds wonderful: a lot like Totoro.

It reminded of another theme in Miyazaki’s films: sympathetic and laid-back parents like in Totoro, Kiki and the Miyazaki-scripted Whisper of the Heart.

[Pazu]

@choie

(By the way I’m embarrassed how late into the film it was before I recognized how much an homage to Wizard of Oz this was. I mean, Witch of the Waste? The scarecrow? The dog? The moving house? Where was my brain?? Hell, I only just now realized that Howl was even pretending to be a wizard himself. I’m slow.)

Actually, most of these elements (minus the dog) were right out of the source material, Diana Wynne Jones’s novel Howl’s Moving Castle.

[A_shameful_cracka]

@sovtawen

I too have been trying to get into Japanese animation lately. My advice: don’t automatically rule out dubbing when subtitles are available (it sounds like you haven’t.)

With other genres I avoid dubbing like the plague, but I think it works very well for Japanese animation, and oddly enough, I’m starting to prefer it to subtitles. I think there are two reasons for this: 1) I’d rather be appreciating the artwork than staring down at the text all the time, and 2) I seem to have trouble picking up some of the more subtle nuances of spoken Japanese, so I have to rely more on the text to pick up emotional cues than I would for, say, a French film.

I actually saw most of Miyazaki’s stuff a few years ago, but I stuck to the subtitled Japanese and most of the films left me a little cold. I’m in the process of rewatching them with Disney’s high-quality dubs, and it makes a world of difference. I guess I’m a philistine.

I’m not an anime fan or anything, but I’ve noticed, especially with Miyazaki’s films, the dubs change a lot of the story needlessly, and really change the tone of the movies.

I have a couple of examples. In “Vampire Hunter D” (NOT a Miyazaki film), there is a henchman who betrays the main villain partway through the story. This subplot is left out of the dub completely, which made a lot of his actions seem illogical until I watched it with subtitles. The same movie also has a character saying in the dub that, if they start to turn into a vampire, that they will go away from the village and never come back. In the subtitles, the character claims that they will kill themselves - no reason to censor that, this is an R-rated movie with explicit gore, nudity, and sexual themes. There is also a part where a character suddenly punches a wall for no reason and kills a creature hiding behind it. In the dub, there is no explanation given, in the subtitles the character is talking to himself during this part and it’s revealed he knows that this hidden creature is projecting a ghost-like creature that is attacking him and he is sensing where it is coming from. The dub also adds cheesey synthesizer music to scenes that are silent in the original.

In “Kiki’s Delivery Service”, Kiki is a completely different character in the dub than in the original. She has a bratty, rebellious, overly self-confident aspect to her character that causes her to make several mistakes because of her pride. In the subtitled version this aspect is completely gone, and her reasons for a lot of her actions have a lot more to do with her living up to her expectations and trying to do the right thing for other people. In the original soundtrack, she has a pet cat that speaks with a feminine voice occasionally. In the dub, the cat has a male voice (Phil Hartman, to be exact) and he talks constantly. Many scenes that are almost totally silent are filled with the cat making wisecracks and explaining obvious plot aspects. There are also changes to the soundtrack, replacing quaint music reminiscent of mid-century French movies with modern pop-rock.

You should try watching some of Miyazaki’s movies with both the English dub and the subtitles on at the same time, you wouldn’t believe how different they are.

[Giles]

We had a discussing on dubbing versus subbing about 2 years ago – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=386386 – so I’ll just repeat that I always watch anime subtitled. There are dimensions in the Japanese language that get lost in dubbed English, and whenever I accidentally hear the English dubbing, it almost always grates on me.

[freekalette]

@Giles

We had a discussing on dubbing versus subbing about 2 years ago – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=386386 – so I’ll just repeat that I always watch anime subtitled. There are dimensions in the Japanese language that get lost in dubbed English, and whenever I accidentally hear the English dubbing, it almost always grates on me.

Word.

I made a funny. Hahahaha!