Gr8Kat: I agree completely: I love being able to watch the dub with the subtitles and compare them.
Actually, “love” may be too strong a word, because it just pisses me off how lame parts of the dub are. The final lines of the dub aren’t even in the japanese-language version; I guess the US writers thought they might need to hammer the point home. And, yeah, “I thought it was a real seal…” That’s because you’re stupid. Of course, calling it a “golden” seal is an inoffensive fix.
Jason Marsden (Haku) should be shot. Totally smarmy used car salesman. Barf.
I loved the japanese-language making-of video. Miyazaki talking to his animators: “The dragon wriggles, like an eel…you’ve all bought eel at the market, right? No? Japanese culture is doomed. … The dragon snarls, like a dog that you’re giving a pill. You had dogs as kids, right? What, only one of you? This is pathetic!”
I really, really wish the stupid John Lasseter intro wasn’t tacked onto the beginning. When I press “play”, I want to sit back and enjoy the movie. I want to revel in the magic of the experience. What I don’t want is to see some idiot blathering, in effect saying “Remember, it’s just a movie. You’re sitting on your couch at home, and everything you see isn’t real! It’s all drawings! So enjoy it!” Yuck.
I didn’t see that part at the beginning–I hit skip. I didn’t see the making-of, either, because the video was a new rental and had to be right back. Hopefully, I’ll get it for my birthday and can watch it again and again.
And to make sure my title of Defender of the Dubs remains secure, I submit the following article which I think makes several valid points:
In principle I don’t have any problems with dubs for animation. It’s just that every single dub I have seen has been inferior to the original. I also think his argument about “original” versions is wrong. The original version is the one directed by the people who created the show or film. Their decisions about voice-acting are more authentic and are likely to be better because they know a lot more about the characters.
He is right that a lot of Japanese voice-acting is average or worse but at its best it's better than anything I have heard in the US including big-budget Americans animations. I find a lot of American voice-acting in animation to be affected and annoying . It appears to be dumbed down for children. I don't see this in the Studio Ghibli films; even those aimed at children. Just watch Kiki's Delivery Service and compare the virtuoso performance by Minami Takayama ,who plays a 13 year-old and an older woman, with the performances by Kirsten Dunst and Janeane Garofalo. Dunst is particular is nowhere near as good.
I think the problem is that animation and voice-acting aren’t taken very seriously in the US and therefore you don’t have the same level of professional expertise.
Well, honestly, the word “God” simply does not translate, and Spirit is probably a better term. Granted, technically it may mean in one sense “a supernatural being worshipped”. However, the English term has an immense array of implications that are best left alone. The word “spirit”, by contrast, works much better in conveying the actual connotation of the Japanese “kami”.
There are whole books written about stuff like this, and I don’t claim to be the sole source of truth, but this is how I see it.
Actually, I do have a question; are the mask-people and/or shadow-people supposed to be spirits of the dead?
Not sure about which mask-people you are referring to (there were a few different ones, including No-Face), but my theory about the shadow-people on the train is that they are actual people from the real world who are wrapped up in the minutia of their lives. They ride this fantastical train through a supernatural world without ever realizing it.
One of the worst things that could happen to No-face is to be stuck on this train with noone else but the shadow people, hence his hesitation to get onboard until he sees Sen inviting him to sit with her. Without anyone to identify with, No-Face would disappear entirely.
One thing I noticed the other day while watching SA yet again. When Sen is heading to go and see Yubaba to ask for a job, there is a sequence where you see some of the “guests” of the bath house. One of the guests resembles Cthulhu! Hmmm…
I saw the dub in the theatre and LOVED it! Haven’t seen the DVD yet, but I had a question, and this seems like the right place to ask it. Why did being in the bath house make No-Face crazy? Too many people? But he/it was on the bridge and seemed OK. That was probably the only thing that didn’t make sense to me.
Joel and I have discussed this at length. Here’s my take on it (I hope this makes sense):
I think he was acting out, like a teenage delinquent who craves attention and settles for negative attention.
No-Face is lonely, he tells Sen that he has no family. Everyone ignores him, except for Sen who lets him into the bath house. He thinks he has to “buy” her friendship with bath tokens, he doesn’t seem to grasp that she likes him and he doesn’t need to buy her affection.
However, look at the attention the other workers shower on him when they find he can make “gold.” They wanted nothing to do with him 'til they thought he had money, then everyone was vying to get close to him. I think all this attention went to his head. However, it still didn’t work on Sen.
Joel wanted to know why they thought it would be safe to leave him at Zeniba’s house, why wouldn’t he go crazy again. I think it’s because she gave him something constructive to do. He was being productive and earning her respect, not buying false friends with fake gold and getting a swelled… head, body, everything in the process.
Just like JD’s who need to get a job afterschool instead of standing on the corner smoking cigarettes and stealing hubcaps, or whatever JD’s do these days when they’re not getting enough love at home (yes, I still live in the 1950’s where the JD’s still have duckass haircuts and wear black leather jackets and are still called JD’s. ;))
My WAG is that No-Face not only doesn’t have a face, he also doesn’t have an identity. So he becomes a product of the people he interacts with. This explains why he was helpful to Sen, a greedy monster to all the bath-house people, and a productive, quiet spirit when interacting with Zeniba ( I think someone else on the boards expressed this opinion first, but I don’t remember who).
I think he doesn’t have an identity or personality of his own, so he absorbs the environment around him. With all of the greed in the bathhouse, he becomes a monster. Since Chihiro was nice to him from the beginning, letting him into the bathhouse to get out of the rain, he remained nice to her. With Zeniba, he was giving work to do and was more than happy to comply because that’s what they were all doing at her house.
I meant, eh, the the people who were getting off the boat early on in the flick. They were masks and then took shape and shadopw when the exited. Seems like that miught be the “faces of the dead” and its all they carry to the realm of the dead.
Wondered about the train people, too. But I thought it seemed wierd that it was basically even with the bathhouse while the train in the real world was supposed to be at the bottom of a cliff. Granted, wholesale rearragement of the landscape seems to be normal in the Spirit World, but still…
Actually, there are several things they could have been. No way to tell. It was somewhat odd that there really wasn’t anything out there but water, even at the train stops. I guess that even if it was real people, twasn’t that they were wrapped up in their lives but that the real world and the spirit world were overlapped just a little.
I wondered, since I don’t know much about Japanese culture, if No-Face was actually spelled “Noh-Face” as a pun and they changed it? Or am I thinking too much?
There were alot of water references throughout the movie (the workers at the bathhouse were frog men and slug women, Zeniba’s lives in swamp bottom, the river spirits, etc). My feeling is that alot of what was happening was occuring in a marshland in the physical world.
“I wondered, since I don’t know much about Japanese culture, if No-Face was actually spelled “Noh-Face” as a pun and they changed it?”
It’s just a coincidence of translation. The original Japanese name has nothing to do with “noh”.
BTW I don’t know if anyone has mentioned this but No-face seems to take on the voice of the first frog that he swallows. That would support the theory that he is a blank personality who absorbs whatever is around.
My take on no-face is mostly similar to Gr8Kat’s. I explained it in the other Spirited Away thread, so I’ll just summarize here:
No Face is lonely, empty, and wants to belong. (The first time we see him, he’s on the bridge as Sen and Haku pass with Sen holding her breath, and No Face isn’t walking with the rest of the spirits, he’s just standing there…as if he’s alone in a crowd) Sen is nice to him, and he wants to reciprocate, but he does so clumsily. He tries to be nice to others, but rather than appreciating what he does, they become greedy. They don’t love him, they love the gold. It’s no wonder he feels rejected and acts out. It’s only being appreciated for a constructive contribution that makes him feel wanted at Zeniba’s.
As far a sub vs dub, most english dubs have at least one actor whose voice grates on my nerves. The japanese voice actors may be awful, but at least I can’t tell, so I enjoy it more.
In one of the Disney making-of videos (may have been on the Laputa disk rather than SA) a voice actor says “The voice I do would be completely over the top in a movie, but for a cartoon it works great!” IMHO, that’s the sort of thinking that needs to be stamped out if english voice acting is going to get better.
“IMHO, that’s the sort of thinking that needs to be stamped out if english voice acting is going to get better.”
I agree 100%. Unfortunately this over-the-top approach appears to dominant in American animation including in the visuals.
You have it in a lot of anime as well but generally not in the Studio Ghibli films or the quality serials.