Forum - View topicREVIEW: Princess Mononoke BD+DVD
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Pepperidge
 Posts: 1104 Location: British Columbia, Canada |
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So do you think there's, you know. ANYTHING we can do to convince Disney to address the dubtitle issue? I can live with Kiki, since the new dubtitles are technically more accurate than the old dubtitles were, but I really don't think the way they treated this title is acceptable.
Also, let's hope that Pom Poko doesn't wind up dubtitled. Would be a real disappointment given the key difference between those two scripts. |
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Silverias
Posts: 5 |
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I contacted Disney on this. The response I got was to ask for my full mailing address, and a statement that they are 'working on a solution,' so my hopes are pretty high. In the meantime, I encourage everyone who bought is to contact them here, and let them know that you want to see it fixed, too: http://www.disneystudioshelp.com/contact-bddvd.html |
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yuna49
 Posts: 3804 |
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I asked this question earlier, but Key suggested waiting until this review came out. How do the subtitles on the Japanese BR release compare to those on this version? At $60, the JP release is reasonably priced by Japanese standards. If the subtitles are comparable or better, I'll probably buy the JP version instead.
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Zac
ANN Executive Editor
 Posts: 7912 Location: Anime News Network Technodrome |
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It's my understanding the JP release has both literal subs and subs for the dub track. |
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Pepperidge
Posts: 1104 Location: British Columbia, Canada |
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Done. I've actually done this before for other titles, but I'm skeptical of how effective it will be for something like subtitles. Keep in mind, though, that Ponyo suffered from a lack of lossless Japanese audio, and use of this feedback form is probably what prevented that on subsequent Ghibli releases, even if Ponyo was never fixed. If they actually said that they're working on a solution for Princess Mononoke, let's hope something comes of it. |
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Animegomaniac
Posts: 4083 |
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Is it permissible to talk about the film itself or just the problems with the region A release? Please bear with me, I'm trying to remember a film I last saw on VHS in the 90s.
Slow, yes, meandering, yes, unfocused {the mc "not a girl" starts his quest for a cure for his curse but that's not even part of the story. Wasn't the cure itself incidental?} but that's the start of it. There's always been a problem with Japanese folklore in anime; The land of a thousand gods has no problem with saying "Hey, if everything we believed was real, we'd all still be the same." People are people and gods are gods but it's just getting resolved here, now. Reverence? Developed over time, passed through hush whispers? Not apparent for sake of plot. "Here There Be Dragons" only in this world, yep, they're there. And no one cares.
In Nausica, the main theme was that humanity already destroyed the planet for their own personal dominance and the plot was about mankind hanging on the last bit before oblivion. Maybe I saw a different movie? The problem with Mononoke? It's people compromising with other people about nature, not with nature like Nausica. In a world where nature has a direct voice {the mute Ohmu spoke volumes with red eyes}, its representatives didn't seem to have any intelligence. And what's the point of talking if you don't have anything to say? {Saying that in an ANN review thread is doubly ironic, I know}. I do have Miyazaki films I like but this will never be one of them. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18192 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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This is also my my pick for Miyazaki's best and most complete work (as well as my favorite), and I would at least put it in the discussion for best anime movie and best animated movie, period. I loved the score for this enough that I had the OST for the movie for many years.
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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I'm not sure there is, y'know, anything we can do, as--like the old Japanese audio issue on that controversial first DVD--it's not a matter of "convincing" Disney about it. Up to now, some of us weren't even sure Disney still had the rights to Mononoke (the '99 Ghibli deal only specified a theatrical dub, and the disk rights had to be painfully hammered out later, back when Toho didn't want competition for a disk edition they didn't have yet). Around the time Disney was letting GKids share some of the distribution, there was the rumor that Disney had lost Mononoke in the Miramax shakeup, which brings up the theory that some of their subtitle tracks were Tokuma property. They're perfectly free, of course, to use the ones they wrote themselves. Fifteen years of sycophantic Lasseter-Gushing, and we still don't trust Disney around the corner and think they're being "mean" to us? 
Last edited by EricJ2 on Tue Nov 25, 2014 1:23 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Sam Murai
 Posts: 1051 |
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Ah, yes, the film that I like to refer to (almost solely) as "Nausicaa 2.0", because that what it essentially is as noted in the review: a refinement and reapproach of that film, its characters, and its themes. Perhaps not that surprising since Mononoke came not long after the 10th anniversary of Nausicaa.
I remember all of the hoopla around the film stateside on the film industry and critique side and the effort made to bolster the film's status there to the public. I thought it was alright when I first watched it, but I liked it much more on a second viewing. It's hard—make that really hard—to shake the Nausicaa vibes off of the film, and though that did aid in my enjoyment and expanded understanding of Mononoke and what it was trying to say, it also detracted from my enjoyment of it to a certain extent because it felt too familiar and derivative (if it was an outright declared remake, I would have been more forgiving). Still, in its own right, it's a pretty good film, and certainly a gorgeous one. On a side note, I always find it humorous how little is said about the level of violence in the film, compared to other Ghibli films and other films at its "PG-13"-level rating. Miyazaki certainly was not playing around in Mononoke, but I guess it gets washed away under the "But it's Ghibli…" banner and praise, and is superseded. There was some in North America, but was largely swept under the rug as the "norm" for that "anime/Japanimation" thing…
That's pretty disappointing to hear about the sub track, particularly when one was already in existence (perhaps Disney rather use their own and didn't want to bother looking over the old one for error-checking, either). Not completely sure about either going with the JP release or potentially double-dipping (less sure), depending on the presence of an English menu on the JP one. Last edited by Sam Murai on Tue Nov 25, 2014 1:22 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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TurnerJ
Posts: 481 Location: Highland Park, NJ |
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I for one really love this movie. I had the pleasure of seeing the English version on the big screen at the Angelika Film Center fifteen years ago. It blew me away back then, and today it is still one of my favorite films of all time. This and Laputa are my favorite top 2 Miyazaki movies. It is very seldom to have an animated film from Japan that, while more for adult audiences, does not entertain by resorting to shock value just because (Akira, Ninja Scroll, and Wicked City, for one), but instead tells a deep, thoughtful story with no clear cut hero or villain. The animation is also spectacular, the scenes with the Nightwalker and the Great Forest Spirit especially. Although there is some violence in the film, I was surprised at how it didn't leave me sick to my stomach and today still doesn't. This was the first "mature" animated film that really impressed me and today it still holds up extremely well. It is arguably more memorable than Miyazaki's subsequent films, and a true epic in every sense of the word.
Bringing Neil Gaiman to pen the English script for Princess Mononoke was a very brave but rewarding call on Disney/Miramax's part. His script deserves praise for finding the right balance between remaining faithful in spirit to the original while rewording the dialogue to sound fluent in English. And when he throws in some extra lines, he does so to help audiences unfamiliar with Japanese culture. The dub of Mononoke also holds up surprisingly well; I never had a problem with it back when I saw it in theaters, and today I still enjoy it. The performances are all well done, especially Keith David as Okkoto (oddly nowhere mentioned on the cover), Minnie Driver as Lady Eboshi, and Billy Crudup as Ashi-taka. Even Billy Bob Thornton, while a very eccentric choice to play Jigo, never once rubbed me the wrong way. In fact, I can't imagine seeing the film any other way. Claire Danes is mostly very good as San, especially during her "angry" scenes and when she's around Ashi-taka, but there were a few (note: FEW) lines that weren't always as well emoted. Even so, this dub is an obvious labor of love like any of the other Ghibli dubs, and so any flaw is absolutely forgivable. (The Wind Rises, oddly, was the dub that I liked least.) Princess Mononoke is both a magnificent movie AND a fantastic dub. It is arguably Miyazaki's magnum opus. At least to me. The subtitles issue IS baffling, though; a shame, because the rest of the BD is magnificent. Even my Miramax DVD copy has never looked this rich. The best extra is also the one in which Miyazaki tours across America to promote his movie. My favorite part? The shot where Neil Gaiman meets Miyazaki for the first time and says, "Your film is so beautiful." Indeed! He also said in an interview that Miyazaki hugged him after the master saw his work. I also think it's interesting to see that Miyazaki is not particularly fond of other forms of Japanese animation and thinks of it as "junk". That part I don't quite agree with him about because there are other non-Ghibli works that I have enjoyed as well (Lodoss, Nadia, Fullmetal Alchemist, Sword Art Online, the list goes on and on). But even the most talented artists have had quirks of their own (yes, even the great Musical Masters like Beethoven and Mahler). |
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EricJ2
Posts: 4016 |
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Disney went overboard in trying to make this their "prestige" dub, and Gaiman (back before Coraline, when only a few art-comic geeks knew the Sandman or his novels) was the right pick to put the weird-fantasy and myth folklore into an action context. It is, I'll tactfully say, the BEST you could ever do with this movie.
The JP trailer said "13 years since Nausicaa", not only promoting the director's reputation, but also preemptively trying to make some point about "The battle goes on, in any age..." Umm, yeah, nice try.
Like, getting people to actually WATCH it, since it'd been banished to a handful of art theaters. (Which turned out to be less of a problem with Spirited Away.) Or the bigger obstacle, telling people, no, this was not what "every single Ghibli movie looked like", or even what all anime looked like, whether or not they'd ever rented the Kiki VHS. This is, we can fairly say, the one movie you do not show to any first-time Ghibli audiences who just discovered Kiki, and that unfortunately included Disney, but it was in the contract. I liken it to Disney's "brave" experiment to bolster the new regime with "Princess & the Frog": All the Disney fans were saying that 2D animation wasn't the "villain" of the old regime, and deserved to come back. And when the resulting product wasn't...that...(ahem, cough)...great, but got a bad reputation from an unfortunately mischosen theatrical release strategy, we grit our teeth, thought of the industry, swallowed down our embarrassment for Disney having to release the movie with so much attention paid to it, and redoubled our efforts in a great desperate show of enthusiasm saying how much this film DESERVED to be given a chance, and how it was unfairly picked on, and much of the dogpiling came from people who hadn't seen it with an open mind. And then, like Spirited, Tangled came along a year or two later, actually was a good movie, and we all breathed "glad that's over" sigh of relief and told first-time non-fans, "Good, go watch that one instead." |
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whiskeyii
 Posts: 2245 |
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Wow, have I been living under a rock? o_O I totally forgot this was getting a Blu-ray--and just in time, too; my DVD is starting to skip like crazy from all the times I've watched it. ^^;
EDIT: Funnily enough, *this* was my first Ghibli movie, picked up on a whim, with no recognition of the studio or the man behind it. ^^; I'd never heard of Kiki or Totoro before watching this. 
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DerekTheRed
 Posts: 3544 Location: ::Points to hand:: |
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First thing's first: Zac, this stands out as a particularly good piece of writing, if you had somebody edit this who normally doesn't, you two work well together. I think they hushed your voice a little, but I can live with that.
 I can never unsee that now. I never looked closely at that cover art, and I had always thought that Ashitaka was holding both blades.
[quote"Review"]+ One of the best films ever made.[/url] That's one hell of a pro. |
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Lord Starfish
Posts: 154 |
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The Japanese BluRay has no English menus... but seeing how it also just starts the movie automatically and you can just use the Audio and Subtitle-buttons on your remote to change the settings anyway, I'd argue that it doesn't really matter at all except when you want to watch the extras... which are for the most part in Japanese anyway.
Actually it has two Japanese subtitle-tracks, one for the original Japanese audio and another for the English dub. I'm pretty sure this is the only movie they did that with too, and I'm a bit curious as to why. But when it comes to English subtitles, it only has the "literally translated Japanese dialogue"-option. |
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residentgrigo
 Posts: 2422 Location: Germany |
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Roger Ebert placed Princess Mononoke sixth on his top ten movies of 1999. The best animated movie of all in my eyes but i i prefer Akira.
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