The United States, which overall had a surprisingly lackluster response to Mononoke's release in theatres, is going to be getting the DVD version first.Įurope, too, will be allowed a viewable copy.īut not Japan. Now, I want everybody here to consider this:
#PRINCESS MONONOKE ENGLISH DUB RELEASE MOVIE#
Princess Mononoke is the most popular Japanese movie of all time, bested only by Titanic in terms of tickets sold in Japan. (Initially he refused, until he realized that that just meant someone else would do it, possible someone who didn't care as much.) The biggest problem with the translation is Disney's fallacious belief that Big-Name-Actors = good voice actors. The reason the Disney version isn't total ass is that they got Neil Gaiman (of Sandman fame) to head up the dubbing process. He tells me that the Japanese Otaku don't seem to camp out before the stores open to make sure they get their copies, so he wound up with one of the first Mononoke Hime LD's sold in the world.) I don't know Japanese, but I didn't notice any scenes go away (I would have been more likely to notice better if I had watched them in the other order, though). I have seen not a fan-sub, but the japanese Laserdisc release (my flatmate happened to be in Japan on the date of it's release.
Indeed this (no cuts) was one of the stipulations of the sale of Miyazaki's (worldwide, including Japan!) rights to your friend and mine, Disne圜o. While we may have the freest speech of any nation that purports to have it, that right is also in more danger in the US than in any other nation which currently claims to have it. So powerful, in fact, that really the only thing that stops these groups from having their way with our rights is a 220-year-old document (they don't have the majority required to fairly influence politics, but they do have the influence to do it anyway). We have extremely powerful groups here in the US who would take that all away, groups who are, if not absent, at least much weaker elsewhere. Think about it: freedom of speech (criticism on established groups), freedom of religion (need I say more), freedom of the press (or, to put it in a more modern light, the media), and freedom of assembly (almost any non-religious, non-corporate group nowadays). But the more I look at the situation, there are few nations who need that guarantee more than the US.
#PRINCESS MONONOKE ENGLISH DUB RELEASE FREE#
Several times in the past I've spoken about how the US is the only nation in the world which guarantees free speech. Furthermore, the people who create anime have more artisticf freedom than filmmakers in the US, both because they seem remarkably free of the corporatist pop culture we find here and the fact that they don't have a religious right to smack them upside the head if they don't do something which fits in said group's narrow definition of morality, which they would want to enforce on others. The reason many of us like anime, I believe, is that these gems are more numerous than in other mediums. But, as with any medium, there are also some true gems. Honest question: what have you seen? There is crappy anime out there. I think the main thing people are on about (go look at Ain't It Cool News for an example) is that this is going to affect all the other Miyazaki titles (Kiki's Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, Laputa/Castle in the Sky), and NONE of them will get the "proper" DVD treatment (look at "Grave of the Firefiles" for an example of a well-done anime-on-DVD). Hopefully, this is just going to be a Princess Mononoke thing. This is doubly ironic, since the main reason for that nasty MPAA-DeCSS legal fight is (presumably) the DVD industry asserting its rights against people who want to do things like unraveling region encoding. Then there's the other issue - the fact that the powers-that-be in Japan (Buena Vista Japan to be specific) don't think they can trust the region encoding mechanism to enforce international market segmentation. So it comes down to pissing off a relatively small market of anime fans, or risking the revenue that will be provided when the most popular domestic film in Japanese history makes it to DVD in its home country. Here in the US PM only did small art-house-type business - less that $30 million IIRC. Since there has NOT been a Japanese-language, region-2 DVD of PM for the Japanese market, the release of a US (region 1) DVD which can be enjoyed in all three ways I just described is problematic to the people who will eventually distribute the PM R2 DVD in Japan. A "good" anime-on-DVD allows people to view it either dubbed, subbed, or neither - in other words just plain Japanese. The problem is that Princess Mononoke was a HUGE hit in Japan - the highest grossing domestic film in that country's history.
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