Did Disney do right to tamper with Miyazaki's dubs?

Dub fans beware: Some things may be different.

People complain all the time when they listen to dubs of some of their favorite anime and foreign films.  Generally us fans of the original version prefer the original language tracks, but we still like to complain about them now and again.  When it comes to anime I tend to watch it in Japanese like most purists, but one of the rare exceptions to this are Disney’s dubs for Hayao Miyazaki films.  Now I’m going to say straight up that the Japanese versions are better.  Always have been, always will be.  That said Disney’s dubs are pretty damn good most of the time.  They have the money and the resources to make quality dubs.  They may hire celebrities to dub the voices, but the voices at least match.

So while I would still prefer the subtitled edition the dubs are usually good enough to work if I just feel like relaxing a bit.  Last year I heard that Disney would be re-releasing three of his older movies on DVD along with “Ponyo” on DVD and BluRay (which has a near perfect dub I want to say).  I wasn’t going to re-buy these movies until they came to BluRay, but with the DVD’s selling for more then retail price (and “My Neighbor Totoro” selling for well over $60 at the time) I sold my DVD’s and re-bought these new editions.  Little did I know that these DVD’s would inspire this little rant.  See the dubs here are fine, but they all have irked fans in one way or another.

The dub for “My Neighbor Totoro” mainly bothered people because Disney re-dubbed the film with voice actors they weren’t used to.  The same dub appears on this DVD unaltered so there’s not much to say other then that if you prefer the Fox dub then keep that VHS because it’s still MIA here.  It’s the other two dubs that fans are going to be concerned about.  Both “Castle In The Sky” and “Kiki’s Delivery Service” were two of Disney’s first dubs.  As such they were high quality but had some newcomer issues.  We’ll discuss the dub for “Castle In The Sky” first.  The dub was recorded in 1998 but shelved for some reason and wasn’t released until 2001.  Of all the dubs this is the weakest dub.

James Van Der Beak and Anna Paquin didn’t make for good voice actors.  There was a lot of ad-libing from the actors (mainly by the three pirate brothers) that made the script an annoyingly loose translation.  The one thing Disney did that was probably an improvement to the film was that they had Joe Hisaishi go back and re-record his 37-minute synthesizer score into a full 97-minute orchestrated score.  While the dub was fairly weak this new score recording made up for a lot of the problems.  I personally replace the old score with the new one on my iPod and I haven’t looked back since.

Disney went back to the dub and in an effort to make the dub more faithful to the Japanese version they deleted most of the ad-libing, took out some weird sounding lines altogether, and (worst of all) deleted the newly recorded score.  I can live with some of the ad-lib removals but the score is another thing all together.  I wanted that score to be added to the Japanese version, and now Disney is hear telling me they don’t like it anymore.  It’s baffling because the option to listen to even the altered dub with the new score is nowhere to be found, and many Miyazaki fans are in agreement that the new score is significantly better then the old one.

Buy Hisaishi's updated 'Castle In The Sky' score

“Kiki’s Delivery” service is much the same way.  The Sydney Forest songs have been replaced with the Japanese songs, the filler music is removed, and much of the ad-libing is gone.  These minor tweaks make the dub much more faithful to the Japanese version, but here’s the sad thing: This movie was Phil Hartman’s final role.  What’s worse, Hartman was known for ad-libing.  His performance of Jiji the cat is VERY different from the Japanese version, but the fact that Hartman voiced the character made things much better!

Many people still miss Hartman, and it was a treat to hear some of the ad-libs that made him famous in the first place wind up in this dub.  Yeah it kind of screwed up the continuity a bit (especially with the final line in the movie), but most fans didn’t care because it was a personal favorite’s final performance.  Since he ad-libed the most out of all the actors his funny lines are almost completely gone.  I don’t know, there’s something that feels...wrong about that.  Again, I prefer the Japanese version myself, but these dubs have been around 8 and 12 years (respectively).  They exist.  They are a fact.  Why they have to alter them so late in the game is baffling to say the least.

Especially since fans of the original would have just turned to the Japanese tracks as it is.  I don’t know why Disney did this now, but hopefully they’ll give us the choice of which dub we want to watch on the upcoming BluRays.  Now if you really want Phil Hartman’s complete performance of Jiji I’d recommend hanging on to the previous DVD release.  A release - I might ad - that should have been easy to throw away without any feelings being hurt.  As it stands I almost can’t recommend these DVD’s unless you really don’t care about the dub in any way.