That’s a real name, similar to Lucille.
Lusheeta is not.

They don’t even get the damn names right. I don’t care what the official romanisation of their kanji names are – the original japanese voice track has a big beardy guy called Daffy and a pirate captain called Dora (good real-life welsh names, there; “Duffy” is more of a girl’s name, and “Dola” just doesn’t exist), a scruffy young miner called Patsu (very nearly a proper name; more so than “Pazu” with a soft “Jazz” z rather than a hard “Nazi” one), a heroine called Shita with a shorter “i” not a longer “ee” (look, it’s indian, ok? no-one laughs when an indian actress on the TV has that name… though it would appear she’s probably more likely scottish…), and a villain called Mooska. All of those got changed to greater or lesser extents; I can maybe understand the last two, but not the others. I mean, if you’ve listened to the japanese version before recording the english one, how can you get it back to front?

Plus one of the great, powerful things about the sound tracks in SG films is how they do a proper, more grown up, live action job of employing dynamics to emphasise the action. Music isn’t overdone, dialogue isn’t mangled into an endless torrent of exposition and mindless chatter, and a quiet or silent section can be far more dramatic and effective than a noisy one. JP Laputa is a good example of this – the background noise diminishes in places whilst building up to a big bang, making it all the more surprising when it comes, music is used to add emphasis and build tension or a melancholic mood, and Patsu wakes up his village with approximately grade 4 tootling on a battered, unaccompanied trumpet blaring out into the silent, soft dawnlight.

Somehow, the translated version of Kiki’s Delivery Service managed to preserve the feeling of the original film almost to a T, including all those things above. They pretty much took the japanese version, replaced each conversation with an as-direct-as-still-makes-sense english equivalent with no alteration of the tone or needless filler, and although they slightly spruced up the quality of the music and SFX, didn’t fiddle with the actual content other than translating the radio transmissions.

Laputa swings entirely the other way; it’s like they took the one bit of the Princess Mononoke dub that wasn’t totally excellent (the part where all the iron town workers are swimming back across the lake) and thought – yes! THAT’S how we’ll do it!

So the use of shifting audio dynamics is almost totally lost (most of the soundtrack is just noisy, and that gets fatiguing after a while, like listening to pop radio, and the loud bits don’t stand out amongst all the other medium-loud-to-loud ones), music becomes pretty much just another background sound as if you’re in a lift (including over the first few moments), and the characters just… don’t… stop… bloody…talking. Almost any point where someone is present, but you can’t see their face (or even their mouth), it seems they’ve taken the opportunity to shoehorn some novel dialogue in there. Originally until the first pirate guy opened the window and shouted back that he’d found Shita, there were about three words spoken, two of them in alarm by the airship crew, and another by Muska telling her to get down without any emotion or concern in his voice. In the Disney version, you could write a book from that bit of script alone, and Muska comes across almost as a nice guy who doesn’t want her hurt in any way, rather than an officious toff. They’re actually -changing the characterisation- (ok, it’s only mild, rather than an outright “magic roundabout” job, but still) with their dub… and people have the nerve to call the old one a “macekere”.

Oh, and then we have the trumpet scene, which has become orchestral for no reason whatsoever. Yes, I know Hisaishi was involved. No, I still don’t care, and I wonder if he’d have bothered if Disney hadn’t come along saying “WE NEED NEW MUSIC FOR THIS FILM YOU SCORED 16 YEARS AGO, HERE’S A PILE OF MONEY, YOU HAVE FOUR WEEKS”.

Thankfully they did at least leave the classic, near-iconic main opening and end themes alone, but that probably required the more change-resistant part of the localisation crew defending those parts with makeshift weapons McGuyvered together out of office supplies.

I don’t even know if I’ve managed to watch to the end of it yet. I probably have, but since erased the memory of it from my mind. Hamill makes for an excellent cartoon baddie, but he has to have the script to go with, otherwise you’re just squandering the talent.

On which note, I must away. It’s too bad that the Youtube version has already been taken down, but I’m just more than happy to learn that this version is still out there *somewhere*… and, indeed, if I have enough money to troll around eBay with, it might even be purchaseable on an old Japan-only DVD

Doing so may also confer the benefit of a cleaner transfer, because my PAL one has quite plainly been converted from an NTSC one by some kind of primitive analogue means. The motion seems kind of mushy in places, and if you pause the disc, you can see why… a great many of the frames are blends between two originals, as it changed a 23.976fps original to 25.000fps without any speedup. That method works OK when you’re converting 59.94 field-per-second interlaced TV shows to 50.00-field, but less so with movies, and certainly very badly with animated ones. On top of that, they’ve then applied a crazy amount of pre-sharpening (which has also been inflicted on other SG releases like Earthsea – I had to watch that with my soft/sharp control turned ALL the way to the left to get rid of the additional white outlining on every black line).

It’s downright shocking that a company so rich and advanced as Disney would do that when even I, several years before they made the DVD, was able to do a fully digital, frame-for-frame standards conversion between NTSC and PAL video CDs (4% speedup or slowdown for both picture and audio, with pixel aspect ratio and some colour tone correction, plus basic deblocking, but no oversharpening at all) using an obsolescent, hacked-together desktop PC and a bunch of freeware windows applications. I think, really, it’s indicative of their attitude towards the movie on the whole. They have to put it out there in some form to avoid fan backlash, and may as well bring in decent talent to voice it (after all, time in the vocal booth for a readymade film with no musical numbers is pretty cheap vs a largely musical one that’s still halfway through production, and certainly vs live action), but probably don’t want it doing too well even so. They will receive relatively little in redistribution fees on each sale vs sales of their own original IP, the contemporary examples of which Laputa paints in a particularly bad light… it was still a few more years until they got back on track with The Little Mermaid after an infamous 1980s lull, after all…

It’s fine if you disagree, but I personally thought the Disney dub was a much better executed dub, even if it differs from the original Japanese version. But I really can’t stand this older dub; there are too many things awful about it—Muska’s uttering of “Now say bye bye” and the choppy stilted dialogue killed it for me.