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Spirited Away & The Cat Returns Blu-rays Detailed
Posted March 27, 2015 02:30 PM by
Walt Disney Home Entertainment have officially announced and detailed the Blu-ray releases of Hayao Miyazaki's Academy Award-winning Spirited Away (2001) and Hiroyuki Morita's The Cat Returns (2002). Both films arrive on Blu-ray/DVD combo pack on June 16th.
Spirited Away: From one of the most celebrated filmmakers in the history of animated cinema comes the most acclaimed film of 2002. Hayao Miyazaki's triumph, filled with astonishing animation and epic adventure, is a dazzling masterpiece for the ages. The film tells the wondrous fantasy tale of a young girl, Chihiro, trapped in a strange new world of spirits. With her parents transformed into pigs, she must call upon the courage she never knew she had to free herself and return her family to the outside world. An unforgettable story brimming with creativity, Spirited Away will take you on a journey beyond your imagination. "To enter the world of Hayao Miyazaki is to experience a kind of lighthearted enchantment that is unique to the world of animation" (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times). It's a fantastic tale the whole family will want to experience over and over again.
The highly anticipated Blu-ray release of Spirited Away is presented in 1.85:1 1080p with English and Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround and English and French subtitles. Special features include:
Introduction by John Lasseter
The Art of Spirited Away
Behind The Microphone
Original Japanese Storyboards
Nippon Television Special
Original Japanese Trailers
TV Spots
The Cat Returns: From the creators of the Academy Award-winning Spirited Away (Best Animated Feature Film, 2002) comes the visually stunning The Cat Returns, a spectacular animated journey to a world of magic and adventure. Haru, a schoolgirl bored by her ordinary routine, saves the life of an unusual cat, and suddenly her world is transformed beyond anything she ever imagined. The Cat King rewards her good deed with a flurry of presents, including a very shocking proposal of marriage to his son! Haru embarks on an unexpected journey to the Kingdom of Cats where her eyes are opened to a whole other world and her destiny is uncertain. To change her fate she'll need to learn to believe in herself and, in the process, she will learn to appreciate her everyday life. Featuring the voice talents of Anne Hathaway, Cary Elwes, Tim Curry, and Elliott Gould, The Cat Returns is a magical animated adventure that will delight and inspire everyone.
The Blu-ray release of The Cat Returns is presented in 1.85:1 1080p with English and Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround and English and French subtitles. Special features include:
Yup. I literally joined this site because of this film -- to sign up for a pre-order notification. But I'm thinking now I should wait and see if it has dubtitles before I order.
Dubtitles suck, but paying the absurd price for the import sucks more. Don't like it, but I'll be buying Disney's release whether it has dubtitles or not, and Disney knows that will be the case for the majority which is why they get away with it. I freely admit, I'm part of the problem.
Would preorder these immediately normally, but as has been said, I will have to wait for a review. Note to the reviewer of this site-- please point out if they are proper subtitles or dubtitles. @Miner4Life99-- dubtitles means the subtitles match the English dub audio and are not a proper translation of the Japanese audio track.
It's when they base the subtitle track on the dub rather than making them more literal (not to be confused with making them actually literal which would be much worse) to the original script.
@Miner4Life99 They write the English dubs to at least partially match the characters' lips better, so there are often notable changes in words and phrasing. It's the difference between, "this soup tastes like donkey piss" and "this gruel tastes like hot water" in Princess Mononoke.
Sometimes with foreign movies, the dub isn't an exact translation, but tries more to match the movement of the mouths so that it's not distracting. They still tend to stick pretty close to the idea that's being presented, but a lot of people want the literal translation.
@Blucollect - the only Ghibli title left that's under Disney is My Neighbors The Yamadas and I think Only Yesterday.. but since OY doesn't have a dub I don't see it happening. The final Ghibli film is When Marnie Was There but that's a GKIDS title and will probably be released under Universal like Kaguya was. I wouldn't be surprised if MNTY is being held off to be released around the time that Marnie goes to BD/DVD.
It'd be nice if they also do a surprise OY dub to go along with it but I won't hold my breath... if Disney doesn't want to dub and release it, they should just let the rights expire and maybe GKIDS or an anime studio like Section 23 or Sentai Filmworks can get it, since they did Grave of the Fireflies.
I, too, prefer literal subtitles but it's not a dealbreaker for me. I always watch foreign films with subtitles instead of dubbing except when it's animation. I always find that reading subtitles is too much of a distraction from the visuals in animation.
Wouldn't "literal translations" make no sense due to the way Japanese do verb-object placement, etc? Every foreign language converted to English is going to have some degree of translation, some better than others, obviously. I'm not sure who did the dub of Spirited Away, but you couldn't ask for a much better translator than Neil Gaiman, who did the Mononoke dub. Perhaps waaaaay too much is being made of sub- vs. dubtitles.
@Kevin87: Studio Ghibli has been directly producing the English dubs since Poppy Hill (Ghibli's International Distribution head Geoffrey Wexler is the producer of all dubs since Poppy Hill), so it's possible Ghibli could produce a English dub of Only Yesterday regardless of whether Disney or GKids releases Only Yesterday (just as Ghibli has retained creative control over the dubs despite having different distributors for the films since Poppy Hill).
Also, Only Yesterday has not been released on BD in the UK or Australia, so it's possible Studio Ghibli may be having their partners over there hold off on a BD release till Ghibli can produce a dub.
When people say that subtitles are "literal" and dubtitles are not, they're not referring to it in a purely grammatical sense.
The appalling thing that Disney does via dubtitles is to alter the original material to fit the "Disney World View" of things, where everything is over-sanitised and peachy-keen.
KIKI is one of the most butchered, with characters drinking "hot chocolate" instead of "coffee" and Jiji lecturing Kiki about respecting policemen, etc (which have all been added to the material as voiceovers).
ONLY YESTERDAY is a film about a woman going through a mid-life crisis and taking a working holiday on a saffron farm, so it's not "kiddie" enough to be fully Disney-fied.
Disney's problem with "Only Yesterday" is mainly the flashback plot sequence in which the girls get their periods, and the boys are wondering who has theirs and who doesn't, etc - not exactly in the Disney tradition. That's the main reason they never dubbed and released it on DVD. I have a Hong Kong BD that looks great, but is obviously only subtitled (how I watch the majority anyway.) One would hope that "My Neighbors the Yamadas" would get a BD release for completion's sake, but the animation style is such that HD would do little to enhance it, and it was certainly the lowest-selling Ghibli/Disney title. There's also a Ghibli made-for-television feature called "Ocean Waves", a teen romance but very much in Ghibli style, unreleased on BD anywhere but available on import DVD from Hong Kong and Malaysia I believe - worth having but not essential for the Ghibli collector.
My personal hope is that someone does a compilation of Ghibli shorts - music videos, museum-only shows, etc, such as the song "On Your Mark" in which future soldiers first capture then help release an imprisoned angel, and "Mei and the Kitty Bus" a direct sequel short to "My Neighbor Totoro". I have a feeling a wish is all it'll ever be.
I understand Disney owns the U.S. home video rights to Only Yesterday, even though they never released it. Assuming it does have the content Gojira14 describes (I haven't seen it myself but it seems plausible), I suspect it may be a Touchstone release but in the usual Disney/Ghibli cover style, like The Wind Rises.
I can remeber a difference in the english script from the Japanese which has nothing to do with lip movements. I saw the movie with subtitles first. The first time Haku walks away from Chihoro in the garden after she has been crying, after a moment you see a dragon flying. Chihoro observes in silence. In the English dub she says "Oh, Haku is a dragon"
Serious dumbing down. Also in the doc about the english scripting process the co authors admit to not knowing what a wax seal is, the word seal; they said they were thinking of the kind with flippers & they thought it was some confusing japanese thing. Does not exactly inspire confidence.
So in that sense dubtitles mean a dumbed down version of the script with added dialogue & mistrust of the audience to observe things without them being explained to them in a blatant, idiotic & spoiler filled way.
What is so difficult for Disney to obtain the original subtitles and have them included? Why do they do this? They should know it frustrates many people out there including myself.
@lesco: Kiki's so called "dubtitles" (the English, not English SDH subtitle track) on the NA BD definitely say "coffee" instead of "hot chocolate" mentioned in the English dub. I understand that the "English" track may still be a "dubtitle" track instead of a literal subtitle track (I don't understand Japanese), but the coffee/hot chocolate thing is a inaccurate representation of the "dubtitle" track.
Also, after the first Policeman scene, the modified English dub on the NA BD does not have Jiji lecturing her about respecting Policeman (which may have been removed to bring the dub closer to the original), nor do the "dubtitles" track mention this.
@mosuncertain: The dub adaptation shouldn't affect the literal subtitles unless they are "dubtitles". And I definitely recall that the "English" subtitle track on the DVD was definitely different than the dialogue on the English dub. So I would believe that the English subtitle track on the US DVD is a literal subtitle track.
I never watch these in the original language because I don't fell like reading the movie, I would rather watch it. So I prefer DUB voice anyway since I don't know Japanese and could care less about sub titles.
@disneywildcat Kiki has a long history of bad subtitling. Yes the old DVD subtitles differed greatly from the first version of the Disney dub (which your guess was surprisingly spot on that the dub itself has been edited since then to remove at least the extra bits of talking, especially from Jiji [not that they did anything to improve the rest of the dialogue]), but just because it is different from the included dub does not necessarily mean it is something other than a dubtitle, and certainly no guarantee it is a literal translation. The subtitles provided for Kiki on every release the entire world over, until the Disney BD (which reportedly they just used a fairly direct transcript of the latest dub), has been from an old dub. If I'm not mistaken, I think it was a dub created for JAL (Japanese AirLines), possibly by Streamline (not in a position right now to completely fact check this, but you get the idea). The dub script for that was assumed at the time to be accurate, and given out as such to distributors (which any dedicated North American anime distributor [i.e. not Disney] would have caught and fixed), though the actual dub it came from was either never used for home video or barely saw the light of day (I think it may only be available on a very rare Japanese Laserdisc).
In the end, a subtitle track can be a dubtitle track without matching the dub that's actually included, as only the original language is sacred, dubs are more fickle by nature (many dubs can be produced in a language, with nothing but nostalgia distinguishing worth; produced for a variety of reasons, from quality to avoiding unnecessary licensing fees).
Spirited Away ... It's about durn time already!!!!
Been waiting for this movie on blu for literally FOREVER!
Haven't watched it in ages because I sold the DVD years ago in anticipation of replacing it with the blu-ray when it came out.
I had about given up on this and they never play it on t.v.
It's too good for t.v. and our children apparently.
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