Dubbing – or dumbing? Miyazaki’s case.

I was recently quite shocked by Disney’s dubbing of  Hayao Miyazaki‘s movies, specially   (Castle in the Sky (Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (Majo no takkyûbin). These are widely held as masterpieces in animation, so that they would seem to deserve special care. On the other hand, they fall in dangerous “children’s territory”. Some may be isolated in the dubbing process:

• Translation, which is bound to introduce variations. Unfortunately, this will apply to subtitles also, unless they are used as visual aids to the listening. (In my case, this holds for English movies, certainly not for Japanese ones.)
• Voice acting. For Miyazaki’s, and other movies from Studio Ghibli, this has been also criticized. In my opinion, the acting is usually excellent, and performed by top-notch actors: Anna Paquin, Elle and Dakota Fanning (cute to have sisters dubbing fictional sisters), Janeane Garofalo, Phil Hartman, Kirsten Dunst …
• Adaptation. This is the part where I was shocked.

Adaptation would concern the question of what to dub in order to adapt the movie to a different audience (also, the musical soundtrack). It seems in order to Westernize these movies:

• completely new dialog is inserted, often to fill “empty” sequences (the usual Western horror vacui)
• same with music score: just as in stores, it seems some music must be playing, or else we, poor Westerners, get bored
• “foreign” features (humour, cultural references) are altered or eliminated
• some characters acquire new personalities

Don’t be to quick about taking the easy way and blame Disney for it all.  Studio Ghibli has carefully supervised the dubbing, and Miyazaki himself seems to have approved it. My very personal (and perhaps wrong) explanation is that the Japanese are trying their best to adapt a product to a “new” market.

But, they are wrong: people, and very specially children, should be open to new ways of storytelling, and be exposed to a sensibility different to the predominant one. That’s what I think, at least, and that’s what I am trying to do, even if my kids have to endure the original Japanese and I have to do all the reading…