Stardate 20030901.1905

This page contains numerous spoilers for the movie Spirited Away. If you have not seen the movie, you should definitely not read any further.

Kevin writes:

At your recommendation, I picked up Spirited Away for my family to watch. None of us had ever seen a Japanese cartoon before (well, ok, I used to watch 'Astroboy' years ago, but that scarcely counts). I wanted to watch it subtitled and my kids are certainly old enough to handle that, but due to circumstances, we had to watch the dubbed version.

There is absolutely no way any of us could have predicted anything that happened next. At first I thought it was because the story was a product of Japanese culture, about which we know nothing, but then something about the animation reminded me of Alice in Wonderland. I paused the movie and dug out our illustrated 'Alice' and it's all there -- the goofy creatures, frogs dressed up like people, and a haughty, imperious queen with a grotesquely huge face (if you have an illustrated Alice, you need to compare the Queen of Hearts with the sorceress Zaneba and her twin sister whose name I forget). And the chaotic nature of the story is eerily similar to Spirited Away. But I wonder if a Japanese person would think it as chaotic as I do. I wonder if he just knows that, for example, these stories just have to have a stink spirit who shows up to make life difficult. Kind of like how we know that if there is a medieval story, you need dragons and damsels in distress, just because that's how Things Are Done.

I don't think that the flow of the movie would have been any less surprising for someone in Japan who hadn't been warned, really.

As was the case for Kevin, I didn't know anything about all about what was coming, and was constantly surprised. In fact, I didn't know there was going to be anything supernatural at all in the film; I thought it was going to be about a girl going to her new school and finding new friends. (Which could also have been a very good story, though nothing like as wonderful as the story Miyazaki actually told us.)

With both Miyazaki films I've seen so far, there was the dual experience of never knowing what to expect when watching the film the first time, but realizing afterward that everything that happened was necessary and inevitable. That's the mark of a good story teller. I just picked up a DVD of Castle in the Sky, which is also by him, and it will be interesting to see whether the same thing happens when I watch it. As with the others, I'm doing my best to make sure I have no idea at all what the film is about before I watch it, so I'll go in with a clean slate.

Kevin may be right that there's some inspiration from Alice involved. I'm rather surprised that I didn't think of that; certainly there's a strong resemblance between the twin witches Yubaba and Zeniba and the character of the Duchess (moreso than to the Queen of Hearts, I think), which in turn is reputed to have been based on a 1513 painting by Massys called "A Grotesque Old Woman":

And the Duchess was plagued by a crying baby, too. Of course, if the Duchess had ever smiled, it would have cracked her face. On the other hand, both Yubaba and Zeniba smiled and laughed quite a lot, though for different reasons.

I suspect that there may well be a lot of inspiration from Alice; it wouldn't surprise me at all. Great artists of all kinds learn from and borrow from one another. Kurosawa Akira was probably the greatest Japanese director of live movies, and he made movies of both King Lear and Macbeth. I was surprised to find that Ran made a lot more sense in Japan than King Lear did in Europe. To make it work, Kurosawa had to change Lear's three daughters into sons, and he moved the story into the period after the establishment of the Tokugawa Shogunate but before the shoguns outlawed firearms, which are used in all the major battle scenes. (Which means, oddly enough, that Kurosawa placed the story after Shakespeare's own lifetime, since Tokugawa Ieyasu became Shogun in 1615, and Shakespeare died in 1616.)

In turn, Hollywood has been plundering Kurosawa's films for ideas for years, including quite a few outright remakes which mapped Kurosawa's Ronin epics into the Old West.

I don't doubt at all that Miyazaki is familiar with the Alice stories. Miyazaki primarily writes his stories for children and anyone trying seriously to appeal to kids would study the greatest and most successful children's books in history. Certainly if you're looking for inspiration about places where the unexpected should be expected and where nonsense rules, you could do no better than to study Alice.

The Alice books may well have partially served as inspiration for this film. But of course there's much that's happening in Spirited Away which totally unlike anything that happens in Lewis Carroll's two masterpieces.

When I first heard the name Yubaba, I also wondered if maybe the name might in part have been taken from the witch Baba-Yaga from Russian folk tales, but in most regards there is very little resemblance between the two (e.g. no hut on chicken legs) so I think that name is probably coincidence.

Kevin continues:

The chaotic nature of the story made it difficult to watch at first. My family told me later they were ready to bail out after about 20 minutes but they stuck with it and the story kind of grew on them after awhile. In fact, we couldn't take our eyes off of it. My wife was delighted. I think this is the only movie I have ever seen that made me want to watch it again just after it ended the first time.

I know exactly what he means. After I watched the film, I started doing something else, and a few minutes later I had an overwhelming urge to watch it again.

So I did.

Also, the Japanese characters, particularly Chihiro and her family, did not look particularly Japanese. My wife observed that they looked more Hispanic than anything else. Particularly their eyes, which were big and round, not almond-shaped, which is what I would expect. I wonder if there is a reason for this? Catering to an American audience, perhaps?

Actually, it is very rare for the characters in anime to look Japanese. They nearly always have round eyes, and blonde hair and blue eyes are quite common. (Also red, green, purple, orange, pink, and any other color you can think of.) I myself have been puzzled by this, and what I'm told by fans is that this stuff first appeared in the 1950's and 1960's and in part was intended for export to other nations in the region (though not, at that time, to the US). There were still a lot of bitter memories from the war, and I gather that the artists were afraid that if the characters looked Japanese that it might be harder to sell the material to places like Korea and Taiwan. So they drew them "generic", with round eyes. (Which is the norm in the human race; Oriental eyes are a distinctive racial trait, but everyone else's eyes are the same round shape.) However, there may be an entirely different explanation.

In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud points out that the "hero" characters in anime tend to have their faces be drawn quite minimally and generically, with little in the way of individuality, or any distinctively racial features. No slant eyes, no thick lips, no "Roman" noses, nothing like that. The faces themselves are actually quite interchangeable; you recognize characters by other things like clothing and hairstyle and context. Villains, on the other hand, tend to have far more distinctive and recognizable faces.

Human faces are the only thing that a baby can recognize within the first weeks of life. They appear to be the only thing we're prewired to recognize. But during that time, a baby's vision system hasn't organized itself well, let alone learned how to focus its eyes, so everything it sees is quite blurry and a bit scrambled neurally. That means that its internal recognition for human faces has to be quite minimal, too, keying off a very small number of large features, and that's what they got. Basically two big spots and a sideways line beneath it is all that's required. This is a survival characteristic in babies, because they naturally smile when they see a face, and this enchants their parents.

That recognition mechanism is still present in adults, and that's why we can "see" faces in clouds or rock formations or other places where they don't really exist (such as blurry pictures of mountains on Mars). That's why the yellow "smiley face" icon actually looks like a face to us.

The minimally-drawn character faces in most of anime definitely look like faces, but they don't usually look like any particular person's face. If you see a picture in anime which looks like it might actually be based on some specific live person, it's most likely that he's a bad guy. They're the only ones who tend to give away racial cues. McCloud says that characters drawn more generically are also more easy for an audience to identify with. Since the drawing suggests less, there's more room for members of the audience to fill the character with what they want to find. Whether he's right about that, I couldn't say, but he's a student of the form and knows a lot more about it than I do.

In a lot of more recent work that's no longer true, in any case. The characters in Cowboy BeBop are all very distinctive, and all of them are definitely Caucasian. I saw a lot of different people in that film but I don't recall seeing any which looked Oriental, though I think everything else was in it.

And the twin witches Zeniba and Yubaba are about as far from being generic as I can conceive of any character being. (Yeesh.)

Whatever reason there may have been in the beginning for this tendency to not feature characters which look Oriental, it's become part of the genre. There are different art styles, of course, which vary widely but there's also something of a stylistic boundary, and there are audience expectations. At this point, the majority of anime characters look that way because it's just how things are done. By the same token, beautiful women in anime (which is nearly all of them) invariably have exaggerated figures, with large breasts and wasp waists and long legs. That's true even for the character Faye Valentine in Cowboy BeBop, let alone in more cartoony titles like Hand Maid May or Sailor Moon. (Unless, of course, someone is drawing in an entirely different style I've seen, where everyone looks like a weird midget and none of the female characters have either waists or breasts.)

We had a chance to compare a few bits of the dubbed and the subtitled versions, and they're not the same. Particularly the dubbed version, which contains humorous items that do not exist in the "original." Like when the no-face spirit barfs up the frog, the bath attendant, and that other guy, one of them says, "now THAT'S what I call an esophagus!" So we looked for it in the subtitled version and it just wasn't there. Pity, though, because it's quite a funny line.

It's pretty common for there to be fairly substantial rewrites of the script in the dubs in other languages. I haven't watched Spirited Away with the dub yet, though I intend to the next time I watch it, but I have watched other shows with both, and there are definite changes. It's common for the jokes to change, in particular, because some kinds of humor don't really translate.

But there are often other reasons for the script to change, and writing the dubbed script in another language can be a major endeavor. In the normal process of creating animation, the voice actors do their part before the layout artists. The script is created from, or simultaneous with, the storyboard, and then they go to the recording studio and work with the actors. Once the voices are recorded, someone times out what the voices are doing and creates timing sheets from them, and the animation is actually sequenced to fit the voices. It was found very early that it was easier to match the animation to the voices than the other way around; the result was more natural. Some extremely early cartoons that I've seen from the 1930's did it the other way, and the voice actors sometimes ended up speaking in unnatural cadences in order to match what had been animated. It didn't take long to figure out that this was the wrong approach.

Of course, with a dub, there isn't any choice because the animation already exists, and it's necessary to make the new voicework fit it. When the voice actors record the dub, there is actually screen in the recording studio and the animation is played for them as they record so they can try to match their voices to the film. They have to match exactly; if they stop speaking before the character's mouth stops moving, or if they're still speaking when the character's mouth stops moving, it doesn't come off. Meanwhile, they also have to speak without seeming to be slowing themselves down or speaking particularly fast, and that is only possible if the dub's script is right. So the translated script not only has to preserve the original story, while making such changes as are needed to make sense culturally in the destination language, but it also has to fit into the animation. The problem is only made more complicated by the fact that some words which are short in one language translate into words which are long in another and vice versa. Expressing some concept in one language may involve a lot more syllables than in another. I think that if you want the result to be good, that all adds up to a non-trivial challenge. The author of the dub script is facing a lot of practical constraints in his story telling.

Though I haven't yet watched either of the Miyazaki films I own with the English dub, there are other things I've seen in both versions. I've become quite the fan of a series called Dragonball Z and had been watching episodes of it, dubbed in English, on Cartoon Network. Recently I picked up a few DVDs of that series, which included both the Japanese and English versions. (Yeah, it's junk, but it's my kind of junk. I like watching people flying around and tossing energy blasts at each other, and the animators in that series do really good fight scenes and wonderful fireballs and energy blasts.)

One of DVDs I've gotten contains the penultimate episode of the series. In it, Goku is in a tournament and about to fight against a kid named Oob (or Uub), and the kid is terrified and doesn't look as if he's going to be able to fight effectively. Goku isn't interested in winning, he's there because he wants to fight Oob and wants to see Oob's full potential (for complicated reasons). He even cheats in order to arrange to fight against Oob in the first round, but when he looks at Oob in the arena, Oob is too terrified to fight well. Goku decides to make Oob angry with insults.

The insults are completely different in the two versions. The entire sequence is intended to be silly rather than serious, so they're more than a bit ludicrous. Part of the reason is that doing something like this is completely out of character for Goku, and he isn't good at it. So he has to stop a couple of times in the middle and think about what he's going to say next.

Frankly, I thought the English insults were a lot better overall (at least to my American sensibilities), though I must say that there was one particularly good insult in Japanese: "Your mommy's belly-button sticks out!", but that's not as good as "Your dad's a bed wetter!" from the English version.

What the hell; here's what they say. Japanese version first:

Goku (friendly): Don't be so nervous! You can't put out what you're capable of like that.
Oob: Right! (but no change in nervousness)
Goku (to himself): This isn't going to work.
(Goku takes a step forward and Oob flinches.)
Goku (to himself): It's no use. All right, if it comes to that...
Goku (nastily): Hey there, you! Come at me! You little hick! Either you were pretending in front of everyone to be a good little boy, but you're really an incredible brat, ain't you? And I... (looks thoughtful) let's see... (nastily) I hate you! I'm going to knock you flying! Or would you rather, um, get killed, and go back home as a pile of bones!? (looks thoughtful) Let's see, let's see... (nastily) Your mommy's belly-button sticks out!
(Oob begins to get angry.)
Oob (stuttering a bit): M- my mommy's bellybutton does not stick out!
(Goku is surprised, and realizes he's finally getting through, so he bears down.)
Goku: Well then, she's just a pile of poo!
(Goku turns around and pats his butt)
Goku: Yeah! Yeah! She's a pile of poo!
(Oob becomes furious)
Goku (to himself): All right, now for the final blow!
(Goku begins to fly across the arena towards Oob)
Goku (nastily, screaming): Your daddy is a pile of poo, too!
(Goku kicks Oob in the head, knocking him backwards.)

Here's the English version. (You need to know that Oob has a mohawk haircut):

Goku (friendly): Hey, don't be so tense! You can't fight to your full potential like that!
Oob: Yeah! Right!