Kiki's Delivery Service Subtitle Confusion

The other day I got an odd hankering to watch one of my favorite Hayao Miyazaki films, Kiki’s Delivery Service, the story of one young witch’s journey out into the world. The version I was watching was in Japanese, but with English subtitles, and as the movie progressed I noticed something interesting: the subtitles didn’t match the Japanese dialogue of the film very closely. They included quite a few lines by Kiki and her black cat Jiji which didn’t exist in the original, and I eventually figured out that they had been transcribed from the English dub of the movie and not translated directly from Japanese. It was immediately apparent that, whoever the producers of the English version were (*cough* Disney *cough*), they didn’t rate their viewers’ intelligence very highly, since many of the lines added did nothing but cover five-second patches of (gasp!) silence by stating information that was obvious to viewers, anyway. It became quite interesting, seeing what parts of the movie the U.S. producers felt needed “improving” by adding meaningless bits of exposition, despite the fact that no character was actually talking. Incidentally, if you’re interested in the official DVD releases of all the Studio Ghibli films, complete with extras full storyboard versions and English subtitles, J-List has them all in stock, along with a great upscaling region-free DVD player to play them on.

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