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One of my favorite anime videos is Castle of Cagliostro, an adventure film about the master thief Lupin III, directed by Hayao Miyazaki 20 years before he did Spirited Away. The narrative pulls you in from the first frame and never lets go. I recently picked up the DVD and heard the Japanese (with English titles) for the first time. I'm always amazed by the differences in the dubbed versions of anime and the subtitled scripts--the American writers take amazing liberties, I guess because it's just low-culture crap for kids and doesn't matter. But the changes can also work for the film. Here are some examples of the yin and yang of dubbing.
About halfway through Lupin is dumped into a catacomb beneath the Castle. It is filled with the skeletons and rotting bodies of people wearing the armor and raiments of all world history, who have sought the secret of Cagliostro and failed. In the dubbed version, Lupin makes typical dumb American small talk as he walks over the bodies ("place could use some fixing up--some plants, new drapes") and then, after he watches a skeleton wearing a jeweled crown crumble to the ground from the chains that have been holding it to the wall, he looks around the killing ground and says:
"Centuries of political murder, and for what? Rest in peace, you poor bastards."That is a great line, and adds a social dimension to what has been pure escapism up to that point. It foreshadows some of the political machinations driving the story that aren't fully revealed until later. And it gives Lupin a depth we haven't seen before now. The subtitled translation in the Japanese version handles the scene very differently. There is no adlibbing--Lupin is completely silent as he surveys the dead. And his assessment and benediction are much more sombre:
"Killing and killing for 400 years. Rest in peace, all of you."This seems truer to the Japanese tradition of honoring the dead but the line isn't nearly as interesting. Another example, this time where the Japanese subtitle is superior: Earlier in the movie Lady Clarisse steals a car and flees the henchmen of the evil Count Cagliostro, to avoid an arranged marriage with the Count. Lupin and his sidekick Jigen intervene to help her, following in their own car. Gunfire is exchanged and the bad guys are dispatched but then Lupin sees Clarisse slumped over the wheel of her still-speeding car. The music clangs dramatically and in the English dub he yells "She's unconscious!"---which sounds like something a paramedic would say and makes you think she might be seriously injured or even dying, clipped by a stray bullet.
In the subtitled version, though, the line is "She's fainted!" Possibly Mary Mason, the American writer, changed it because she thought Clarisse was too strong a character to swoon at the first sign of trouble. Assuming the subtitled line is faithful to the Japanese, that pc rewrite of Miyazaki is presumptuous. Also, for narrative economy and momentum "fainted" is the better choice here: after your initial shock at seeing Clarisse prostrate in the front seat, when you hear (read) that word you know the movie isn't taking a sudden turn for the tragic--you accept that she'll recover if Lupin can only stop the car. (A main character's surprising brush with mortality doesn't occur till much later.) These little examples make you realize how powerful dialogue can be in shaping what you see with your own eyes.
The 3rd edition of The Visual Experience, a secondary school text by Jack Hobbs, Richard Salome, and Ken Vieth, includes a piece of mine, Discs. It's on p. 15, in a section called The Philosophy of Art:
The authors gave me a break in not asking the thornier, implied question: "If the crystals aren't a work of art, why is Discs?" Fortunately the text covers that elsewhere, explaining the history of abstraction, found objects, etc. (The scan is blurry because every way I tried to sharpen it or tweak the contrast it distorted the piece(s).)