At the risk of over-generalizing an entire culture, I would like to say that there is a certain melancholy that is pervasive throughout Japanese culture that is missing from American culture. Last year, my family spent about a month in Japan with friends who are missionaries there, and we discussed this quite a bit.

This melancholy can best be summed up by the phrase “mono no aware”, which roughly translates into English as “the sadness of things”. It describes a certain awareness of the fragile and ephemeral nature of existence, and explains why there is such an appreciation or focus on such things within Japanese culture, the cherry blossom being the best example.

I think this certainly spills over into Japanese cinema, be it Studio Ghibli’s animated titles or the live-action works of folks like Kurosawa, Ozu, and Kore-Eda. And it definitely pervaded last year’s acclaimed film, “Departures”.

All of this is to say that there’s something at the heart of Japanese culture that leads to this willingness to explore this sort of subject matter in cinema (and it shows up in surprising places, such as Japanese horror and cyberpunk films). Of course, as you pointed out, Japanese moviegoers are more than willing to take in Hollywood-esque fare, and there’s a lot of cinema coming out of Japan that makes the most extreme Hollywood fare seem tame by comparison.

But, that willingness is there, and it’s an indelible part of the Japanese collective psyche that I, for one, find very fascinating.

Excellent article Steven. I don’t believe the English-language trailer will be as good either. You may want to refer to that ice-cream analogy you made way back when reviewing “the Flintstones” and you might be able to work out why american audiences go for the inferior works.

Just wanted to ask, do you have a link of Michael O’Brien’s thoughts on LeGuin? I can’t find them on google.

Jason: Thanks for your insightful and knowledgable comments. The characteristic melancholy you speak of is certainly part of what I’m trying to get at, but it’s more than that: It’s also mystery and wonder, a haunted sense of glory, “nostalgia for an age to come.” “The inconsolable secret” Lewis spoke of, the “secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence,” is not only a melancholy thing. Middle-earth is haunted by it, as are the tales of King Arthur and even Robin Hood. There are strains of it in Star Wars and even Avatar. I find it in a lot of anime (not that I know a lot of anime, but still). Not a lot of American film, and certainly not a lot of American animation (nothing I can think of, although WALL-E comes close).
 
Ben: Wow, I can’t believe you actually referenced my Flintstones review. There’s a page right out of history. Yes, the ice-cream analogy is certainly relevant to our willingness to consume animated sequels featuring computer-animated funny ogres or prehistoric animal comedy trios. What it doesn’t explain is our apparent lack of interest in beauty, loss, longing and mystery ... a lack of interest that is itself uninteresting, apparently, judging from this combox. (P.S. For O’Brien on LeGuin see A Landscape With Dragons.)

Other than the names of the characters, this doesn’t seem much like the Earthsea series—a laudable situation! I doubt that this film will be anti-Christian like the LeGuin originals which among other things, mock human longing for personal immortality and the very notion of objective morality.

I hate to think of American audiences as really fitting the “mere trousered ape” description. That’s really a depressing thought.

Maybe American audiences don’t identify “beauty, loss, longing and mystery” as things that are of themselves worthy of comtemplation and exploration in film (or anywhere else)? Maybe our culture has so buried our souls in layers of consumerism and little vanities that we no longer recognize within ourselves the desire to comtemplate human experience as anything other than what we are familiar with in post-modern American life?

Or maybe the problem is with Hollywood studio execs? I would not be surprised to find out that *they* have long dismissed any mythopoeic sentiments that aren’t accompanied with an ironic smile. Perhaps if the really influential people in Hollywood were more open to “beauty, loss, longing and mystery”, American audiences would get more of it, and eventually learn to appreciate it the way they appreciate films such as Shrek?

My complaint about Disney ditributing the Anime movies is that I cannot
accept the voice overs Disney uses. I prefer listening to the movie in Japanese and reading the subtitles. I hope that doesn’t seem un-American, but most present day children on TV or in movies “for children” have such a rude attitude, disrespectful. I also have come to dislike the comedian’s voices used in Disney movies, they dominate the story eg. Aladdin genie. The comics are in the wrong time warp compared to the script they are doing and sound more like they are doing a stand up routine. Give me the subtitles. That is the way I see it.

@Steven: One thing that I’ve noticed about Japanese culture is that it’s an intriguing blend of old and new. On the one hand, Japan is one of the most advanced countries on Earth. On the other hand, they place a great emphasis on revering traditions and customs that stretch back hundreds and even thousands of years. The Japanese, as a whole, are surrounded by these traditions, many of them religious in nature. As such, I suspect that that imbues the culture with a deeper sensitivity to spiritual and mystical affairs. Of course, there are all kinds of potential problems with that, as you might imagine, but it strikes me that this could also account for a greater appreciation, if only on a subconscious level, for the mystery and wonder that you mentioned.

@PAT: I don’t think that’s un-American at all. I think that’s simply a desire to remain as faithful to the original artistic vision as possible, which is a laudable goal in my book. Some of the dubbing jobs are better than others, but for me, there’s a fundamental disconnect that occurs when I hear English voices synched with Japanese animation. FWIW, the only place I can really stand dubbing is in old kung-fu flicks, but only because those are often pretty silly to begin with and the English voiceovers only add to the ludicrousness.

Some interesting thoughts all!
 
Limiting myself in this response only to the subject of dubbing and subtitles: I can’t stand dubbing and greatly prefer subtitles in all cases except two. One is chop-socky flicks, as Jason mentioned (where the dubbing has a cultural milieu and kitchy value all its own).
 
The other is animation. My reasoning is twofold: First, sweet films like My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki’s Delivery Service are ideal for viewers too young to read. Dubbing is the only way they can appreciate these lovely films.
 
Second, all cartoons are “dubbed” even in their native language. Dubbing a live-action film deletes half of a unified performance, mashing one actor’s physical performance with another actor’s voice performance. With animation, in principle, one actor’s voice performance has as much integrity as another’s. (It’s true that the animation may be inspired by the first actor’s vocal performance, but by the same token the second actor has both the animation and the first actor’s vocal performance to inspire him or her.)
 
Disney’s Ghibli DVDs offer the original Japanese soundtracks with subtitles, so you can always enjoy them that way, and I do love to watch them in Japanese. They generally do a good job on the English dubs. They do tweak the dialogue and story, sometimes understandably so, other times not so much. You mention comedians, Disney does like to punch up the comedy from supporting characters in Miyazaki’s films. Again, some edits I suspect Miyazaki might approve of, others less so.
 
More later.

@Steven: Good points on dubbing in animation, especially with regards to younger viewers. I would certainly never try to “inflict” subtitles on a kid.

Good point that all animation is dubbed anyway. For a similar reason, I’m not sure it’s too terribly important for actors in movie musicals to do their own singing.

For young children, I think one might consider avoiding subtitles even if they can read, simply because reading words and looking at pictures at the same time is a rather difficult skill that requires some practice and maturity. For the same reason, comic books as a form are not best suited to young children. In a movie, however, it’s even harder, because you can’t spend as much time as you want looking at a particular picture or particular words.

If anyone’s interested, the full version of the song in the trailer with (possibly inaccurate) English subtitles can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFPRp2dHrgo&feature=player_embedded

Americans are sensitive to this sort of thing, and do seek it out. It’s just that it’s not usually advertised that way to Americans. If you had assigned a petrochemical or truck company’s ad agency to make a commercial for Ponyo or Howl, they’d probably make a good job of it. Show people a lot of shots of hawks and lonely hills, and possibly some manly men doing manly things with pretty women close by, and the public would show up in droves.

People even sell steakhouses and fast food with “There’s a place where things are a little different, where everything is beautiful and you can find your heart’s desire, and the sky is a little more blue.” The entire American experience is founded on believing this kind of thing.

Instead, Disney’s ad agencies always advertise Ghibli animes with confusing ads full of freaky scary images and tons of blurbs jumping at you. They don’t trust the movie to sell itself by being different, or quiet, or delightful, or even warm and homey. (They tried with Ponyo, a little. But not enough.)

I’ve shown kids anime before. The hyper ones are usually the ones who love the quiet scenes best.

By and large, it seems that American audiences go to the movies to “have fun” and an assumption is made that you can’t have fun at an “art house” movie.  We don’t go to movies to be awakened to something good, true, or beautiful (or we assume that that’s not how to have fun).  We go to achieve a momentary escape from our lives and nothing provides that better for us than a movie with lots of explosions, a little skin, and a few one liners that make us chuckle.  I know I am over-generalizing and being a little harsh but I’m not sure the answer goes much deeper than this.

One non-intrinsic, non-necessary problem with American dubbing: in terms of skill, the American voice-actor is rarely in even the same league as the Japanese seiyu, who is a professional and a specialist at voice-acting. Christian Bale (taking Howl as an example) might be a good actor, but a lot of his skill consists in movements of face and body; whereas a good seiyu knows how to communicate *everything* with his voice.

Also, especially the ‘anime-dialects’ of Japanese have many more emotionally rich non-verbal expressions (all those grunts!) than would sound plausible/non-silly in modern, first-world English, so those Japanese grunts are often replaced by English words, which loses simplicity by adding lexical semantics.

But I think the general problem with dubbing is just that the seiyu are usually much awesomer at pure voice-acting than their American counterparts.

JohnE
I think you gave an excellent explanation of the difference in the dubbing. It
makes the most sense. Of course when the children watch they are not tuned in like an adult, and will accept the movie as is. I’ll stick to reading the subtitles and listening in the language that produced the movie.

To further the concept of mystery: there are some cultures who develop with a more developed sense of fatality. For example, one reason LotR has that sense is that it Tolkien relied heavily on ancient nordic/germanic culture, which had the concept of “Wyrd,” a fate that ultimately included doom (read here for more information: http://www.octavia.net/anglosaxon/Wyrd.htm).

Greco/Roman philosphy (admitedly in my opinion) feels very different. The gods never age, the order is eternal, everything is a march toward greatness. This assessment is of course oversimplified, and subject to exceptions/errors. But in an overall assessment, I think this culture is one that is not likely to admit that defeat can be met honorably: to a Roman, defeat was simply defeat. You played to win, always. And so I think it is difficult for us, with that sort of cultural heritage, to feel the beauty of melancholy.

By the way, if you want to really appreciate a celebration of Japanese culture, look into the musical “Pacific Overtures” by Stephen Sondheim. The song “I Wear a Bowler Hat” is exceptionally haunting.