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Miyazaki's Spirited Away U.S. Release
soupforare writes "Spirited Away is slated for a US limited theatre release in on Sep. 27th
nausicaa.net has a theatre listing and some more info. It looks like some theatres are even going to be showing the subtitled version." No showings near me, but hopefully those prints will make it around. Been wanting to see this one for a long time.
Watch Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. (There is, of course, a page for it on nausicaa.net ... but for obvious reasons, you're not going to be able to visit it for a few hours now.) It's only available as a fansub, but it's well worth it -- IMO, it's the best anime I've ever seen. (And many of the themes explored in it were carried directly over into Princess Mononoke.) Spirited Away was also an amazing movie, and I hope that it's showed in my area at some point ... but Nausicaa was Miyazaki's best work.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
It's a fine movie if you like Miyazaki's work, although its somewhat less "normal" than his other projects. It's targeted at younger folks than Mononoke Hime was, and lacks the violent action. In fact it turns out to be quite similar to his previous Kiki's Delivery Service (a pre-teen girl looks for a job around the intersection of magic and the real world). This one is a bit more disney-like though, with some more overt antagonism than Kiki faced.
Like Mononoke, you can occasionally see places where the animation budget was preserved, but it detracts not at all.
The dub is just as good as Mononoke Hime's was- that is to say not perfect, there are moments of awkardness when they were obliged to be additionally verbose to help out us slow Americans. But there's nothing as painfully bad as the Gillian Anderson-techno-reverb wolf voice the end of Mononoke suffered from.
I know that many movie "experts" consider dubbing as a terrible thing: breaking the director's original vision, etc. For certain foreign movies, I agree. However, for visually rich films like this one is supposed to be, I much prefer dubbing; even bad dubbing. I hate missing what's happening on the rest of the screen while staring at the words on the bottom.