In all, the english subtitles are a direct translation, many things have to be altered to have folks understand it because it might have to much of a culture reference that americans might not get and so forth. It does indeed have an Original Language and it seems silly to believe otherwise. They do not alter the lip movement or acting when they bring it here or redo art. Their is indeed an Original language as it was made in japan and thus has that as it's Original Language. In most cases animators look at the reaction and lip movements of the voice actors to match up just right the artwork. Just because the drawings themselves were not speaking, doesn't mean the artist didn't use the actors movements of speech to draw the images. I must say that it is pretty silly to say that. those drawings aren't really speaking, you know' 'so there really is no original language. Not to mention I have been watching subtitled anime for close to 10 years so I guess that is one reason why I'm so used to the language and being able to read and pick up the emotion from it. In the dub, even if it's a good dub, it lacks that certain something. You get the emotion and the feeling from the Original Language even if you can't understand the language by simple tone of voice. there seems to be a few lines missing when the dub occurs so if you put the Dub on while the subs are on, you will notice that in many cases it doesn't follow translation right. Jough You must not have read my response to this early on in the thread.Įnglish dubs do not match up always with the subs. Not to be a pedant, but aren't you 'losing something in the translation' by reading the subtitles? Aren't subtitles an English translation as well? I just consider it more of an alternate take on the movie than an actual part of the movie. Which is not to knock the Spirited Away dub-everything I've heard sounds very good. The same is present in the subtitle track, but you have far fewer instances of subtitles adding or completely altering the meaning of the original lines, and completely cut out the times when the voice actor or dub director changes the tone of voice a character delivers a line in. The English dubbing team is going to spin the way the dialogue is played out, and present the English track as their reinterpetation of the Japanese track. I view the Japanese as the actual original language just because that's the language the actual original creative team worked on, and the one that best reflects what the writers were originally going for. Those drawings aren't really speaking, you know. It's animated, so there really is no 'original' language.

I prefer the original Japanese language version, but that's more because I love the sound of Japanese.

Spirited away english dub subtitles