Too bad that these are all the DVD versions, and apparently aren’t all that “special edition” either.
Now if they were all the Japanese Blu-Ray releases without the Disneyfication of all of them, this would actually be something…
These have the Blu-Ray symbol on them; pretty sure they are Blu-Ray. Dunno about the rest of your complaint, though.
Hmm, seems there may be another edition. The photos shown are not the photos shown at Amazon, and the Amazon set claims to be DVD. Weird and confusing.
The 12 disc Blu-ray set seen in the photos is on Amazon UK for 180 pounds. It will be released on December 8th. I don’t know when it will be released in the States.
This post is very wrong and confusing.
Neither Whisper of The Heart nor The Cat Returns are shown on the box. Neither are by Hayao Miyazaki either. Are you sure those are part of the collection?
I have all the current Ghibli Blu-rays (I bought them in Australia), and the Japanese soundtracks and titles are still on all of them, so I wouldn’t worry too much about “Disneyfication”.
I haven’t owned a television/dvd/blueray in over 8 years…I find it sad that I could not find a digital version for purchase even after 10 minutes of looking. (The closest legitimate digital content channel i could find was Netflix rental of some of these). Anyone?
High quality drm free digital version of them all abound in the “pirate world”. It boggles my mind that time after time the legitimate channels fail so hard and don’t even make easy options available, it is almost like they want to make their businesses extinct rather than change with the times.
Buy discs and rip. They make a good backup and you can toss the packaging while keeping the artwork, meaning they really don’t take too much space.
Disney didn’t change or add anything to their Ghibli releases apart from a very well produced dub that’s an optional track.
Interesting my son just happened to ask that very question last night - why are these dubs so good? I told him it’s because Disney has a ton of money, so instead of hiring voice actors, they can hire actors. Didn’t Dakota Fanning voice Chihiro?
However… thirty bucks a pop? Any real fan is going to already have some of these, and any non-fan is going to wonder why you bought them nine goddam cartoons. I do not predict strong sales.
The price is maddening. I waited ages for the price to drop (they’re $38 in Australia), but they never did and I eventually bought them at a shop-wide 20% discount, which was still too much. I don’t like to pay more than $10 for a movie, and $20 is sort of my limit. But the Ghibli movies… had to have them.
Yea, but you get to skip the ahem… less awesome ones. Subtract those and divide into US$275. Then imagine what the whole set will cost on Ebay in a year - somewhat less, I imagine.
Disney has film directors in charge of the dub, and they hire excellent writers – Neil Gaiman wrote the dub script for Princess Mononoke, for example. They end up with dubs that match the lips extremely well.
Voice actors are still actors, and often better at doing dubs than “actors”, however.
Isn’t it more that they’d like the business model to be “if you want to watch it again on different technology, you’ll have to buy it again”?
Pshaw! First thing that came to mind when I saw this was: we’ve already got every Miyazaki available to play on U.S. or Euro machines. Not all Blu-Ray – heck, about half are DVD upgrades from our VHS copies, and so are from the time before Blu-Ray – but why would I buy just these 9 again just for that upgrade?
I was going to say the same thing. I find that the price per disc is waaay too high, plus i think i’d rather have a Best of Studio Ghibli than a Best of Miyazaki. Some of the mentioned movies were meh at best.
Personally i’ve found that the dubs for the Ghibli movies to be ok at best, painful to listen to at worst. They aren’t terrible or over/under-acted like other animes where it makes things really unwatchable, but there’s usually something off for me so i stick to watching with subs (as you should anyway). I’ve found english dubs to be pretty terribad, i’ve had more luck finding better dubs in spanish in some animes.
Interesting. Those dubs are considered good? Apparently, due to the relative rarity of movies dubbed in English, you guys have pretty low standards…
At the time I was first discovering Ghibli, I was moving between Austria and Canada, so I was exposed to rental DVDs with dubs in English, German and French.
The German and French dubs were watchable, the English ones were, in my opinion, bad. Not atrocious, as you’ll get in any language for an anime that’s considered “cheap kids’ stuff”, but still bad.
I was especially disappointed by “Castle in the Sky”: The voices just didn’t fit. If you have a 12-year-old boy on screen, you can’t hire a grown man to do the dub (James Van Der Beek as Pazu? What were they thinking?).
And what’s with the remastered sound track in the Disney dub of Castle in the Sky? OK, the original synthesizer-heavy sound track could use some updating, but does that really mean filling every magical moment of silence with a full orchestra?
One of the DVDs (I don’t remember for which movie) also had a nicely done “Making Of” special feature for the dub. It was actually quite interesting, but it kept pretending that dubbing an animated movie was some never-before-attempted great endeavor undertaken for the very first time ever by the noble pioneers at Disney.
So, if you can’t be bothered to read the subtitles, learn French. I’m told that’s easier than learning German or Japanese.
