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REVIEW: Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence DVD

For such a heavily hyped film, the extras are remarkably sparse, consisting of director's commentary, a making-of feature, and some previews.

And really now, why the Hell didn't they produce a dub for this movie?

How are we supposed to appreciate all the cool visuals when we're too busy trying to make sense of what we're simultaneously reading?

Jimmy Balls-O-Steel wrote:

And really now, why the Hell didn't they produce a dub for this movie?

I summarized my thoughts on this in another thread:

"That's a non-issue. Dreamworks should be praised for respecting the integrity of the original acting work under the direction of the film's creators by not degrading the film with a horrible English dub of their own doing. Same goes for their release of Millennium Actress. Thank god Manga Entertainment didn't have the rights to Innocence's American release, an hour and a half of having to listen to Richard Epcar and Crispin Freeman's attempts at being convincing actors. Outside of anime it's more difficult to find dubs, and even moreso outside of America, because the audience generally values the integrity of the original voicework done under the direction of the work's original creators. But disrespectful corporations like ADV have had no qualms about trying to commercialize, homogenize, and generally degrade anime so as to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The stupidest people become the core audience, and thus great Japanese works get turned into laughable piles of garbage with consistently mediocre English dubs. That's what you wanted for Innocence?"

And oh how I eagerly anticipate the cliched "anime is a visual medium meant to be viewed without reading subtitles" argument that naive anime dub fans seem to think has weight and thus love to use, because it just makes me laugh as it's more "pretentious storytelling" than what goes on in this film. It's the guy-eating-a-burger speaking on the behalf of the cow. All film is a visual medium, and nearly every film-maker, animation and otherwise, ever asked about it in interviews prefers their work to be subtitled rather than dubbed. You're damn right it's not the exact experience the original audience of the original language gets when they watch it, it's the universally accepted method of showing it to an audience of another language in the least affected way by taking away nothing from the original film, which is why it's the standard for all foreign film, with anime being an anomaly due to bastard corporations appealing to the lowest common denominator. But why should we care what the film-makers want, they only MADE the thing.

Jimmy Balls-O-Steel wrote:

How are we supposed to appreciate all the cool visuals when we're too busy trying to make sense of what we're simultaneously reading?

Some people start the practice of this arcane art "reading" at a young age and don't find it to be such an arduous task while visually multi-tasking, which raises concerns about how you drive. Not that I'd expect better from someone with "Balls-O-Steel" in their screen name.