So I picked up the first volume of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind yesterday. ($18 bucks? Ouch! I know Hayao Miyazaki is a legend, and everything, but still… Ouch! That’s two volumes of Sgt. Frog right there!) And I was trying to remember why I was picking it up.
(That happens to me a lot. I get recommendations or hear reviews from all kinds of outlets and people and put things in my “try that” file, simultaneously purging the reasons it wound up there in the first place. My disk space must be low.)
Anyway, Gary the Shopkeep helped me out. “It’s by the guy who did Spirited Away.” Light dawns, price tag hurts less.
Then Gary asks if I watched the subtitled version of Spirited Away or the dubbed.
Dubbed.
So then Gary says the story in the dubbed version is significantly different from (and inferior to) the subtitled version, and that the translators took some fairly serious liberties with Miyazaki’s original material. Can anyone confirm or deny that for me? Is it worth hunting down the subtitled version?