Land Before Time Retrospective #27
This post was regarding a Japanese language version of the fifth film that had been discovered and livestreamed with the Land Before Time fan community I was a part of. Most of the Land Before Time films have dubs in Japanese, and a few other languages as well, and since then I have collected many of these alternate language dubs for myself.
I would like to thank OwlsCantRead for his livestream over the weekend. A while back, he purchased a copy of The Mysterious Island, albeit at the time he didn’t realize it was a dual language copy containing both the English version, and a Japanese version as well. It was something he just happened to discover much later on when he was scanning the DVD case digitally for Mumbling. The whole thing was a complete accident, albeit a happy accident, for it made for a pretty entertaining and unique stream!
I would also like to thank Owls for taking the time to manually do up English subtitles for the stream. I don’t know Japanese myself and so I would have had no idea what they were saying otherwise… which admittedly I do think would’ve been entertaining and comical in its own way. Nonetheless, I appreciate his time and effort into setting it up so that the rest of us would be able to understand the characters.
I think the funniest moment for me was just after the Gang snuck off from the main herd in the desert, leading to Topps in his Japanese voice giving an epic yell of “CEEERRRAAA!”
The voices themselves were pretty good. Some of them still sounded fairly similar to their English counterparts, while others sounded quite different. Although I found that, by the halfway point of the film, I didn’t really notice the Japanese voices all that much any more. I don’t watch non-English movies with subs very often, but on the occasions when I do, I find that my mind eventually just registers the subtitles as though they were speaking actual English.
The songs did stand out to me more. It was quite interesting to hear the same instrumentation, but with totally different voices singing along.
Owls tells me that the Japanese dub is surprisingly faithful, which makes me curious if some of the other language dubs deviated further than that or not. Either way, this was quite an unexpected treat, and it piqued my interest in seeing more alternate language versions of the LBT series in the future.
