Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man - Steve Alpert

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I also noticed in the sequence was that when Ashitaka jumps up onto the roof he causes a few of the tiles at the edge of the roof to crumble. Pieces of them fall to the ground. With my newly gained knowledge of animation, I realized that what was unusual about this is that the roof is a part of the background and not something that normally moves in animation. Princess Mononoke was the last major feature-length animated film to be drawn by hand and animated on hand-painted cels. In hand-painted cel animation the moving pieces are done in a somewhat simplified style that allows them to be more easily replicated and manipulated. But the elaborate backgrounds on which they move are too detailed, too intricate, and too finely done to be manipulated (animated) in that way. Also, they are done in watercolor and not pencil.

      In other words, in order to get those few pieces of rooftop tile to crack and crumble to the ground, Miyazaki would have had to get an animator to specially create elaborate hand-painted cels to match the background image and to painstakingly recreate them in enough versions of crumbling to make the effect work. This sequence lasted on screen for perhaps only a few seconds or less. But it would have taken a large chunk of someone’s time (and therefore money) to create. This on a project that was already precariously in danger of not meeting its production deadlines. In a larger studio (a Hollywood studio), the film’s producer would probably have told the director that it’s a very nice touch and, yes, it would be great to do this but we don’t have the time or budget for it and it won’t make that much difference to the film so sorry, no, it’s out. Not at Ghibli.

      This is no doubt one very large difference between filmmaking in Japan and filmmaking almost everywhere else, the US in particular. In America the film belongs to the producer. He/she has the final say. In Japan the film belongs to the director. The director has the final word. At Studio Ghibli the director and the producer were of one mind about the quality of the film (usually). Budget would not be a reason to override an artistic decision (usually). And if Suzuki felt that he had to override any decision that Miyazaki made on a film, he would have to do it with guile and deception and not by fiat.

       PRINCESS MONONOKE

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       The rooftop chase scene that required exceptional attention to detail using hand-drawn animation.

      I asked Miyazaki about that sequence in Princess Mononoke. I wondered why, since it was such a relatively large job for just a few instants of effect, and since it happened so fast and in a place when the audience’s focus was on the action of the scene, wouldn’t it be true that most viewers would not even notice it?

      “You don’t think you notice it,” he said. “You may not be aware of it consciously, but you feel it. You feel it though you’re not aware that you feel it, and it does make a difference.”

      When I first began learning Japanese I was struck by how beautifully it can express certain things in a way that’s different from how they might be expressed in English, and by how things that aren’t normally expressed in English can be expressed in Japanese. My idol was the Columbia University professor Burton Watson, whose translations of Chinese and Japanese poetry and fiction were the best. My dream was to have a career like his. That was before I learned that he had quit teaching to become a taxi driver. Also before I ever attempted to seriously translate anything.

      Translating from Japanese to English or from English to Japanese is very hard. For a lot of reasons the two languages simply don’t line up right. Even the best translators are often performing a metaphysical leap of faith. Japanese is very vague. And English, a Germanic language, is more precise.

      The scene in Sofia Coppola’s film Lost in Translation where Bill Murray’s translator keeps relaying the director’s complex instructions simply as “talk louder” is not atypical. In the movie business translations are never checked by anyone. You’re the translator, you say this is how it should be done, and that’s it.

      One of my Japanese literature professors told me that as a graduate student he once moonlighted doing translations. In an American film he came across the phrase “like a bull in a china shop.” He thought the phrase meant “a bull in a store owned by a Chinese person,” and that’s how it appeared up on the silver screen. Because movie translations in Japan are never checked by anyone, the subtitles of every translated film have at least one bull in a Chinese person’s store in them. Whenever I went to the movies to see an English-language film in Japan I always found the audience laughing at something that wasn’t supposed to be funny, or I would be the only person in the theater laughing at something that was supposed to be funny but that no one else got because it wasn’t translated right.

      When I was asked to start translating Ghibli’s films into English, I wanted to do better than that, and I was immodest enough to think that I could. As Groucho Marx once said, you should never criticize a person’s work until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. If he gets mad, you’ll be far away and you’ll have his shoes.

      These are some of the things I learned translating Ghibli’s films from Japanese into English:

       Rule 1—Don’t release your translation until you find out what it’s going to be used for.

      Toshio Suzuki called me up one day in my office at Shinbashi shortly after I had joined the company and asked me if I would mind translating something for him. It was a summary description of the new film Princess Mononoke and was written in very flowery, poetic language. It had been written by Hayao Miyazaki for the composer Hisaishi Joe to help him get a feel of the mood of the film so Hisaishi could work on the film’s music. The film was still in production at Studio Ghibli and I had only a very sketchy idea of what it was about.

      I immersed myself in the text and let myself feel the atmosphere that it created and then came up with a translation. It wasn’t polished or carefully considered. It just more or less conveyed what I thought the meaning of the original was, in English.

      I faxed my translation back to Suzuki and for about a week I didn’t hear anything more. So I called him up and asked, how about my translation? Was it OK? No questions or problems?

      “No,” he said it was fine. “Just fine.”

      “So what was it for?” I asked.

      “Oh, they needed it for an art book on the film that’s coming out soon.”

      “WHAT!? It’s going into a book? Can I get it back to polish it a little more?”

      “No, they’re on a tight deadline. The galley proofs are already locked.”

      About a week or two later I got an advance copy of The Art of Princess Mononoke and there, in print, was my rough, awful, crude, awkward, imperfect, first-pass translation, fixed in a published book, there for me to be forever ashamed of.

      The studio later decided to use the same English translation as a voice-over for a TV spot for the film. I sat with a deep-voiced British actor in the recording studio as he voiced the lines for the TV spot. After the session the guy said to me, “That was a pretty awful translation. Shouldn’t they have polished it a bit more?”

       Rule 2—There will be things that just can’t be translated.

      The Japanese film is called Mononoke Hime. The English title is Princess Mononoke. The translator (me) has left the two-word title 50% untranslated.

      When I first heard the title of the film the word mononoke was completely new to me. This is exactly the kind of word that Hayao Miyazaki likes to use in his titles. It is a word that most Japanese rarely hear or see in print or can even reliably recall the meaning of unless they stop and think really hard about it. It is a word that no two people will define or explain in the same way. The dictionary is no help. It provides things like specter, wraith, or supernatural being, but everyone I ask says this isn’t it exactly. Any attempt to further explain it takes paragraphs. Japanese is full of words

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