More Remembered (Streaming) Love
Dec. 1st, 2024 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerJust as I’d happened to do during the first months of this year, I came upon on certain notices there’d be another altogether unofficial streaming of Do You Remember Love? This time, the promise was of the original Japanese language dialogue with subtitles. That would be more familiar to me than the perhaps-infamous English dub streamed earlier, but I still thought I could make a late evening of the movie.
Despite an amused recollection or two in advance of certain skewed subtitle translations, the subtitles seemed appealing enough to me. Keeping the chat sidebar visible beside the movie, which did often seem to recapitulate the previous dubbed experience, gave me the understanding this translation was courtesy of an established figure still connected to fan currents all the same. I suppose that could leave a certain unfortunate sense of “a one-time experience,” though. There was something intriguing about the translation pointing out that when the giant antagonists the Zentradi switch from speaking in an invented language (with Japanese subtitles) to speaking in Japanese, more words of the invented language than might have been suggested by other subtitles still can be heard in their dialogue. It at least felt different from certain insistences from certain people that particular Japanese terms are so complex, or at least so hard to convert into a few English words, that you just have to see those untranslated words and pick up on their meaning by osmosis.
If there was one other thing about this particular experience that started getting to me, though, it was an impression that certain shots of the movie didn’t look quite as in focus as others. The question of whether this came from the animation photography forty years ago was a bit unsettling, even if I can at least imagine being told I have a limited mental image of what animation “should” look like, or something. So far as that goes, while my first experience with the long-fabled movie hadn’t been on “over-copied videotape” the way some talk about, postage stamps of “RealVideo” to be played some minutes at a time one after the other weren’t as good as we can get it now.
Despite an amused recollection or two in advance of certain skewed subtitle translations, the subtitles seemed appealing enough to me. Keeping the chat sidebar visible beside the movie, which did often seem to recapitulate the previous dubbed experience, gave me the understanding this translation was courtesy of an established figure still connected to fan currents all the same. I suppose that could leave a certain unfortunate sense of “a one-time experience,” though. There was something intriguing about the translation pointing out that when the giant antagonists the Zentradi switch from speaking in an invented language (with Japanese subtitles) to speaking in Japanese, more words of the invented language than might have been suggested by other subtitles still can be heard in their dialogue. It at least felt different from certain insistences from certain people that particular Japanese terms are so complex, or at least so hard to convert into a few English words, that you just have to see those untranslated words and pick up on their meaning by osmosis.
If there was one other thing about this particular experience that started getting to me, though, it was an impression that certain shots of the movie didn’t look quite as in focus as others. The question of whether this came from the animation photography forty years ago was a bit unsettling, even if I can at least imagine being told I have a limited mental image of what animation “should” look like, or something. So far as that goes, while my first experience with the long-fabled movie hadn’t been on “over-copied videotape” the way some talk about, postage stamps of “RealVideo” to be played some minutes at a time one after the other weren’t as good as we can get it now.