Alright, my daughter and I are big fans of anything Studio Ghibli. Especially her, so I watch a lot of it, too. Lately her favorite has been Kiki's Delivery Service. She prefers the English dub. Now, I don't believe localization is the devil, and I understand that in order to make dubbing work effectively, synching up the mouth movements with at least the number of syllables is necessary, so often the text is altered to where the same character at the same moment says two entirely different things. I get that about dubs, and don't mind them - in fact, I actually prefer the English dub of The Cat Returns (voiced perfectly by Anne Hathaway, an actress I otherwise have no opinion of) to the grating screech of Haru's voice in the Japanese original.
However, the English dub of Kiki's Delivery Service absolutely baffles me, and not just because Kirsten Dunst's Kiki is forced and wooden. It's Jiji.
Why does this cat talk so damn much? In the Japanese original he's the comic foil, offering the occasional snide remark. In the English dub - voiced fairly well by the late Phil Hartman - the cat is just yammering on, all the time. Was this necessary to the story? No, and the lame jokes feel shoehorned in with a crowbar. In fact, at the very last scene, the entire meaning of the story is defied by Jiji speaking.
Kiki's Delivery Service is a fable about a girl passing through puberty to young womanhood. As her self-confidence is shaken by a series of events, her doubts about herself bring her to the point when she can no longer fly, and Jiji's talking turns into meows. Kiki can no longer understand the cat when he speaks. In the final scene of the Japanese original, we see Kiki talking to television reporters. Jiji wanders in through the crowd, hops up on her shoulder, and meows. This is significant to the story, for two possible reasons.
First, it indicates that Kiki's journey to womanhood has just begun and that she still has some difficulties before her (as referenced in her letter home), but secondly, it possibly hints that being able to hold a conversation with a cat was a childish thing - much like children hold conversations with their stuffed animals, or an imaginary friend. Kiki, no longer the child but the young lady, doesn't talk to cats anymore. She's grown up a little in her short time in the city.
In the English dub, during the exact same scene, Jiji comes wandering in, calling out for Kiki. He's talking again. Was it in Phil Hartman's contract that he must say X number of words for the salary he got? Fine, his constant blather is annoying, but the change the English language producers decided to make to this final moment in the movie flies in the face of what Miyazaki was trying to convey here.
I wouldn't go so far to say that this change
ruins the movie - Dunst's amateur performance and Jiji's yapyapyap do that just fine. But it does bug me that the producers would make a change that, in addition to being unnecessary, is also out of sync with the movie's message.
And don't even get me started on the opening and closing themes. We go from the sassy 50s style rock of
this, to the flavorless 80s-style pop country of
this? Putting aside how utterly incongruous to the setting a pop-country tune is, why would Kiki listen to this? Yumi Arai's "Message in Rouge" is a fun, catchy, smirky little tune about a girl who's going to make her lover pay for cheating on her - the kind of song a young girl would find fun to listen to on the radio. Instead, we get "Soaring", which was the theme song written for Kiki. Why would she be listening to her own theme song?
Ugh.
