Gloaming Crackle

Our environments both reflect and inform who we are. So what do the prefab boxes and pedestrian-free roads of America say of its people?

I keep noticing how weak and grumpy I am, and realize that I must be hungry. And I’m incredulous: why, I just ate a perfectly good meal! Isn’t that enough? Then I realize that this happened eight hours ago.

Damn.

Nausicaä has a really good English dub. I’m very used to an old fansub, since it took so damned long to come out here. Yet the dub is good enough that there’s really no point not to listen to it. It’s well-written, well-cast, and sensitively acted. So in a sense, it’s probably closer to the original intent to listen to it this way than to read the subtitles. The big problem with dubs, historically, is their awfulness or just inaccuracy to the intent of the original (which can also come in obsessive literalism). But if you get a dub that perfectly replicates the original intent, then, well. There you are.

Having done this for part of a living for several years, I’m impressed with how natural the English sounds here. It’s not at all showy. It just… does its thing. And the actors are really taking it seriously. You’ve got Patrick Stewart in here, and he’s all focused. I guess they must create a pretty good atmosphere over in Pixar-land, to get these performances. A lot of the “big” voices are not neccessarily in big roles. Mark Hamill is a relatively minor character.

To an extent, Mononoke — the first Miyazaki I saw — is almost like a darker, grittier Nausicaä, yet it works. The English script and dub, though, are only so-so. As understated as it is, Gaiman uses too many words and the actors speak in that late ’90s rapid-fire dub-monotone. And the casting is often a little off. Gillian Anderson, really?

I think Nausicaä is Miyazaki’s best; it’s basically that, Cagliostro, and Mononoke. It probably helps that it draws from a much wealthier resource, in the original manga, as it imparts a deep sense of place and history and causality. There’s this amazing sequence an hour in, that makes the movie. The rest could be and do anything, and it would still be worth watching for that moment. It’s maybe a ten-minute scene with just Nausicaä and a boy she’d only met a few minutes before, alone in an alien landscape.

For me, the works that really make an impression are the ones that draw places where I long to be. That have a certain logic to them, that is materialized in wonderscapes. Strange, spiritually nurturing places to be alone. To marvel, and to try to bond with and understand. This is such a place, and Nausicaä goes through just that process.

This is one of the reasons that I like Boston and San Francisco so much. They’re two of the very few places in this country that I’ve been that feel like places. They have history, and sense; by being places, they make me feel like I have a place to be.