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A Different Kind of Princess

Princess Mononoke

The Studio Ghibli film Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke) directed by Hayao Miyazaki was released in theaters in Japan in July of 1997. Set in Japan’s Muromachi period, the story follows Prince Ashitaka, who is caught in a struggle between the gods of a forest and the humans who consume its resources. The film was a critical and commercial blockbuster, became the highest-grossing film in Japan of 1997, and held Japan’s box office record for Japanese-made films until 2001 when Miyazaki’s Spirited Away broke that record. On each and every weekend in the months of July and August, people stood in long lines outside movie theaters all across Japan to see Princess Mononoke. For the first two months of its release every showing was completely sold out.

Princess Mononoke played in movie theaters in Japan for more than one year. Ticket sales reached 19 billion yen ($160 million). This was a new Japanese box office record, nearly double the biggest box office success for a Japanese film. The previous Japanese-film record-holder, Nankyoku Monogatari, had grossed about $89 million. Steven Spielberg’s E.T., the previous all-time record holder, had earned $133 million in Japan and had held the record since 1983. For fifteen years, no other film had even come close to E.T.’s record. Even big Hollywood blockbuster movies in Japan rarely earned more than $60 million. Princess Mononoke, a non-Hollywood film, and a hand-drawn animated film, had nearly tripled that.

This unprecedented box office success was a cultural phenomenon so big that even foreign news agencies and big international newspapers and TV networks took notice. Princess Mononoke did not conform to anyone’s idea of what a Japanese hit movie would be. And once the foreign press began to notice, the Japanese took an even greater interest.

When I joined Tokuma Shoten, the parent company of Studio Ghibli, Princess Mononoke was still being furiously drawn in pencil. The finished drawings were painstakingly hand-painted onto transparent single sheets of cellulous acetate called cels. The cels were individually photographed to be joined together to make a film. It was October 1996 and production of the new film at Studio Ghibli was only about halfway through. Although the film was in full production, its director, Hayao Miyazaki, had not finished writing the final fifth of the film. He hadn’t yet decided how it would end.

My boss when I joined Tokuma/Ghibli, Toshio Suzuki, insisted that it wouldn’t be possible for me to do my job unless I learned the full, start-to-finish process of making an animated film. He believed that the only way to really learn about animated filmmaking was by direct experience.

When I made my first visit to Studio Ghibli, what struck me most was how small the studio was. The main building, then the studio’s only building, was designed by Hayao Miyazaki. Miyazaki famously enjoyed designing buildings for his films. When Ghibli was established he got his first chance to design one that would actually be built.

Ghibli’s main building was designed to be both compact and flexible. Every part of the building had to be able to be used for multiple purposes. The downstairs “bar” where the staff ate their bento lunchbox meals also served as a kitchen, a meeting room where the whole company could gather, a place to hold meetings for outsiders, and a screening room where the day’s rushes could be viewed. The compactness and self-contained utility of its design reminded me of a submarine: a submarine with large windows letting in light and a beautiful garden on its roof.

The area where the animators worked had retractable overhead skylights to let in sunlight when the weather permitted. Watching the animators at work and drawing at their desks, I found it hard to believe that they were drawing the entire film by hand and that the film could be made from start to finish right inside this one relatively small building. During the course of my career I’ve had many opportunities to visit Disney Feature Animation and Pixar Animation studios. It never surprised me that these were the buildings where Aladdin or Lion King or Toy Story was being made. As at Ghibli there was a palpable atmosphere of extreme creativity, but unlike at Ghibli there were a lot more people and equipment, and a whole lot more space. On my first visits to Studio Ghibli I always wondered where the rest of the studio was.

For a long time at Ghibli, even after the success of Princess Mononoke, anybody could just walk upstairs and stand in front of Hayao Miyazaki and watch him work. Miyazaki is an iconic figure in Japan. His usually smiling visage, capped with a shock of snow-white hair and adorned with a full beard and moustache, also white, large squarish black glasses, a wry grin, and a twinkle in his eye, is a face at once recognizable to anyone in Japan—and a lot of people outside it. At work on a film, Miyazaki would sit in a tiny corner of the animators’ area at an animator’s desk that was identical in every way to any other animator’s desk in the room, though the aura emanating from him identified him at a glance as someone unique and special.

Miyazaki would sometimes stop what he was doing, stand up, and shake hands and even chat with a visitor (if he was in the mood). During the production of Princess Mononoke I once watched astonished as two local junior high school girls in their school uniforms walked upstairs and interrupted Miyazaki to have their picture taken with him. They made V for victory signs as they posed for the camera. No one objected and they politely left with their mission accomplished.

Ghibli is set in a mostly residential area on the outer fringes of Tokyo. At the time the studio was built, the area’s small-plot agriculture was slowly being erased by an increase in single-family housing. Ghibli’s was the only commercial building in its neighborhood. The owners of the few vegetable fields immediately surrounding Studio Ghibli were loathe to break with their ancestral link to the land and the over-generous tax benefits of their “farming” status. Most of the local farmers would lovingly nurture their crops to maturity and then pile the produce in a corner and let it rot. It was a quiet, leafy neighborhood, rare in Tokyo. The cicadas sang in the summer. Bats swarmed the streetlights chasing insects in the early evening. Sunsets seen from Ghibli’s roof were spectacular. And on those few rare crystal-clear days, the silhouette of Mt. Fuji was visible in the west.

There was little or no car traffic near the studio. Most of the people who passed it on foot or on their bicycles seemed completely unaware of Ghibli’s presence and of what might be going on inside the odd-looking building. Most passersby seemed surprisingly incurious. There were no external signs or any obvious indication of what the building was. Sometimes I would stand outside and watch the comings and goings of the people who worked for or had business with Ghibli. For the most part these people in no way looked like anyone who should have any business in the neighborhood, and I often wondered what exactly the neighbors imagined was going on.

Much later I was asked to give tours of Studio Ghibli to visiting foreign guests. It had become my job to explain Ghibli to people, including the heads of all of America’s major animation studios, who had much the same reaction that I did on their first visit. Where, they wanted to know, was the rest of the studio?

John Lasseter, the creative head of Pixar (now Disney/Pixar), once sent us a visitor who provided me with the perfect analogy to explain Ghibli to foreign guests. Several of Pixar’s board members happened to be visiting Japan and wanted a tour of Studio Ghibli. Over coffee in Ghibli’s multi-purpose meeting room, one of the directors, who had formerly been with NASA, told us about a trip he had taken to the Soviet Union to have a look at the Russian space program. He had asked one of his tour guides about astronaut transport vehicles. He explained that in America, in order to deliver the astronauts from their waiting area to the rocket on the launch pad, NASA had developed a special vehicle that cost $24 million. He wondered what the Soviets used for this purpose. His guide responded, “Oh, for that we have used Buick station wagon. Cost us about $7,500.”

When I retold the story to visitors, Pixar and Disney Feature Animation would be NASA in the story and Studio Ghibli would be the Russian space program. Ghibli had grown up out of a culture of making do. From wartime Japan, through the Occupation, and through the postwar reconstruction periods, Japanese people had learned how to deal with scarcity. In the animation industry it informed the way they made their art. For Ghibli’s animators, having a single brand-new building where everyone could work together was already an unimaginable luxury.

In my quest to learn how animated feature films were made I had the opportunity to study the animators at work drawing, the background artists preparing the sumptuous watercolor backgrounds, the cinematographers turning the drawings into cels, and the color specialists choosing the colors and painting the cels. The first post-production process I got to see was voice recording. Unlike most animation studios, Ghibli would complete the animation first and add the voices later. This is called after-recording, as opposed to pre-recording. Hayao Miyazaki and many of the senior animators at Ghibli whom he trained had an amazing sense of timing. They could imagine a line of dialogue and then capture not only the exact mouth movements it would take to deliver that line, but the timing of each mouth position on screen.

This made things more difficult for the voice actor. He/she would have to strike exactly the right tone and create the right mood or attitude in speaking each line of dialogue while also exactly matching the mouth movements of his/her character as they would appear on a large-format screen in a movie theater. They would also have to say their lines clearly and precisely enough to satisfy the most sophisticated audiophile viewing the film using the most sophisticated state-of-the art audio equipment.

The recording was done one line at a time. After recording each line or each part of the line between ten and fifty times, the voice actor then had to maintain the emotion of the entire speech or scene and match the volume and tone of the lines he/she had said thirty-seven times a half hour earlier. All while exactly matching the lip movements up on the screen.

There was also a fairly long wait between each of the repetitions. After the actor says a line, he/she has to wait while the recording technicians examine every quarter second of the recorded line on a graphic display. The process has been speeded up over the years by the use of computers, but when Princess Mononoke was recorded the recording process was still largely manual.

The recording technicians were in a soundproof control room, seated before an enormous crescent-shaped console. The console contained hundreds of dials, lights, toggles, and switches and was identical in every way to the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. The director would sit in Captain Kirk’s (or Captain Picard’s) chair, and his sound designers would sit a half-level below working the dials and buttons. The producer(s) and anyone else involved in the day’s recording session would sit in chairs along the back wall. A large viewing screen at the front of the room displayed the part of the film that was being recorded. Monitors displayed a graphic voiceprint of each line and placed it in the context of the film’s soundtrack. The actor was in a separate soundproof booth and couldn’t hear what was being said in the control room unless someone pushed and held down a large red button of the kind used to launch a nuclear missile.

Each line would be played back and discussed. If the director liked the line, it was examined for sound imperfections, volume level, clarity of pronunciation, continuity with previous lines, and its fit with the screen image. It might be accepted or discussed. The best three or four lines were saved, annotated, and logged in, and one of them would eventually be used in the final mix of the film to become part of the film’s soundtrack.

For the voice actor, all of this translated to a fairly long wait between lines. After each line had been examined and discussed, even the most accomplished of actors would invariably hear the director’s voice saying, “That was great. Really great. Now can we get one more like that, only this time …”

My first experience in the recording studio was listening to the very famous, talented, and versatile actress Yuko Tanaka perform the role of Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke.

The control room of a recording studio may have looked like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, but it also resembled the basement recreation room of a college dormitory. The furniture there had experienced years of use and abuse beyond its natural service life. The hermetically sealed atmosphere reeked of stale cigarette smoke and bad coffee. Overflowing and unemptied ashtrays sat within easy reach of every chair and table in the room. Assorted ceramic and paper cups still held a last quarter inch of coffee and some had become the final resting place for a few dozen stumped-out cigarette butts that the ashtrays couldn’t accommodate. Bags of junk food and the remnants of junk food packaging were scattered about the room.

The people in the room looked as if they had been in there for months without sleep. Day after day they would sit there listening to the same lines over and over and over again, hundreds and hundreds of times, their goal being to capture and perfectly record every grunt, moan, breath, and spoken word that would become the dialogue track of the completed film.

Animators at their desks at work appear to be in heaven. They can’t believe that someone is paying them just to draw. They have on headphones and are listening to music. Most of them smoke. All are absorbed totally in the joy of drawing and making their drawings move. They are exactly where they want to be, doing the very thing they want to do.

An animation director in the recording studio appears to be in hell. His stint in paradise is finished and now he is fallen (usually literally, since drawing requires light and occurs above ground, while recording studios are either underground or might as well be). But he’s a professional and it’s his film, his child, and he is devoted to the process of bringing it into the world. He has his producer to keep him company through the worst of it, and the support of assorted others who show up for various reasons. He makes the best of it. There are brief respites. There are breaks when it’s possible to socialize with the actors. But this is real work.

Being an observer of the after-recording process feels at once like a kind of privilege and at the same time like being subjected to a kind of torture. You are listening to the same lines of dialogue, or fragments of dialogue, being repeated over and over and over again. There is no end in sight. You are trapped in a basement with no light and everyone smokes (I don’t).

For the voice actor in the sound booth, the challenge, and the thrill of it, is probably a lot like being a hitter in baseball. You want to hit a home run. You want to score. It’s much, much harder than it looks, and if you nail a line two or three times out of ten times trying, you’re doing really, really well. 70% failure and you’re doing very well. Just like a batter in baseball.

Yuko Tanaka was in her early forties but looked much younger. In her public appearances she’s perky and lively and projects a kind of girlish charm. But in the recording studio she looked like a different person. She was dressed in jeans and a plaid flannel work shirt, and she looked like she’d spent the day chopping down trees. She looked nothing at all like Lady Eboshi, the strong-willed master of the Tataraba Fortress she was playing in the film. But the voice coming out of her was dense with gravity and authority. So much so that you had to look away to believe that the voice you were hearing belonged to this delicate woman dressed like a lumberjack. After every line she recorded, Hayao Miyazaki muttered to himself about how Yuko Tanaka was teaching him something new about Lady Eboshi, the character he himself had created.

One thing remains indelibly in my mind from Yuko Tanaka’s recording session. Miyazaki had her say a part of one line almost fifty times. “Kunikuzushi ni fusawashii …” (It’s perfect for bringing down a nation …). For some reason this line wasn’t coming across as he wanted it. I later learned that when a director asks for a line to be done again that many times in the recording studio, it often means that he so respects the actor’s talent that he thinks she can get it not just very good but perfect. Usually if the professional recording technicians don’t think a line can be done any better, they know after the first dozen takes. Or sooner.

The communication between the director and the actor seemed bafflingly vague. In her fifty attempts to get kunikuzushi ni fusawashii perfect, Ms. Tanaka was hearing directions from Mr. Miyazaki such as “do the first part like you did it four times ago but finish stronger the way you did it the first three times.” Yuko Tanaka seemed to know exactly what Miyazaki was talking about. Although she couldn’t quite do it.

In addition to attending the voice recording sessions, I sometimes attended Princess Mononoke production meetings. I sat in the back of Ghibli’s large meeting room, which then also doubled as a second screening room and research library, and took notes. During a color meeting we watched a projection onto the front-wall drop-down screen of a line drawing of the tall and powerful lizard-like Didarabotchi hovering over the forest treetops. The discussion during the meeting was about how to color this mostly transparent forest deity. The discussion went like this:

“Over here I think 237 for the main part with 27, 35, and 412 over here. 613 and 89 for the shadows.”

“Not 89. 127 or 45 maybe.”

“No, 613 is right, but I think 127 and 45 to give it a little more visual impact.”

And so on. Everyone in the room but me knew the colors by their pigment numbers and could visualize them on the screen.

I attended a meeting on sound effects. The sound effects that went into the film were exquisite in their evocation of nature in all of its moods and guises. The meeting I attended was a kind of catalogue of the different types of rain and of the different Japanese onomatopoeic words to describe them. Should the rain be dara dara or poro poro? Do we want it jyan jyan or jyaan jyaan? Or should it be just peko peko? Everyone knew exactly what they were talking about. I had no idea.

The final mix, when all of the film’s elements would come together, took place in a sound studio as large as a full-sized movie theater. The mixers work with the same console as in the recording sessions, only larger. It’s the Starship Goliath to the recording sessions’ Starship Enterprise. The process is even more excruciatingly painstaking than in the recording sessions. The mixers listen to each fraction of each line over and over and over and over again as they try to decide where in the theater’s state-of-the-art surround sound system to place each element of each bit of the soundtrack. You admire their skill and their astounding ability to hear minute gradations of tone and volume. You also think that if you have to hear that same little bit of sound just one more time you are going to stand up, scream at the top of your lungs, and kill everyone in the room. Obviously, I’m not a professional.

But seeing these bits of the film played over and over again you do see things that you might otherwise not have noticed. I once repetitively watched a sequence where the heroine San charges into the Tataraba Fortress, leaps up onto the roof, and speeds across it. Then the hero Ashitaka leaps up and goes after her. What I noticed after seeing this again and again was how the tiles on the rooftop react to being stepped on, first by the light and lithe San, barely registering the weight of her compact body and small feet, and then by the heavier and less graceful Ashitaka. Just by how the rooftop registers the tread of their feet you have a sense of the weight, mass, velocity, and physical force exerted by each character.

What 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

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.”

Temporarily Misplaced in Translation

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 like this.

So I decided to just leave it. I assumed that by the time the film came out in English, someone cleverer than me would have come up with a good word (or words) for it. In the nearly twenty-plus years since the film came out, no one has come up with anything.

Rule 3—Sometimes you just have to let go and leave things out.

As soon as the final version of a Japanese commercial film is approved for release, the translator or translators begin making an English-subtitled version.

Creating the subtitles is very hard. Your translation has to be accurate. It has to sound natural. And you have to be able to read the subtitles in exactly the same amount of time it takes for the character to say the lines on screen.

This is an example:

In the film Princess Mononoke, Ashitaka, riding his faithful elk-like animal named Yakul, comes upon a battle. As he watches from a hilltop, several of the samurai fighting below notice him. One of them says “Kabuto kubi da!” Direct translation: kabuto—helmet, kubi—neck, da—is. Literally, the samurai has said, “The helmet is a neck.”

Though kubi may literally mean neck, it also refers to a severed head. So “kubi da” refers to a head cut off. Kabuto in this case is just a very quick way of saying “that guy wearing the helmet.” In feudal Japan a soldier often received a bounty for every severed head he brought back from a battle. Proof of an enemy kill.

So the samurai is saying “That guy wearing the helmet, if we cut off his head we get a reward.” That translation made into a subtitle would take eighteen beats. “Kabuto kubi da” is six beats long. Your subtitle translation needs to lose twelve beats. It needs to be 70% shorter.

“Get the guy in the helmet! Take his head!” Ten beats. Still need to lose four beats.

“The helmet guy is mine.” Six beats, so it should be OK. But now the translation sounds funny. What’s a helmet guy? And you’ve lost the head being cut off and taken in for a bounty.

“His head is mine.” Four beats so it fits fine, and as a bonus, slow readers can follow. It feels right in the context, but you’ve given up mentioning the helmet. But it’s a better line. Japanese speakers get the full flavor. English speakers get an abridged yet acceptable alternative.

Rule 4—Don’t take anything for granted.

In the film Spirited Away is a scene where it’s reported that the character Haku has stolen the character Zeniba’s seal. The Disney writers working on the English-language screenplay of the film contacted us urgently because they were puzzled by this. In Japan, a seal (an emblem used as a means of authentication) is a very important thing. Americans routinely affix their signatures to checks, credit card slips, and legal documents, but in Japan everyone uses a seal for this purpose. For legal documents and such, a Japanese person takes out his/her seal, presses it into a pad of red ink, and then stamps it onto the relevant document.

The Disney writers wanted to know why, if Haku had stolen Zeniba’s seal (semi-aquatic marine mammal), the seal never appeared in any subsequent scene in the film.

When it comes to foreign cultures, you just never know what other people know and what they don’t.

Rule 5—Review everything.

When we got back the first screenplay for Castle in the Sky from Disney to review, we checked the dialogue over and over again, but we didn’t think to check the characters’ names. It was only later when we began to get samples of recorded dialogue that we noticed that some of the characters had odd names.

Wishing to impart to his film a slightly international flavor, Hayao Miyazaki had given two of the characters French names, Charles and Henri. These names pronounced and written in Japanese come out as Sharuru and Anri. Disney’s translator, who was a third-generation Japanese-American and had never lived in Japan, and who also didn’t believe in asking questions, had decided that the names were probably Chinese. So despite Disney’s frequent complaint that the names in Ghibli’s films were too exotic and hard to pronounce for an American audience, Disney ended up with characters in its version of Castle in the Sky named An-Li and Shalulu when they could have had Henry and Charles.

* * *

After the monumental box office success of Princess Mononoke, potential foreign distributors wanted to see English-subtitled versions of all Ghibli’s films. Some of these existed but were for the most part very quickly and very poorly done. From both an artistic and a commercial viewpoint, we wanted the films to be as well translated as possible.

Our method at Ghibli of translating the films into English was to do it with a team of at least five people. We figured that with at least two native speakers of English and two native speakers of Japanese, and one person who could go either way, we had a better chance of getting everything right. The biggest problem with that was Hayao Miyazaki. Hayao Miyazaki can say something in Japanese, and five people hearing him will have five completely different ideas about what it was that he meant. And none of them will be wrong.

Our process was an attempt to render the often difficult but beautiful Japanese of the original films into English equivalents that gave the non-Japanese speaker a feel for the original language insofar as it was possible. Making a film is essentially a collaborative undertaking. We thought that the translation of a film should be, too.

Translating a film has other special problems. In the movie business a film made in one country and shown in another is usually deemed to lose commercial value the longer the amount of time since its first release in its country of origin. If your film has a commercial shelf life, as soon as it’s completed, or even before if possible, you have to produce an English-subtitled version that you can show to potential distributors abroad. So speed can be important.

Once a film is sold to a distributor in foreign Country A, the distributor will want to subtitle and/or dub it into the language of Country A. If Country A is Norway, say, there aren’t a lot of translators who can do Japanese to Norwegian. But there are plenty who can do English to Norwegian.

It turns out that the English subtitles we made for the Ghibli films weren’t that useful in creating Country A subtitles or dubbing scripts. The shortcuts we had to take to get the English subtitles to match the length of the dialogue on screen turned out to cause more problems than they solved. So for every Ghibli film we made what we called a direct translation. This was a faithful translation of the film that made no compromises for timing. Then the Country A translators could get their translation right, and it was up to them to figure out how to fit their subtitles to the screen.

Translators are nerds and want their product to be accurate. Because nothing stimulates excellence in the workplace like having someone review your work, we reviewed all the foreign translations where there were people at Ghibli who spoke the language—essentially French, Spanish, and English. If an error was serious enough that we could catch it, it was probably a problem.

But all writers resent criticism of their work. Creating and reviewing the foreign-language screenplays often resulted in heated battles over words and ended with bad feelings. We once had to do Italian subtitles for a Ghibli film that was entered in competition at the Venice Film Festival. We hired a team of Japanese/Italian and Italian/Japanese translators. The work had to be done in Japan at Ghibli for security reasons because the film itself had not yet been released even in Japan. By the end of the project, a stout referee had to be installed in the conference room where the work was being done to keep the translators from physically coming to blows.

The final thing I learned about translation is that if you get it right, no one will thank you for it or praise your work. If you get it wrong you will hear about it, loud and clear. Thanks to the internet, you will never have to wonder where you went wrong. There is no such thing as a perfect translation. Of anything. Whatever you do there will be criticism. And yes, it does hurt.

The Circus

When Princess Mononoke was released in Japan, Hayao Miyazaki hadn’t been out with a new film since Porco Rosso in 1992. The director’s Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro) is/was Japan’s most beloved film. Much like The Wizard of Oz in the US, the Japanese public knew the film through its annual broadcast on TV. Shown every year on the NTV television network in July when schools were on vacation, My Neighbor Totoro reliably drew a huge audience share every time it was broadcast. Its theatrical release in 1988 had been only a modest success, though critically acclaimed. But Toshio Suzuki believed that, over the years, every single household in Japan had acquired a copy of the film, which they would have recorded themselves at home off the TV broadcast.

Miyazaki’s new film neared its theatrical release bearing the stamp of approval from Disney, a company known in Japan more for its theme park and consumer products, but also a major Hollywood studio and animated film giant of international renown. Suzuki, directing the marketing campaign for the film, went to great lengths to make sure the public was aware of Disney’s worldwide stature. The Japanese public often ignores its home-grown talent until it becomes famous abroad. Then suddenly its esteem in Japan grows exponentially.

As part of his strategy to make the Japanese public aware that Princess Mononoke would be a huge hit not only in Japan but abroad as well, Suzuki wanted the public to know he had even hired a foreign executive (me) to handle the anticipated worldwide demand for the film. The idea was to position the film as an international hit before it had even been released. At the many press conferences held for the release of the film, I was usually called on to say a few words in Japanese about the plans for the film’s international release. There’s always more good news to deliver when you’re allowed to talk about the possible as opposed to the probable, so my part was very easy.

As the film’s release neared, I was regularly invited to be interviewed by the press, and once or twice to do a taped interview for TV. In the 1980s and 1990s there were programs on late-night Japanese TV that featured an ensemble cast interviewing people (celebrities or non-celebrities) or simply humiliating people (housewives wrestling in a ring to win household appliances) or making surprise visits to people’s homes or workplaces. Many of the segments featured scantily clad women who were either regulars on the show or guests (an S&M model being tied up naked with heavy rope and hung upside down calmly explaining how the knots were expertly tied to cause pain, reveal the naked flesh just so, but to minimize soft-tissue damage). Many of these shows had big audiences and were taste-makers and trend-setters.

One of the common techniques these shows would employ was to send one of their featured regulars out somewhere and have the audience vicariously experience the visit to the person or the place that was the target. Most of the places visited were restaurants or Japanese traditional inns in famous or out-of-the-way places. To my surprise, one day Suzuki informed me that I was going to be the interview guest on one of those late-night shows.

All I was told about the interview was that one of the show’s hosts, a young woman, would be coming to our office in Shinbashi with her film crew and that she would ask me to talk about Princess Mononoke. I hadn’t watched a lot of late-night television since my student days (aiming then to improve my listening comprehension of spoken Japanese) and I didn’t have much of an idea about what kinds of shows were currently popular or who the stars were. I also didn’t look into it. I just assumed that someone would come and ask the usual questions and that would be it. But I did notice that when I mentioned to anyone in the office which show it was, the reaction was always a rapid deployment of a hand to a mouth to suppress a laugh. No one would say why it was so funny. What, I wondered, were they not telling me?

By the appointed time of the interview no one had contacted me and I didn’t hear anything further about it. I was at my desk late one afternoon when I heard a commotion down the hall. Beams of bright light were steadily approaching the door to our office and the people in their path were leaping out of the way. The bright lights drew closer. In through the office door and bathed in a blazing halo of light came a leggy Japanese beauty dressed entirely in silver. Close behind her came a man shouldering a large TV camera. Behind the camera was another guy holding up an array of klieg lights and one more guy with a large overhead boom mike on a long pole.

The nubile young woman was wearing a silver-metallic high-collared sleeveless jacket over a silver-metallic bra. She had on a very (very) small silver-metallic micro-mini skirt with a slit up its side. Her hair was silver and metallic. She had silver-metallic eyebrows. On one arm was a silver-metallic elbow-length fingerless glove.

The woman in silver strode toward me on silver-metallic six-inch platform boots. Her silver chains and bangles jingled as she moved. She had a silver ring in her nose. And in one hand she held a very large silver microphone.

The interview was beginning even before the silver lady reached my desk. She held out the mike for me to reply to a question I had not heard. The cameraman bore down on me and the lighting guy fixed me in the glare of his thousand-watt high-beams. I am unusually bad at spontaneous situations. Even if I had heard the question, I would have been too stunned to respond. My staff and a group of people from the neighboring office stood comfortably out of camera range laughing. People from other offices were poking their heads into the doorway.

All I could think of was to ask the silver lady if she bought her clothes on this planet or on the planet she was originally from. But I decided that might antagonize the late-night TV demographic. It was very hard to not just stare at the young woman. A lot of her body parts that were not coated in silver were out and on view. She was very attractive in a way that people whom you normally encounter in day-to-day life are not. And I was getting an up-close view.

I don’t remember anything about what the silver lady asked me or what I responded. But I do remember being too distracted to say the things I had been trained to say in an interview. I didn’t think the interview went well. But when I saw Suzuki later he seemed to think it had gone just fine. Even if that were true, I understood that I couldn’t take any credit for a good performance. 99% of being successful at doing interviews in Japan as a gaijin is about just being a gaijin and showing up. However, I suppose I did do a good job looking blown away and incapacitated by the presence of the silver lady.

My appearance on TV and at press conferences was obviously only a very minor part of the overall marketing plan. The international aspect of the film’s release was but one of its supporting parts, like the little swirl of red syrup on the plate of a fancy dessert that’s added to give it a little color but that you don’t necessarily eat. The important parts of Suzuki’s campaign were the TV spots and theatrical trailers, and the personal visits by Hayao Miyazaki to local markets all across Japan.

The making of the trailers and the TV spots for Princess Mononoke was like a lesson in advanced marketing. From the beginning, Suzuki faced stiff opposition to his choice of scenes to be included. Many of these were the same objections Miyazaki had faced from the film’s production partners when he announced that his next film would be Princess Mononoke.

Miyazaki was told that if the film was set in a historical period it would fail because the Japanese were sick of period dramas. Further, if the film took place in feudal times, the Japanese public would not accept main characters who were not samurai but were shabbily dressed villagers. The film depicted heads and arms being severed. That might be OK for a live-action film, but it would be the kiss of death for an animated film. Miyazaki thanked the production partners for their input and went ahead and did what he wanted to do anyway.

When Suzuki designed the TV spots and trailers to promote the new film, he intentionally featured all of these “faults,” to the horror of the film’s distribution partners. NTV, the film’s major production partner, hinted that they might not run the TV spots, though in the end they reluctantly did.

Just before a new Ghibli film opened, Suzuki always made it a point to travel all over Japan with the film’s director. It was a ritual that, once their film was finally finished, both Miyazaki and Suzuki greatly enjoyed. They traveled (by train), meeting with the theater owners who would be showing the film and speaking to the local press who would be reviewing it. Miyazaki jovially took questions, drew pictures of the film’s characters, handed them out, and signed autographs. The film completed, Miyazaki was usually in a very good mood, and he relished the opportunity to talk to people all over Japan and to sample the odd regional idiosyncrasies that made one part of Japan different from another.

The in-person appeal to local theater owners also made the owners more likely to keep playing the film longer than was normal in the industry. Japanese theater owners were small businessmen with a tough business to run. The expenses of operating a theater were incurred seven days a week, but for the most part the customers only came in on weekends. If a theater was running a film, what the owner wanted to know was, would the film continue to be supported with advertising and publicity as long as it was running?

They success of a film also depended on which theaters it was shown in as well as how long it continued playing. In Japan, which has relatively few theaters and fewer per-capita movie screens than most countries, a theater owner always had the option of dumping a film after only two weeks, even one that was playing well. There were always brand-new releases that common wisdom dictated were likely to play better, and the theater owners knew they could always dump your film for one of those. But they also resented the pressure tactics of the Hollywood studios that tried use their mega-hits for leverage in getting their less popular films into theaters. Suzuki used this to his advantage.

The conventional wisdom among Hollywood studios was that the more movie theaters your movie played in, the more money you would make. Suzuki conceded that in America that might be true, but in Japan it wasn’t. Suzuki’s strategy was to limit the number of theaters his films played in. The theater owners who played Princess Mononoke appreciated this, because that meant there was less competition among theaters playing the same film, and your theater could therefore afford to give the film a longer run.

Americans doing business in Japan would always hear that Japan is different. Savvy American businessmen almost always chose not to believe it. The Hollywood studios releasing their blockbuster films at the same time as Princess Mononoke (such as Jurassic Park) followed conventional wisdom and urged their local offices to book as many theaters as possible. Suzuki kept his distributor from booking too many theaters, even turning a number of them down.

In the days before digital media, when an entertainment industry reporter in Japan wanted to get an early read on how a big a highly touted new film had opened, he/she got up on a Saturday morning—the day new films are released in Japan—and drove around to look at the bigger movie theaters in Tokyo or Nagoya or Osaka. He/she wanted to see if lines were forming at the box office. If there were lines, the film was a hit. If there were long lines the film was a big hit. A reporter would do this for the first two shows of the day and then write his/her article based on that.

This was another reason that Suzuki made sure Ghibli’s films opened in fewer theaters. If the publicity for the film had been successful, there would be many more people wanting to see the film as soon as it opened than there were seats in the theaters showing it. Fewer theaters showing the film made it more likely this would happen. Japanese people have infinite patience for waiting in line. They even seem to enjoy it. For a film that they really want to see, Japanese people are perfectly happy to stand and wait.

For the first showings of Princess Mononoke, Suzuki brought in Miyazaki, the film’s director, and the famous actors who had voiced the film’s characters for live stage appearances. This took place either before or after the film played. The first few audiences for Princess Mononoke were treated to appearances of the famous director and their favorite actors. They were also given small souvenirs to mark the event. This increased the desire among fans to attend the very first showings of the film at the big Ginza theaters in downtown Tokyo where these first-day events usually took place.

The TV, radio, and print media reporters covering the film’s opening and celebrity appearances and the other reporters driving by to assess the opening box office results would see very long lines of people waiting to see Princess Mononoke and conclude, and report, that the film was a huge hit.

In Japan, the film that a Japanese audience most wants to see is the one that they can’t see because it’s already sold out. If it’s sold out, it’s popular. If it’s popular, everyone is seeing it. If everyone is seeing it, no one wants to be the only one not seeing it. If waiting in line is what you have to do to see it, fine. If you’re Japanese, waiting in line is no big deal.

The Kiss

The Walt Disney Company was frequently praised in the entertainment press for having the foresight to acquire the rights to the films of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli before the release of Princess Mononoke. The Disney executive responsible for the acquisition, Michael O. Johnson, then the head of Disney’s Home Video International Division, had extensive business experience outside the US and understood the value of the Ghibli films that had been released prior to 1997.

But neither MOJ (as Johnson was known to his staff) nor anyone at Disney, nor anyone in Japan for that matter, had any idea of exactly what kind of film Hayao Miyazaki was making at the time the Disney agreement to distribute Ghibli films was made.

In early April of 1997, MOJ was in Tokyo and came over to Tokuma Hall in Shinbashi. Toshio Suzuki, the film’s producer, had arranged for a screening of the first trailer that had been made for the still uncompleted Princess Mononoke. The trailer had not yet been shown to the public, but it was already extremely controversial among the film’s coproducers who had seen it. Some of Ghibli’s production partners insisted that Suzuki rethink his ideas. MOJ did not know any of this as the lights in the theater dimmed and he settled in to watch the first footage he would see of the film he had persuaded his company to acquire.

Arms were sliced off. A head was shot off with an arrow. Writhing slimy guts spilled out of a rampaging giant boar. The dainty heroine of the film was shown wiping blood from her mouth with the back of her hand. When the lights came up in the theater, MOJ was speechless. He was very careful not to show too much in front of the other people in the room, which included an entourage from Disney Japan, Ghibli production staff, Tokuma PR people, and a camera crew that was filming a long documentary on the making of Princess Mononoke.

Only later at dinner with Suzuki and Koji Hoshino, the head of Disney’s Home Entertainment business in Japan, did MOJ beg Suzuki to PLEASE get Miyazaki to add something to the film to at least balance the violence. A romantic scene between the hero and heroine would be nice, or a kiss. Johnson went on to explain that Miyazaki was a great artist whom he respected enormously. He said he understood that an artist such as Miyazaki should not have to entertain suggestions from a mere businessman, and certainly not be seriously asked to make changes to his film. But PLEASE couldn’t Suzuki pass along the suggestion and ask him to make just this small change?

Suzuki merely nodded, looking pensive. To MOJ, as to most Americans, the nodding looked like understanding and agreement. To everyone else in the room it just meant that he was thinking. Probably thinking what form his rejection of the request would take.

The trailer that MOJ had seen was actually a work in progress. About a month later when I visited Burbank together with Hoshino, we brought with us the final version of the trailer that would run in theaters and on TV. There was now a line of dialogue in it: “Release the girl, she’s human!” To MOJ, that seemed to be a positive addition. MOJ took that to mean that the hero, Ashitaka, was rescuing the heroine, San. This wasn’t true, but Hoshino and I didn’t disagree.

In a later scene, San is seen bending over Ashitaka and planting what looks like a kiss on his mouth. Wonderful, MOJ said. Now we also have some romance. He looked relieved and asked us to be sure to thank Suzuki and Miyazaki for him. We didn’t tell him that it wasn’t exactly a kiss.

In the scene in the trailer Ashitaka is near death and barely conscious. San had been chewing up dried meat for him, because he’s too weak to even chew it for himself, and she transfers it to his mouth directly from hers. MOJ was happy and we didn’t want to spoil the mood. We preferred to let him find out the truth after the film was released. By that time the film had broken every conceivable Japanese box office record, and whatever his concerns had been, nothing says “forget about it” better than a historically record-breaking blockbuster box office release and all of the positive worldwide press that would follow.

The film did prove too edgy for the Walt Disney Company to release it under its own name. Which is why Princess Mononoke was eventually released by Disney’s new subsidiary, Miramax.

Going Public

Japan likes to find itself featured in the international news media (major earthquakes and nuclear plant meltdowns excluded). When an animated feature film in Japan shattered fifteen-year-old box office records the international press took note. Suddenly, there on CNN was Hayao Miyazaki being touted as Japan’s preeminent filmmaker. There were shots of long lines of Japanese people waiting to see Princess Mononoke even weeks after it had opened. The foreign press found it odd that adults would go and see an animated film, further boosting its box office numbers. Then people who hadn’t seen the film wondered why the foreign press was so interested and decided that they should see the film. The big box office numbers became even bigger box office numbers.

Requests for interviews from foreign (non-Japanese) news agencies began to come in. It began with the entertainment-industry publications that covered most film releases in Japan. Then came the international wire services wanting to know about the big box office numbers, and finally the big American and European networks and print media. They all wanted to know why Japanese people would wait in line week after week to see an animated film that was not targeted at children. CNN, NBC, the BBC, TF1, Arte, and CBS all called. Time magazine, Newsweek, the New York Times and the Washington Post called for interviews. The attention was not necessarily unwanted. But it was unexpected. Ghibli had no one designated to handle requests from the foreign press.

I suppose because I spoke English better than anyone else in the company it became my job to field questions from the foreign press. We had assumed that once Ghibli’s films were being distributed in foreign countries the film distribution companies in those countries would handle the press there. We didn’t expect immediate foreign-press questions about Princess Mononoke’s release in Japan. I had not yet learned the all-important art of not answering every question someone asked.

I have always had a respectful but possibly naïve view of the press and of journalists. One of my college roommates became a reporter for the New York Times, and no one in the world worked harder at it or took it more seriously than he did. He did exhaustive research. He worked through the night without sleep to finish an article. He never published anything until he was sure of the facts. To me every reporter who managed to get a job with a major news publication or network was like that. I believed that any reporter with a byline must without doubt possess the work ethic, the morals, and the spare-no-effort grit and determination of a Bob Woodward or a Carl Bernstein (as portrayed on-screen by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford). Apparently this is not strictly true.

I also learned that though I am pretty good at talking to other gaijin, I am not very good at talking to gaijin who are members of the press, particularly when I’m “on the record.” Being on the record seems to require a certain sensitivity to word usage and the ability to compress a long, difficult, and carefully thought-out answer into a space of fifteen seconds or less. Honest mistakes in speaking are fair game so you have to be careful what you say. Knowing how to not