Tuesday, July 19, 2011

5 things about HP 7.2 in Japanese (no spoilers)

Floating on air cuz I watched Harry Potter and the new Ghibli Kokkuriko-zaka kara (From up on Poppy Hill) today. I watched them in Japanese. It's always weird watching English language films in Japanese for me. Whatever language I watch a movie in first is the RIGHT language. To this day, I can only sing "Dille Che L'ami" (Italian) instead of "How Does She Know" from ENCHANTED (COME D'INCANTO). So Harry Potter 7.1 and 7.2 will probably always sound weird in English.

Anyhow here are some random thoughts about seeing Harry Potter in Japanese:

1. Most of the Japanese voices do a fair job of sounding almost exactly like the English or capturing the spirit of the character. Except Hermione. Hermione sounds vaguely Minnie Mouse on helium, so it always take a few minutes of giggles to get adjusted.

2. Harry Potter in Japanese is pronounced funny. Ha-RII PoTAA. I scoured youtube for Japanese voice overs but I can only find the trailers with subtitles. :(

3. 分霊箱 (Bunreibako) confused the heck out of me for the first 30 minutes. Eventually I figured out it meant "horcrux"- literally "part-spirit-box". Horcrux isn't exactly in the dictionary.

4. For about 90% of the movie I wondered why they kept talking about 机 (tsukue)- desks. I kept saying to myself, I can't remember there being this much talk of desks in the book. Turns out they were saying 杖 (tsue)- wand. Wand makes so much more sense than desk. So much more sense. Definitely should have looked that one up before hand.

5. And my fave thing: The translation of "Marauder's Map" was "忍びの地図" (Shinobu no chizu) or literally "Ninja Map" !!! BEST. TRANSLATION. EVER. I mean who doesn't want a Ninja Map?

And that's my 5 randoms about watching HP 7.2 (and 7.1) in Japanese. Did you love it? Hate it? Not see it yet?

(P.S. leave a random word at the end of your comment and I'll incorporate it into a short story I wrte next week. I'll use at least 5 words, maybe more.)

5 comments:

Lori M. Lee said...

hahah awesome. I totally want a ninja map!

Alex J. Cavanaugh said...

Not sure I could get past the Minnie Mouse voice! Saw the movie Friday - excellent!

Marsha Sigman said...

We never go the first week, the theaters are just too packed! So in a week I'm going to take my teenager to see it. It's a tradition with us but it's killing me to wait!

We used to skip school/work to see the movies in an empty theater but then they started releasing them in the summer time. Tricky tricky.

Liza said...

Saw HP Sunday morning. LOVED it. So funny to think about translating the untranslatable. But yes, Ninja Map is perfect.

Sidrah said...

I loved Hp 7! =D I watched it in English,though. Imagining how Minnie mouse-Hermoine sounds like =p