I used to watch this movie as a little kid. I mean, we’re talking 4 or 5 years old.
I hadn’t seen the movie for literally decades. And then — through the power of the Interwebs — I rediscovered the movie by watching clips on Youtube and had to hunt down a copy.
The movie itself is from 1969 and was released by Toei Animation. It’s notable for featuring some of Hayao Miyazaki’s earliest work as a key frame animator. Miyazaki, of course, would later go on to form Studio Ghibli (Princess Mononoke, Nausicaa, Spirited Away). Truth be told, however, it isn’t Miyazaki’s movie (although the chase and action scenes he worked on are outstanding and certainly a progenitor for movies such as Cagliostro).
The film was directed by Kimio Yabuki (Swan Lake) and features notable contributions from Yoichi Kotabe (Pokemon, Panda! Go, Panda!) and Yasuo Otsuka (Lupin III, Future Boy Conan).
I managed to score a copy of the DVD for $10 on eBay direct from Discotek, the DVD’s distributor in the United States. Here is what you get on the DVD:
• Anamophic 2.35:1 16:9 transfer. That’s widescreen.
• Japanese language
• English language dub which the DVD credits as the “Fred Ladd” dub
• An additional audio track with just music and sound effects
• English subtitles
• Extras including picture gallery, theatrical trailer & text interviews with the creators
(Trivia: Apparently no credits exist for the English cast)
It’s a nice little package. But peep:
The English audio is kinda busted…It’s sort of in stereo, but not really: It’s very choppy and sounds as if voices or music will drop out entirely at any given time. It also sounds as if it’s weigthed far to the left…To be honest, I thought it was mono at first. It even says, “Dolby Digital Mono”…I don’t know, it’s weird…The Japanese channel is much nicer. But since I grew up watching the English dub (in glorious 4:3) I was kind of hyped to hear a good English mix. Oh well. It’s good enough. It works.
The bigger problem though is some nasty interlacing (click the images for the full-size screenshot):
So what I did was I used my handy DVD Shrink rip tool to rip the entire movie to an ISO file (click image for larger view):
I then used Handbrake and chose the “Deinterlace” video filter to remove the interlacing:
Handbrake also recognized the DVD’s anamorphic source and set the cropping to remove the extraneous black bars (Top: 50 / Right: 8 / Bottom: 48 / Left: 12, if wondering). I then saved as an MKV with all 3 audio channels as well as the English subtitles. And what I have now is, in my opinion, a superior version (Click to download a 2.4M MKV sample with Japanese & English audio tracks and subtitles):
And no: I will not send you the full MKV, so don’t even ask. Instead, hit up the good folks at Discotek who despite having some interlacing issues in their source material, seem to really care about this release. It’s a nice disc.
Also check out:
• DVD Times article on the DVD release