The Tragedy of Man (Deaf Crocodile)

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The Tragedy of Man (2011) is a movie that absolutely needs to be dubbed. Gorgeous animation, but the constant dialog means that my eyes are always at the bottom of the screen.

Add to that, impenetrable King James-style dialog:

Dialog is flying by while everything onscreen is moving, flashing, or doing some interesting thing. Add in this stilted olde English, and it’s impossible to keep up.

When movies were subtitled in the nitrate era, not every line got translated. I’ve seen prints where a single line covers entire scenes. We should return to that.

Then there’s the ridiculous vocabulary:

You can do pretentious writing in a spoken translation. That is, in a dub. It’s unreadable when put into subtitles.

And speaking of unreadable:

Give me a fucking break.

DUB MOVIES IN THE LANGUAGE OF THE AUDIENCE.

And an error that should’ve been caught:

Drunken Master (Eureka)

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While the processing wasn’t egregious enough to make any notes while watching, splices tended to be replaced by a combination of microloops, frozen temporal cloning, and interpolation. Still, a light hand overall.

Microloops

(Frame number in yellow.)

Mismatched cloning

Interpolation

Jackie Chan’s finger is stuck to the background and fine damage lasts an additional frame:

La fin du monde (Gaumont)

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Taking a guess, it was de-grained, restored to death, then re-grained. It looks smeary and unnatural.

Clipped directly from the BD.

And check out those ugly grid lines!

Clipped directly from the BD.

Interpolation still shows under the layer of false grain.

Now, compare to Autour de la Fin du Monde (1930). There’s a clarity that comes through the softness when the picture is left alone:

Clipped directly from the BD.

Too bad it’s out of sync:

La fin du monde (1931) was processed by Gaumont, Eclair, and FPA France. This version is also available from Kino.

Infernal Rapist (Vinegar Syndrome)

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Very nice video. No complaints.

Clipped directly from the BD.

However, it’s over-subtitled and the translation is lacking.

We don’t need the entire Lord’s Prayer subtitled. It’s a pretty standard execution scene. Just this line, ending with an ellipsis, is enough.

The Spanish word for “no” is “no.” Do not subtitle cognates.

The title character’s nickname (“El Gato”) should be “The Cat” in English. (Though, in this example, the cop simply calls him, “Gato.”) We say “Mack the Knife,” not “Mack Messer.”

Coloring the subtitles pale yellow is a nice touch. I approve.