Archives of Studio Ghibli?

xo · Posted: Tue Feb 19, 2002 12:04 am Post subject: Archives of Studio Ghibli?

I was at a local anime store today and my friend noticed an unexpected find - a 6 DVD boxed set called "Archives of Studio Ghibli".

It contains:
Disc 1 - Nausicaa / Omohide Poro Poro
Disc 2 - Mimi Wo Sumaseba / Mononoke Hime
Disc 3 - Totoro / Ponpoko
Disc 4 - Porco Rosso / Laputa
Disc 5 - Grave of the Fireflies / Kiki
Disc 6 - Umi Ga Kikoeru / On Your Mark Music Video

I'm guessing this is a bootleg- the clerk informing me it was regionless seemed all the more suspicious. I popped in the disc at my friends place and the menus looked really amateurish, and the box seems rather vague (except it does not that Chinese subs are available).

Anyways, seemed pretty sketchy to me, but um... who am I to judge, neh Wink

.

Anyone know the story behind this thing? With Disney being their evil selves, it seems unlikely that we'll *EVER* see some of these titles released here on DVD, so I may look to pick this up for myself sometime.

-xo

fureimu · Joined: 17 Feb 2002 Posts: 13 Location: Uppsala, Sweden

I've seen that set being sold on eBay a lot, it's yet another of them HK releases. I've not seen it myself, so I can't say anything about the quality, but considering not all Ghibli movies are out on DVD I'd guess some were ripped from LD/VCD/whatnot.

Tobias Rieper · Joined: 18 Feb 2002 Posts: 41 Location: Berlin, Germany

Sounds very interesting. How is the quality?

And is there a online shop, where I can order it? (no ebay)

T.Rieper

xo · Posted: Wed Feb 20, 2002 1:53 am Post subject: Where to get?

xo · Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2002 3:31 am Post subject:

Finally got around to watching one of the movies (Omohide Poro Poro). I don't know how much the below would apply to the others in the set but I would imagine they'd be similar.

The video was quite good - did not notice any artifacting at all. The only complaint on this front was the logo for publishers would appear in the upper left corner every 20-30 minutes or so and linger for about 1 minute. It was in the unused part of the screen so it didn't obscure the image or anything but it was annoying for me.

A much more serious complaint is the subtitlling. The translation itself seemed pretty good - not too literal and mostly free of typos and grammatical errors, although a couple of times I was distracted by awkward sentences.

The real problem was the timing. They chose a pretty large font to use for the English subtitles and apparently were on a mission to have only one line of text at any given time. This meant that during certain scenes, the subtitles were sailing by and there was no reasonable chance to keep up. At other times, they sort of lagged or got ahead of the movie.

I was able to follow and enjoy the movie, but I hate feeling like there was stuff I missed.

Melchior · Posted: Sat Mar 02, 2002 5:18 pm Post subject: Where to get?

deoch · Joined: 09 Mar 2002 Posts: 65

All the movies in the Studio Ghibli set are ripped from Laserdisc.

I've heard there are occasionally some minor timing issues or missing lines. Pon Poko has the most problems out of all of them, so if you didn't mind it too much, I guess you should be fine.

Tobias, if you don't want to buy it from eBay, you can buy it from here:
http://www.animeniacs.org/DVD0015.html

It is 60 USD and I've been told the seller is reliable. They are US based though, so you'll have to factor in extra shipping costs.

I personally will probably just buy the Region-2s or 3s whenever a movie is released that I particularly enjoy (Though I still gotta get a region-free player -_-). But the set should be a respectable substitute quality wise.