Monsters University – watched and worn
Yesterday I watched Monsters University and it was fairly good. Not as good as the hype I had heard, but enjoyable. In the middle of the movie, my sister showed up at the house with my birthday present(it was January 6, she wasn’t able to get out here until the 9th). We had a good laugh when I opened up this shirt that she swears she didn’t just buy on the way here…
What a crazy coincidence.
By the way, did anybody else notice that while everybody was singing the school’s anthem, Mike Wazowski was the only one not with his hand over his heart?
My guess is that if Mike had his hand over his heart, it would look like his hand is on his crotch. Good choice putting them behind his back, Disney.
As is typical when I watch a Disney movie, I then watched it in Spanish. Pixar puts some extra work into their foreign versions. They actually change the written words within the scenes so that it actually looks like it was originally like that. Some examples from this movie:
I had to take photos since I have no way of taking screenshots from Blu-ray discs yet, so I apologize for the image quality. You can click on an image for a larger view.
Sometimes when something simply won’t work in other languages, they replace the words with images. In the case of Randall’s cupcakes, the number of cakes would have to change for each language, so they went this route which I think works just as well:
The No Trespassing sign was less creative but just as seamless…
Since grading scales vary by country, Mike’s A+ was replaced with a smiley face and Sulley’s C- grade was replaced by…
The voice they chose for Mike in the Spanish version was annoying, quite frankly, like some weird bird or the Steve Urkel parody they had on Pinky and the Brain(Waka-waka do!). Something along the lines of Stitch from Lilo & Stitch, but higher-pitched and actually annoying(I liked Stitch’s voice, this was amped-up). Therefore, I switched to the French version during chapter 13. Here’s the side of the building in French, which translates back to English as “Do not be afraid to scare”, according to Google Translate:
The classifieds section in the French version(and likely the Spanish version) only had the big parts translated, the rest stayed in English. I guess they didn’t feel like wasting their translator’s time.
Meanwhile, at least in the Spanish version, Mike’s calendar stayed in English. This was very surprising since months are easy to translate and the calendar was the focus of several shots. There really isn’t any point in sharing that photo, so instead I’ll just end this blog entry with the following embarassing photo:
Check out my other Pixar-translation-related entries:
Wreck-It Ralph
Tangled
Toy Story 3
