The Sky Crawlers is a powerful and subtle movie and I heartily recommend it. I wrote a review of the fansub not too long ago, so go read it if you like. Why am I talking about this movie again? Well, it got licensed not long after I wrote that review and has just recently seen its release on DVD here in the states. Naturally, I have procured a loaner copy for this review until I pick up my own. Today I am going to talk about the DVD.

I was rather pleased with all of the text on the cover, even the little bullshit lines like “Every day could be your last. Live life like there’s no tomorrow.” The summary was descriptive enough to get my interest without spoiling too much (I prefer the less-is-more approach for summaries but I understand they need people to buy this thing). The artwork is a little generic looking; kind of reminds me of standard Hollywood stuff. Anyway, enough about such boring things.

The movie is still great. While they didn’t do anything too bad, some of the subtlety has been stripped out by the translation for the dub. Why does “oh no” become “HELP ME!” Little changes like that are constant throughout the whole thing, and I can’t help but notice the movie is still ridiculously powerful even despite that. Oddly enough, though, the voice adaption at some points is more accurate than the subtitled one; a rarity. They didn’t change the important lines, although some of the earlier bits of mystery are gone. Overall I feel like there’s just this tiny little layer of depth that’s missing; it’s just not as immersive. Also, I’ve totally had enough of yellow subtitles: these aren’t the days of magnetic tape and we don’t need special machines to overlay text. Windows comes with a program that can add subtitles and there’s tons of freeware out there for it; it’s not that hard to plug in a different font. If I’m paying thirty bucks a DVD I expect more than just yellow block text.

As for bonus features, well, there isn’t much. Two featurettes, one for the animation research and one for the sound design and animation; good for a bit of insight into both the process and the mind of the artists, but I prefer my magic to stay behind the curtain where I can pretend it’s a bunch of little gnomes. There are also some previews, but nothing new; FFVII, steamboy, dragon wars, etc. On a fun note, the preview for Kaena actually makes me want to see it now; the box blurb on the dvd gave me some serious doubts.

So the DVD isn’t the most cracking thing, but it’s been competently brought stateside, something I consider a small miracle considering how different this movie is. Totally worth picking up, if even just to encourage the companies to bring more stuff like this over. Personally, if a movie isn’t awesome enough to merit purchasing it on its own, then no amount of bonus material will save it. Well, unless the bonus material features naked ladies, and it would have to be a lot of them.

~Whim

PS – I can’t believe Sony of all people are the ones who brought this over.
PS2 – The entire time I was watching it, I couldn’t help but feel like it was a little blurry, but that’s because I was watching on my computer and comparing it with my blu-ray fansub. Funnily enough, the file for my fansub will fit on a single layer DVD, so I can’t help buy wonder what’s going on with all these quality and compression advances and yet blu-ray is still so bloody expensive.