Shenmue The Movie Dub Differences

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Shenmue The Movie Dub Differences

Postby BlueMue » Fri May 26, 2017 2:19 pm

The production quality of Shenmue The Movie is very debatable as it omits a lot of really important scenes and changes music timing quite a bit. But it undeniably has much higher quality voices than the game.
Because of that it's easy to assume that the movie has been redubbed since the whole audio mix has been redone from scratch anyway. That is not true however, as they we're able to use the uncompressed recordings... for the most part. And here things are getting interesting.

You see, the video footage for the movie has been captured from the Japanese version of the game. Since the movie was designed to play with the English dub this was a somewhat stupid decission because they had to work with the Japanese lip syncing of the game. This forced them to redo a few lines here and there in order to match the spoken words with the lip animation on screen. Sometimes they just used bits from a different scene, repeated or shuffled things around a bit but every now and then they seem to have made some new recordings just for the movie.

I've put all the changes in one video, comparing the game and the DVD back to back. In order to do this I had to watch the whole thing and compare it to the game bit by bit. This obviously took hours and so did the scene gathering and editing. This was a lot more work than necessary, really... Since it was taking long enough already I also didn't include the minor grunts during fights or QTEs, as well as instances where some lines were shuffled around or dialogue cut short. After all those don't add anything, let alone something new.

phpBB [video]


I'd love to make a comparison like this with the Japanese version. As far as I know the Japanese dub has only been added for the DVD release and it might actually be a full redub. I know for a fact that Lan Di actually threatens Iwao to kill (korose) Ryo when he's holding him up. But I don't think I know Japanese nearly enough to notice all the fine nuances in the wording that the DVDs voices might have to make a proper comparison.

BlueMue has received 7 thanks from: AM2, Amir, Bambi, Mr357, Niowiad, sand4fish, Switch
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Re: Shenmue The Movie Dub Differences

Postby Niowiad » Fri May 26, 2017 4:14 pm

It's ridiculous how many things I keep learning about the saga. :-s
I think I played the two games 3-4 times over the last 15 years and I only watched The Movie once.
Didn't really noticed anything that one time, but really, The Movie is really several steps ahead in the audio compartment and I had no idea about it.
Awesome job. :-o
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Re: Shenmue The Movie Dub Differences

Postby Switch » Fri May 26, 2017 9:08 pm

Wow, a very extensive comparison. Some of the changes are so minor it hardly seems as if it would have been worth the trouble making them!

BlueMue wrote:As far as I know the Japanese dub has only been added for the DVD release and it might actually be a full redub.

Although I believe the movie was screened in English only (with Japanese subtitles), it was released to VHS in two versions: one in English w/ Japanese subtitles, and this one which is marked as having Japanese voices:
Image

BlueMue wrote:I'd love to make a comparison like this with the Japanese version.

Feel free to give me a shout if you want to work on a Japanese comparison. Taking a look at the first few scenes might give an idea of the extent of the changes on the Japanese side.

P.S. Niowiad, nice choice of avatar!
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Re: Shenmue The Movie Dub Differences

Postby sand4fish » Sun May 28, 2017 5:45 pm

I remember the Japanese version being good enough to be screened on theaters in Japan at the time. So I would not be surprisd if the quality of the Japanese version is way above the DVD released on the west.
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Re: Shenmue The Movie Dub Differences

Postby BlueMue » Sun May 28, 2017 6:28 pm

I've read that the western DVD for the Xbox version was upgraded slightly from the Japanese release, to make the lip syncing a little better. I have no idea where this came from but I compared the mentioned DVD with the original Japanese DVD and it's the same thing, has all the changes shown in the video.

Maybe the VHS has older footage? I have the one on the left in the picture but no VCR ready to watch it again.
Wasn't the VHS only released as a rental and only after it got sorted out it went on sale?

Anyway, I made a quick comparison of the intro between game and movie in Japanese and there are some more differences than the mentioned death threat by Lan Di. But only a little bit when Ryo is picking up Ine-san.
So it's not a complete redub either and seems to use the same recordings as the game for the most part, just like the English version
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