Ever wonder what goes into translating and adapting a full legnth cartoon? Cindy Davis Hewitt and Donald Hewitt have; the pair wrote the English screenplay adaptations of Japanese anime director Hayao Miyazaki's four most famous films, "Spirited Away"(2001), "Howl's Moving Castle" (2004), "My Neighbor Totoro" (1988) and "Whisper of the Heart" (1995). These two writers got on the phone with the Daily to promote the DVD release of the Academy Award Nominee for Best Animated Feature, "Howl's Moving Castle," which is set for Mar. 7.
Question: Would you tell us a little about how you got started?
Cindy Hewitt: We had a couple scripts that were in a contest that Pixar had read, and that's how [we met] John Lasseter [executive producer of "Howl's Moving Castle"]. We did some work with John on an animated idea. Then he chose us for "Spirited Away" - that was in... 2001 - and then I think we only did Studio Ghibli films.
So we don't know Japanese; we had never seen a Miyazaki film before - it was all new to us! We had never done anything like this before, so we really had to figure out how to take a film that's got Japanese dialogue and all of the lip movements already solidified and figure out how to make an English sentence fit in a character's mouth as it was.
Q: For "Howl's Moving Castle," did you work at all from the novel or just from the original script?
DH: We watched the film first, because we always wanted to make that our major point of reference, and I read the novel.
CH: The novel, in the end, didn't really help illuminate a lot of things for us, because Miyazaki had made a lot of changes on his own.
Q: How long did it take you to actually write the script [for "Castle"]?
DH: Three weeks, and then there's always the process of going over notes. We turn over the draft to Studio Ghibli and they'll send us notes. And then... you know, you have to watch the video, pause it and then sync up the lines with what we had written.
CH: We'd just start off by trying to make a lot of the storylines clearer. It seems like, in Japan, they're much more open to scenes that are more ambiguous, so we'll do a lot in the beginning to clarify a storyline and see if we can get away with it. We just like to rein it in, but try and keep it as close to the original storyline as possible.
Q: Why do you think that is? Is it because U.S. kids are trained to be more spoon-fed?
CH: It seems like it. I also think it's because [Japanese] people are so enamored with Miyazaki that they assume that what he's done is smart, and if they don't get it, they just have to see it again and look into it more. Whereas in the U.S., we're not that familiar with him, and people are more quick to dismiss something... [Miyazaki] likes to hide things. Like, one of the movies that we were working on was called "Porco Rosso" [1992], and this movie, we thought, "Hey, he didn't end the movie." And it turned out...you had to watch the movie to the very end of the credits and then you could see that Porco's plane had landed with his love interest... and so you knew that they had gotten together.
Q: Did you get a chance to work with the voice talent at all in live meetings or anything specific like that?
CH: Yeah, I mean, we're there every day... The way that we do it is we'll watch the movie and count how many times the character's mouth opens and shuts, and then we'll say, "Okay, we have 12 syllables to fill for this sentence." And then when you get the actors, like, Billy Crystal [voicing Calcifer in "Castle"] would speak twice as fast as the character and Jean Simmons [voicing Old Sophie in the same film] would speak about half as fast, so we'd have to take out words for Jean and add words for Billy. So we're always there just to change the line on the spot.
Q: Did you try to convey the same meaning with the English version?
CH: Yeah, that's really important to [the studio]. When we try to change things, they get really upset!
DH: When we first started these projects with John [Lasseter] last year, we had a video conference with him. He gave this big speech about how we have to be true to the intention, and he's had some of his films translated and dubbed into other languages and if somebody [from a foreign audience] can't understand something, then they wouldn't adore it, and he didn't want to do that to anybody. It's always been our goal to be true to the story. If there's something cultural that Americans wouldn't understand, we'll try and put something in to bridge the gap, but we never try to change the story. We always try and stay true to the intent.
CH: Yeah, and that's important, because a lot of our discussions came up about whether something was a cultural difference or not. Like, in "Howl's Moving Castle," there's a lot of subtlety to the romance between various characters. And when we first watched the movie, we didn't realize that almost every woman in the film is in love with Howl [voiced by Christian Bale] - even the old ladies and all - and we didn't pick up on that at all...
Q: How would you compare Japanese animation to our animation?
CH: The thing that we've noticed recently is that a lot of American films are just, like, frenetic. And it seems like they're just trying to throw out as many jokes as possible, and it doesn't matter what it is, just to keep people entertained. And with the Japanese animation, we're mostly familiar with Miyazaki - we haven't watched a lot of the other anime - so he's just much more subtle.
DH: We were told to focus on the story and the beautiful images. It takes time to tell the story, you know; it has meaning to it. And the thing now is that a lot of American films are just faster, faster, faster.
