#### [Discord](https://discord.gg/PMrccmpYTu) #### Other films in the Ghibli project: * [Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind](/view/1425023) * [Laputa](/view/1502230) * [Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro](/view/1700966) ___ ### My Neighbor Totoro ### Video Out of all the different releases I compared, the Blu-ray from the 2014 “Hayao Miyazaki Collection” JP box set had the best picture quality. You could say it’s virtually indistinguishable from the original 2012 JP BD, but its somewhat higher bitrate (~38 Mbps compared to the original’s ~34 Mbps) makes it technically just a tad better. And that's it really as for which BD is best. However, I thought I'd mention the other candidates here too. When it comes to the UK and possibly AU BD, which might be a clone of the UK BD, there are problems not present on other releases. On top of the poorer PQ caused by the likely worse encoding settings and the clearly lower bitrate @ ~25 Mbps, they also seem to have an incorrect brightness when compared to every single other home release. (If anyone can confirm my clone suspicions, do let me know.) The UK/AU release is also yet another testament to the common fact that many non-Japanese releases of anime are inferior to their Japanese counterparts (usual exceptions to this rule being Dynit's and Discotek's output). Howbeit it's not all doom and gloom here with the non-JP editions: the Disney and Gkids US BDs look much nicer, as they have the correct brightness and are both rocking healthier bitrates @ ~34 Mbps. The Gkids BD particularly comes very close to the 2014 JP BD, but the JP BD remained the consensus choice after I consulted people more knowledgeable than myself about the two. If curious, check out the comparisons below to see all the differences for yourself. I doubt you could improve the PQ of this movie much, if at all, with an encode unless you tried something akin to what Scoped did recently for his Akira upload. Though all these older Ghibli films tend to look decent (at least on their Japanese releases), so they might not be as worth the effort of doing encodes of as various other classic anime films might be. I personally don't think Totoro is in any need of a fan restoration seeing as the JP BD video is already of good quality, but I guess there are always things with any BD for dedicated people to try and improve. As for the existing encodes, I'd only recommend going with them if you don't have the space for the remux here. I would, however, still add on to nedragrevev's note below about Totoro being an iconic film and it deserving good subtitles that it similarly deserves to be seen in as good a quality as possible. To that end, I hope the relatively compact 24 Gb file size of this upload resulting from Totoro's runtime being on the shorter side at only 86 minutes and the included audio tracks taking up less than 1 Gb altogether won't be too high for most people. ### Audio After doing the v2 of Nausicaä and learning the hard way to pay more attention to the actual real-world quality of the audio tracks, I took it upon myself to do audio comparisons of most of Totoro's major home video releases for this upload. I like to believe it's at least good to be sure of these things, even if the time it took to acquire the BDs for this one might've been better spent elsewhere. After comparing the 1996 JP LaserDisc, 2006 Disney R1 DVD, 2012 JP BD, 2012 UK BD, 2013 Disney US BD, 2014 JP BD, and the 2017 Gkids US BD, I can safely say most of them have very similar audio. Technically, the UK BD was the best by virtue of having the tracks in PCM, that is, in an uncompressed format. PCM is kind of the "least compressed" a track can be, though that doesn't mean it sounds any better than the lossless compression formats used on the other BDs, as they are still, obviously, lossless. And ultimately, since the actual audio content is uniformly so similar, it doesn't matter that much which tracks I'm using here because I'm still converting them to FLAC to save that extra teeny-tiny bit of space. When it comes to saving space though, the UK BD tracks were actually the best choice because they’re 16-bit instead of 24-bit, meaning they’re neatly smaller in size than what's on all the other BDs. This upload should be quite exhaustive regarding the number of releases compared, with perhaps only the 2001 JP R2 DVD being a notable one I haven't yet gotten to see the audio of. And if I had to guess, I'd say having those DVD tracks be absent from the comparisons isn't most likely a big loss. I doubt they'd fare much better than the BD audio. Even the LD, which predates the JP DVD, doesn't have preferable audio quality in this case. Having said that, I’m still interested in checking out everything I possibly can and will gladly examine the audio on the DVD in question if anyone happens to own it and is willing to share. Like I already mentioned, all the BDs had more or less the same audio, yet there was one unusual problem I came across: the Gkids BD had the JP 2.0 track in dual-mono instead of stereo like it should be. Is it just my copy, or is this a major oversight on Gkids’ part? If you own the Gkids BD, let me know if the JP track on it is in stereo or mono. Can you actually hear stereo separation, or does everything sound like it's coming from the so-called "phantom center" between the speakers? Big thanks again to [ZeroCool](/user/PeePeePooPoo69), who has been ripping his Ghibli LaserDiscs and sharing the audio on them. I've synced to this remux the 1989 Streamline English dub from his excellent rip of the Totoro LD from the 1996 ["Ghibli Ga Ippai"](https://www.lddb.com/laserdisc/00161) LD set, which was also superior to the 2002 Fox DVD version of the track by having [markedly less noise reduction.](https://slow.pics/c/gn1JMMAH) Another difficult one where ZeroCool really came in clutch was the Japanese audio on the LDs. The Japanese audio LD track was at first going to be another one missing from the comparisons, but I was able to include it thanks to ZeroCool sharing it with me in addition to the Streamline dub. It didn't end up being better than the UK BD audio, but having confirmation of that fact is valuable. ### Subtitles #### NOTE: The following is an abridged version of [nedragrevev's](https://github.com/nedragrevev/custom-subs#readme) notes to fit nyaa's character limit. Read the full notes [here](https://pastebin.com/Cg1qBadr). * #### Translation: The official translation simplified and skipped a lot of dialogue. Every single line has been retranslated in a natural way from the Japanese. I'm very particular about getting things right these days, and being such an iconic film, I tried to translate this as carefully as possible, including the signs as noted below. Referenced Disney's dub at times, which was a surprisingly good translation of the Japanese. Thanks to hydes for offering some pointers about translation choices. I don't like translation notes unless absolutely necessary. I created five of them, and considered including a hardcore version with all showing, but decided not to. Three of these TL notes concerned Mei purposely mispronouncing some words at times. It's interesting but not necessary to enjoy the film. For example, when Mei is explaining to Satsuki that she met "Totoro", Satsuki thinks she meant a troll, which is pronounced "tororu" in Japanese (totoro <--> tororu). There was a reference to Tadpole, which has been translated as pole-tads, which works fine, but the other word she mispronounces is "corn". I considered translating as "corb" but you'd probably be scratching your head and thinking I misspelled it, so I left this out altogether. 4 Versions (Ignore any that don't appeal to you): 1. Signs and Songs Only. Songs k-timed to Disney's English versions of them. 2. Honorifics. Only one TL note included as mentioned above. 3. No honorifics. No TL notes. I recommend defaulting to this one. 4. No honorifics, localized. As with 3, but also removes a Jizo reference and has the western naming order in dialogue and signs. Almost no point with this one, but it gives you the choice as to what you prefer. * #### Timing: Completely and carefully retimed as I usually do. * #### Typesetting: Plenty of new stuff translated and typeset, some of which is basically pointless but it blended in fine so I left it in. Cat Bus Destination Signs: These are left untranslated as place names as they should be. Translating stuff like this, is like translating Shinjuku to the literal meaning of "New Lodging/Inn", which makes no sense. To double check, I asked a native speaker who confirmed these are always read as place names, not descriptors like "Forest" or "Cemetery" as translated in the official stuff (guessing it was to make it kid-friendly). The consensus on the web agrees with this. I did translate Taisha to "Grand Shrine" though as this seemed more logical to do so. * #### Songs: I made some translation adjustments. The Japanese had the final say but after listening to the English version, I liked some of the lines and copied them over (to some extent) if it actually reflected the Japanese lyrics. OP: Credit to [KaraEffect0r](https://github.com/KaraEffect0r) for the k-effect, which I only modified slightly. ED: Translating this nicely was difficult, so it might seem a bit disjointed between some lines. Another one where the k-effect was pretty standard, but worked well with just a few modifications. #### If you find mistakes, please post on my Github issues page and I will fix it as soon as I get to it. ### Comparisons |Audio| | -| |[Japanese](https://slow.pics/c/KouFJwg5)| |[English](https://slow.pics/c/4gyMsRSt)| |[DR Meter data](https://pastebin.com/raw/CpB9n2Lf)| |Video| | -| |[BD comparisons](https://slow.pics/c/6JWnlfit)| |[2014 JP BD vs encodes](https://slow.pics/c/Lmhvj2Wf)|  [Specifics in text form](https://pastebin.com/6eiWzpcv) [MediaInfo](https://pastebin.com/raw/8giK5sPS)