Before getting into the dub itself, I think it's appropriate to talk a bit about the people responsible for it.
4KidsEntertainment were the people responsible for dubbing and distributing Pokemon overseas at the time this movie came out. Their english dub of the TV series was also the basis for a lot of other dubs in different languages, so they effectively shaped the perception of Pokemon in several countries (growing up in Brazil, I know this was the case for us at least). I think most anime fans are more than aware of who they are, but if you aren't one or just don't know for whatever reason here's a brief overview:
4kids was originally founded as Leisure Concepts Inc. in 1970, an independent licensing agency based in New York . They were pretty succesful in the 70's and late 80's, licensing actual people like Farrah Fawcett and acquiring productive deals with franchises like Star Wars and Nintendo games.
It wasn't until the late 90's and early 20's that they would become well-known for their dubs of popular anime. They developed a sour reputation with anime fans as it became known that 4kids heavily edited most of their shows. The company filed for bankruptcy in 2011, and most of their licensing rights to various series had been bought out by other companies at that point. In late 2012 it exited bankruptcy and was renamed 4Licensing Corporation. As it stands, fans who watch dubs will most likely never have to put up with them dubbing series again.
The main issue with 4Kids Entertainment was that their practices when it came to dubbing were misguided from the getgo from an artistic standpoint, and as much as I'd like to go on about that, let's just say that much of what they did ended up going way beyond simple localization and just flat out making the shows MUCH worse and completely violating the spirit of the originals.
I honestly don't hold much ill-will towards 4Kids at this point, nor towards its voice-actors or the composers they hired to produce new music. While obviously I don't really like what they did to most of their shows, I recognize that they were doing what they thought was best for their bottom line and did make efforts to put out uncut subtitled versions for hardcore fans, even though these releases were less profitable. They were just people doing their jobs, and there was a history of treating anime this way that came long before them.
Their actual in-house content like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, aren't actually that bad. Their dubs, even bad as they were, introduced generations of children to various series and generated an interest in them in the west. It may be that without them people wouldn't have been so invested in these shows to the point where they even looked at the originals in the first place. The dubs do have a certain So Bad, It's Good charm, which led to the creation of the original Abridged Series, which 4Kids themselves were reportedly fans of.
...but that doesn't mean that their dubs were good. One Piece and Tokyo Mew Mew were absolutely destroyed. Some of their changes to Yu-Gi-Oh! weren't entirely bad, but a lot of them were. I haven't seen their dub of Shaman King but am told it was actually one of their better jobs, só props to them if that's the case. Pokemon, to my knowledge, actually got off fairly lightly too. There were changes to characterization and a few episodes, but a lot of fans agree that they don't make the show much worse or less enjoyable, and from what I've seen I'd agree.
...this movie is another story entirely, though.
For one thing, the entire focal point of this movie, the emotional hook that really made it something besides a kids' film about animals beating each other up, was entirely removed. According to an essay by Masakazu Kubo, Warner Bros didn't like the “moral ambiguity” present in the film.
“The people at Warner also gave us some hassle over the script. According to them, the Japanese original does not distinguish clearly enough between the good guys and the bad. Such a movie would not be successful in a multiethnic country like the United States, they insisted, because the viewers would not know who to identify with and who to cheer on. In other words, the heroes and villains needed to be identified clearly. They accomplished this by revising the various characters' lines.”
I want to point out that this movie premiered in July 1998 in Japan. Batman: The Animated Series, which was made by *Warner Bros Animation*, was already 5 years old, as was its feature film, Maskof The Phantasm. That movie, and the series as a whole, is far more adult than something like Pokemon and also had its share of sympathetic, complex villains...and it was allowed to be as it was in theaters. Then again, it was basically the opposite of the Pokemon movie in that it was critically acclaimed but a box office flop, so maybe Warner was actually right, as unfortunate as that is.
Now, in this case, it seems like this pressure from Warner Bros played a big part in the changes in the movie, so it may be that 4Kids just didn't have as much say as they would have liked, and wouldn't have had to change the movie as much as they did had they not intruded. However, this wouldn't have been the first time that 4Kids did things like these entirely of their own accord, and it's pointless to really try and guess without knowing more.
So what did this amount to?
The entire segment with the clones and Dr. Fuji's motivation for the project was cut entirely from the dub. Dr. Fuji isn't even named. Mewtwo was changed from a complex, sympathetic character to a much more generic and uninteresting saturday morning cartoon villain. Mew was changed from being the opposite of Mewtwo (i.e believing that clones are inferior to non-clones and wanting to battle him to prove their superiority) to just a goody two-shoes. (We DID eventually get this segment, but it was years later on the DVD release for the made for TV sequel to this movie. It's honestly too little too late, especially considering that Mewtwo's characterization was still ruined in the film anyway. )
4kids also felt it necessary to shoehorn a “fighting is wrong” aesop in. I say “shoehorn” because that's exactly what it is: the original movie at no point implied it, it was completely made up and forced into the movie for no reason whatsoever. I'm more than aware of the reasoning that “well, pokemon battling is mostly just a competitive sport, they usually don't fight to the death or anything”. I don't really buy that though: Pokemon get hurt or in danger through pokemon battles all the time. Charizard almost froze to death in the Orange Islands arc, for just one example. Even if that argument held water, it doesn't matter to me, because the Aesop doesn't belong to the movie and putting it in there was not necessary. The original message was already great by itself, and trying to add an entirely new one out of thin air really ruined the effectiveness of both.
And of course, the music was heavily changed from the original, as 4kids tends to do to everything ever. I don't really get WHY this was done; how exactly do you know that children are going to react better to bad pop music than orchestras? A good orchestral song might be a lot better received, it all depends on the particular child. It just diminishes the movie and was just another decision that made it much harder to take it seriously. To be fair, I do kind of like “Brother My Brother”, but it feels horrendously out of place and was one of the things used to force the “anti-fighting” message into the film, and we've already gone over how dumb THAT was.
I recognize that the dub does have a certain Narm Charm, but I don't think it was worth butchering what was a surprisingly good film for it. And I think what pisses me off more isn't necessarily even the changes themselves, but the REASONS why.
I don't know if this is just me, but it seems like a lot of childrens' programming in the west (in the USA in particular) doesn't give children a lot of respect. Anything that's too "adult" or "mature" (even if all that means is not underestimating children) is taboo. Western animation fans are quick to point out shows like the aforementioned Batman: The Animated Series, Gargoyles, Young Justice, Beast Wars, etc as western shows with mature writing, but they seem to be pretty hard to come by and the exceptions that prove the rule. I think this is actually a big reason why Anime took off the way it did: if nothing else, there's no shortage of shows with film-like drama that appeals to both young people (without talking down to them) AND adults. Fullmetal Alchemist is technically a kids' show (being a shounen) but it treats the audience like adults.
And Mewtwo Strikes Back, while not being as good as something like FMA, does have content that can actually appeal to and entertain people other than children. It brought a level of sophistication that the franchise is usually sorely lacking in, and it's just so unfortunate that most western fans were deprived of being able to experience it for so long.
It's funny because there's a quote attributed to the anime's head writer Takeshi Shudo that states the following:
"“The question of raison d'etre is out of place! Don't put on airs!” If you say this so, I will be at my wits' end. Perhaps this anime is not only for children but also for their guardians: Where is this? Who am I? If you answer, "This is a movie theater where I seldom come. I am a parent who has a child. —Ah, child rearing is an expensive, tiring job," I'll be slightly embarrassed by your answer."
I haven't been able to find the original source for this, but I honestly wouldn't doubt it and it seems consistent with what else I've seen of his opinions and information he provided about the anime as a whole on his blog. The fact that the film was scored so low on IMDB for so long is proof of that. The dub turned it into forgettable children's shlock with little value outside of nostalgia.
Of course, it also does bear mentioning that the score is probably low for other reasons completely unrelated to its dubbing, such as the fact that the movie isn't very approachable to someone not familiar with Pokemon previously. That's something that I neglected to mention in my initial review, but it is important and definitely something i'll be taking into consideration with the reviews of the other movies. Join me next time as we watch birds blowing the shit out of everything.
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