Dueling Dubs: The film was originally issued in North American theaters and on DVD in 2003 by DreamWorks' GoFish Pictures subtitled-only, but Manga Entertainment produced a dub for the UK market in 2005 with London-based Village Productions. The dub featured a mostly British cast (a rarity in anime dubs), and featured Regina Reagan voicing Chiyoko at all three age versions of the character. The film was reissued in North American theaters in 2019 by Eleven Arts, featuring a brand new dub produced by VSI Los Angeles. This dub mirrored the Japanese version by having three actresses voice Chiyoko at different age points (Abby Trott, Erin Yvette, and Cindy Robinson respectively).
Keep Circulating the Tapes: After the original GoFish DVD release went out-of-print, the film was not re-issued in North America for several years until Paramount, inheritors of portions of the DreamWorks library, threw it up on their YouTube page for a period in 2016, with the film currently being up on Tubi TV. It would eventually be fully rescued when Eleven Arts and Shout Factory released a brand new DVD/Blu-Ray for it in November 2019.
No Dub for You: The North American GoFish DVD was sub-only. Manga UK made a dub for Region 2.
Averted with Eleven Arts' release of the film, which has a brand new dub by VSI Los Angeles produced for the DVD/Blu-Ray release.
General Trivia
This was the last, non-IP major-release animated feature film using traditional cel animation. The technique had already faded from exclusive use in the industry worldwide following the gigantic near-miss that was AKIRA's domestic Box Office Bomb in 1988 (which would've bankrupted the entire Japanese animation industry had it not been for its immense overseas success), with later films incorporating CGI as a cost-cutting measure, and many bigger western studios like Disney switched over to digital ink and paint as early as 1990. Despite this, cel animation was still the primary medium of choice in Japan throughout the 1990's due to the economic stagnation of the decade (following the bursting of Japan's late 80's asset bubble in 1992) making more extensive use of computer animation prohibitively expensive. However, computer animation software started to become more accessible to Japanese studios in the late 90's, and it would quickly come to supplant traditional cels over the course of the following few years. Following Millennium Actress, no other major animated films would be primarily traditionally animated with the exception of franchise tie-ins (most notably the Pokémon films, which kept up the technique all the way until Pokémon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea in 2006).
