Tonight’s plan was well executed. In the lead up to dinner time, I opted to start ripping my Blu-ray of My Neighbor Totoro, and then go about making some salmon, sprouts, and corn in the oven. An upside of the recent experiments with Apple Video Toolbox and the discovery that VLC for iOS-based things is the real pickle, the transcodes were largely done before the food was even in the oven.
This time, I opted for a subtle shift in storing such films. Typically, I’ve opted to keep both the English and Japanese tracks, so that I can easily switch from subtitled to dubbed when desired. Sometimes, it’s convenient, but mostly I want the defaults to be Japanese audio with English captions. Yet, this time, I tried something new. Rather than a single combined file: I opted for two separate versions. One that’s marked as subtitles, carrying only the Japanese audio and its associated English subtitles, and another that’s marked dub, carrying only the English audio and its own subtitles. That’s a twist that Totoro lends itself well to, since the Blu-ray has “angle 1” and “angle 2” tracks; each uses different segment mappings for the opening and closing credits. A fairly natural split for my little experiment.
It was also good to relax and enjoy the movie. Been quite a while since I’ve had the pleasure. My Neighbor Totoro, I think is a great film, but it’s an example of what I’d call a movie without a significant plot. Slice of Life is the only terse description that I can think of, and that is something you really don’t see a lot in western cinema. Like really, if someone tried to make a story like Totoro in Hollywood, I imagine you’d probably get laughed out of the room or forced to turn it into some kind of grand spectacle before any studio would touch the project.
Yet, I rather think we should have more stories like it. There is no real antagonist, and fairly little danger or adventure in the classical sense. Rather it’s full of quite ordinary things, a Cat Bus aside. Somehow, it manages to be such a fun and playful story. Despite its quite humble story. Because, who wouldn’t want a Totoro in the neighborhood? 😆