Review M17: Diancie and the Cocoon of Destruction

[Fabio92]

Do these shorts ever get dubbed into other languages? Like, is there a Spanish dub of the Eevee short or anything? And if so how were they handled? Do they get DVD releases or were they streamed online like they are in the U.S.?

The Meloetta's Short was dubbed in Italian too, but released only for the event of Pokémon Day (Cinema) and never released in dvd, tv, online etc.
The Eevee's Shorts was dubbed in Italian, Spanish, French and German, but released, like the English version only on Pokémon TV Website.
The same way, probably will be the Klefki short.

 

[Almonds]

That may have been the case for the older ones but the newer ones (BW and XY) seem like they're maybe dubbed after the fact.

The Meloetta short, the Eevee short, and rhe Klefki short were all dubbed and released in theaters along with the movie where I live.

 

[Dogasu]

So this review over on Amazon states that the Region 1 DVD isn't uncut at all and is just the edited-for-TV version as seen on Cartoon Network.

Disappointed. When Cartoon Network aired this movie, I had heard they cut out like 15 minutes, including scenes in the trailer. (Whatever happened to those???) When I got this movie, it was THE EXACT SAME ONE AS THE ONE I RECORDED 4 MONTHS AGO. I want my $10 back.

Can anyone confirm / deny?

 

[Yoshi1001]

The main feature on the DVD is 75 minutes long. I'd have to do a scene-by-scene comparison to find everything that might be there, but one major difference I've noticed is that the DVD version has titles and song vocals for the opening sequence, and the TV version (at least the one on my DVR from a few weeks ago) has no titles and character voices in that part. My guess is that the opening credits information was put into the high-speed credits at the end of the TV version, and they used the character voices to make the film run more continuously (for lack of a better word) for television.

 

[Dogasu]

The main feature on the DVD is 75 minutes long. I'd have to do a scene-by-scene comparison to find everything that might be there, but one major difference I've noticed is that the DVD version has titles and song vocals for the opening sequence, and the TV version (at least the one on my DVR from a few weeks ago) has no titles and character voices in that part.

So it sounds like the Amazon reviewer was mistaken?

I put up screenshots of all the scenes cut from the Cartoon Network airing up on my site. Do you remember seeing any of these on the DVD?

 

[Fabio92]

I saw this movie at Cinema/Theatre yesterday, and was really good ! They projected the Klefki short dubbed in Italian too , I think it could be distributed on DVD with movie , when they will do ...

 

[Yoshi1001]

According to another review, the DVD is the full version. Based on my experience capturing my DVR recording of the First Movie from last year, 90 minutes of network time (both movies were given this much) equals about 65 minutes of actual show, so even adding a few minutes for a full credits sequence, it still seems like the DVD has a bit more than the original broadcast.

 

[ii kanji]

This was a great movie!

The characters of the movie were really, really funny, particularly those Melecie and aaaaalllllllllllll of the villains! I would never have imagined that having so many different villains could work, but I think the fact that they were all quite human (father/daughter... true lovers... and Riot, Marilyn and Nyasu trolololol sorry) helped a lot. My favourite scenes were when we got to see the gang doing normal things and interacting with each other without any of the usual pokemon movie bs plot stuff going on.

Pokemon is at its best when it focuses on the humour and slice-of-life stuff, as proven by the damp squib that was the lame Xerneas/Yveltal/Diancie/Pikachu "battle" at the end. You know, Pikachu's stone-i-fication nearly got me this time (Matsumoto Rica's acting was so real!) except that it only stayed dead for all of 1 second! Xerneas' old woman voice freaked the hell out of me and it was the most atrociously animated thing I've ever seen in a pokemon movie.

Speaking of which, I thought the whole movie was let down to some extent by the animation. It was fluid enough but the characters all seemed off model quite a lot of the time and there was so much bad CGI overuse.

But overall an enjoyable, laugh-out-loud movie for me - the first one I've actually enjoyed since Lucario!

 

[Dr. Buni]

I was going to complain that gendering a genderless Pokémon and calling it princess is really lame and defeats the very purpose of making the Pokémon, well, genderless. But then I realized maybe Diancie itself choose to be a girl, which is entirely possible, so whatever.

Onto the film, the first thing I want to say is that those two 'old' Carbinks (I think that is the name?) are really really annoying. The second thing is, woah DP music during the opening sequence Wikstrom fighting with a Mega Scizor, I hope this mean the E4 will use mega evolutions in the next Kalos game. Also, nice to see the Mega Absol trainer from the Mega Evolution specials again! Her Mega Absol looked absolutely fabulous in the film!

The villains using the starters was a really neat twist, since usually the starters are used during the opening sequences or by random secondary characters. By giving them to the villains, the starter got a lot more focus and importance, which is nice. On the subject of starters, Delphox looked glorious in the film! I love how feral it acts, contrasting with its somewhat human-like appearance. Chesnaught looked kinda cute, in its own way (too bad it had the old boring Ursaring/Drapion voice) and Greninja looked like the regular anime Greninja. On the subject of villains, they were really great this time. I wasn't expecting them got the development in such a short time.

Side note: The scenes in the shopping were really nice. I like the interactions between Diancie, Serena and Bonnie and I also liked how 'real' the environment felt. It must be truly amazing to live in the Pokémon world Game Freak truly managed to create one of the most awe inspiring worlds in fiction, props to them.

On Diancie, I think it (she, whatever) is hilarious. The naiveness and the lack of knowledge of the world plus the politeness makes its dialogues really amusing.

With all that being said, the film was actually quite boring for the most part. The premise isn't interesting at all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ It only got better when Yveltal woke up and started wreaking havoc. Speaking of which, is it the first actual evil legendary in the series? I don't remember any other, since Mewtwo wasn't evil neither were Darkrai and Giratina. Yveltal's purpose is to destroy stuff and cause death, so assuming that death and destruction are bad things, it is evil. Although if you consider that Yveltal exists for that reason, it is not like it chooses to bad stuff, so Idk.

But yeah, tl;dr: Boring film, with some cool stuff here and there.

 

[charizardmaster125]

Just seen this Movie on CITV in the UK this morning, for anyone who has missed the movie, it will be repeated at 1:30 pm this coming Monday, starting with the previously internet only prologue. This will tie in to the première of Season 18 which will air later the same day at 5:00 pm. Both are also available to watch on the ITV Player for 30 Days.

To clear things up, the version that aired on CITV was the "full" version as opposed to the "Cartoon Network Version" that made substantial time cuts. This also means that Pokémon Theme XY does not have any background noise apart from the odd explosion at the end. I do need to point out though that the end credits have been blatantly speed up with only about half (or less) of "Open My Eyes" being heard yet, all of the scenes from the end credits were intact. This marks the first time that CITV have had specially edited end credits for the movies that they have shown so far.

Sadly and not surprisingly however, Ed Goldfarb's re-score of the soundtrack remains with only four tracks salvaged from the original Japanese version. The music that was kept were the three tracks in the "World of Pokémon" segment and "Clemont's Theme" or Route 4 from Pokémon X & Y which relates to Ed's artistic vision of characters having their own theme which is what we also see in the Japanese version of the show.

This is a far cry from Pokémon Movie 3 which was the last Pokémon Movie to be re-composed of Dub Music and literally any form of music silence is eliminated. Since then, 4Kids (for all the stuff they were criticised for) started to retain the original scoring minus the opening theme song and end credits song though Pokémon Movie 6 was a special case because 4Kids went to the trouble of doing a partial dub of the ending song "Make A Wish".

This shows that 4Kids and currently DuArt can keep a full soundtrack intact but varying "artistic visions" and the assumption that their target audience of "Kid's under 10 years old don't care or won't notice" prevent them from making the effort to do so. I think that Pokémon is now the only Anime that comes from Japan to have its original soundtrack to be changed say for the odd movie or special such as Pokémon Origins which was actually dubbed by Viz instead of DuArt.

It's blatantly clear that Tom Wayland is now cashing in on the nostalgia impact that 4Kids left behind and wants to make DuArt "4Kid's 2.0" yet the scripting mainly remains close to the Japanese version which is one of the "saving graces" of the dub today.

Another nitpick is the running speed of the film where it runs slightly faster and at a higher pitch with everyone sounding like the Chipmunks though this will all be down to the method used for transferring and converting the film for use on the PAL and Standard Definition formats as opposed to the NTSC format which has the films "normal speed" which is usually restored for a home media or "on demand" release. That said, previous Pokémon films before Pokémon Movie 16 which aired on CITV are run in "normal speed" so what gives?

It's just a shame that the Music has and probably will always be a long standing issue for the show until there are changes in the way that the show is dubbed and distributed and I can't see companies like Funimation or Viz picking up the rights to dub the show any time soon when they could have easily picked it up when 4Kids lost its contract.

Music aside however, the movie is at best "decent", along with others I also find that this movies only "saving grace" is its voice acting, scripting and animation. Another far cry from Pokémon Movie 9 where there was major complaints about the voice acting instead of the music. The movie is not on my "to buy list" given the issues I have with the dub and that's why I went to the trouble of recording it to burn onto DVD later on as a guilty pleasure and for future reference.

I do wish that CITV had an HD Stream on Freeview but regardless it still looked nice on our Panasonic AS 650, its video processing and colour contrast helped with that.

 

[AtoMan]

I think that Pokémon is now the only Anime that comes from Japan to have its original soundtrack to be changed

Pretty sure Digimon is butchered even more.

 

[Fabio92]

In according of the official website, on the upcoming Italian Bluray and Dvd of this movie, will be the Pikachu Short too (probably in Italian and English languages).

 

[DVDs]

In according of the official website, on the upcoming Italian Bluray and Dvd of this movie, will be the Pikachu Short too (probably in Italian and English languages).

Link please?

 

[Fabio92]

In according of the official website, on the upcoming Italian Bluray and Dvd of this movie, will be the Pikachu Short too (probably in Italian and English languages).

Link please?

Pokémon il film- Diancie e il bozzolo della distruzione - Lucky Red Distribuzione Cinematografica - Scheda film

 

[Ryu Taylor]

This movie has not made my top 10 list of my favorite Pokemon movies, but I will say that it's better than a few of my pals on Fanfiction.net gave it credit for. I never saw the edited CN version, nor the original Japanese version. All I saw was the full dub on DVD. Like I said before, not a top 10 achiever, but I still enjoyed it.

Personally, I'm not that bothered by the music replacement,...

Me neither. I've let this be known before, but I could not care less that the BGM gets replaced. To be blunt, I think it's ridiculous that music replacement has apparently become priority number 1 when it comes to dub quality. I do understand the attachment to the Japanese soundtrack, but what I don't understand is why replacing it is treated as a crime as serious as changing the plot or characters. The first Pokemon movie dub (despite that I regard it as a guilty pleasure) was not an unfaithful dub because its entire soundtrack got overhauled; it was an unfaithful dub because it made Mewtwo from a living experiment with an existential crisis to a living experiment with a vendetta against creatures born organically. Same with the second movie: unfaithful not because of a soundtrack overhaul, but because Ash was made a definite chosen one rather than a great trainer who happened to be in the right place at the right time. So, unless anything like that happened to the Diancie movie (and do feel free to tell me, by the way), I can't call it a bad dub.

 

[Ryu Taylor]

"Bort?" Are you serious?

That is ironically hilarious.

 

[Yoshi1001]

Part of the attachment (though there are obviously exceptions) I'm sure depends on whether you saw the movie with the original score or the dub version-although I listened to the Japanese score before seeing the movie in English, because I never saw it with the Japanese score, I don't feel that attached. To be honest, however, I think the Japanese Diancie score is one of the weaker ones in terms of standing on its own as music. When I was reviewing the album recently to see which tracks would remain on the station long-term, I didn't find much that still held my interest (again, that may be because I only saw the movie with the dub score). Movie 18 seems better, though some of that may be due to reprises of themes from earlier movies.

 

[Ryu Taylor]

Part of the attachment (though there are obviously exceptions) I'm sure depends on whether you saw the movie with the original score or the dub version-although I listened to the Japanese score before seeing the movie in English, because I never saw it with the Japanese score, I don't feel that attached. To be honest, however, I think the Japanese Diancie score is one of the weaker ones in terms of standing on its own as music. When I was reviewing the album recently to see which tracks would remain on the station long-term, I didn't find much that still held my interest (again, that may be because I only saw the movie with the dub score). Movie 18 seems better, though some of that may be due to reprises of themes from earlier movies.

And what of the dub soundtrack?

 

[Yoshi1001]

And what of the dub soundtrack?

I'd have to watch the movie again to give a detailed opinion, but I recall liking it, though it wasn't as memorable as the first few movies.

 

[Ryu Taylor]

And what of the dub soundtrack?

I'd have to watch the movie again to give a detailed opinion, but I recall liking it, though it wasn't as memorable as the first few movies.

I see. Well, I don't think it interferes with the film. It's just that the English dub is a popular punching bag, so people will lambast it for any bullshit reason they can think of.