by Allan Fish
(France 1970 82m) DVD2
Aka. Pollux et le Chat Bleu
Blue is beautiful, blue is best…
p L.Danot, L.Auclin d/w Serge Danot English version Eric Thompson ph C.Giresse m Joss Basselli ly Eric Thompson
VOICES BY:- Eric Thompson, Fenella Fielding (the Blue Voice),
Memory lane is calling again, in a distinctly blue voice. Back to an age when children’s programmes were worth remembering, the age of Brian Cant voicing Trumpton, of Michael Hordern voicing Paddington, or Ray Brooks doing Mr Benn and Arthur Lowe the Mr Men. Towering above all, however, may I salute one Eric Thompson, Emma’s dad. He gave a French animated film, just as he did the TV series that preceded it, The Magic Roundabout, as much magic as one man ever gave to a kids show. It was taken from a film by Serge Danot, and though I have never seen the French original, let us simply say that, if it bettered Eric Thompson’s, it must have been something else. Without him, the adventures in the Magic Garden of Florence, Dougal, Zebedee, Brian, Ermintrude, Dylan and co, would probably have been lifeless.
It begins with Dougal recounting a dream he had about a blue voice leading to the old deserted treacle factory on the hill, and how he sets out to tell Zebedee about it. On Zebedee’s arrival to tell the others they find a commotion as they are more interested in the blue cat, Buxton, which has just arrived in the Magic Garden. Dougal smells a rat, but none of the others believe him. When Buxton is granted the title of the king, he imprisons Florence and co, but Dougal evades capture and sets out on a rescue mission.
Needless to say the old fashioned animation does seem rather quaint, but can there be a more quotable animated film than this? Fenella Fielding (her of the accent to make Joan Greenwood sound like Ena Sharples) voices the disenchanted blue voice, but the rest of the voices, likes the lyrics, and indeed the script, are Eric Thompson’s. Watch Dougal welcome Buxton (“there’s a train at three. Goodbye.”), Dougal picking flowers for Florence while humming Mozart arias, Dougal doing his Churchillian speech advising them to remember they’re British and “man the barricades, we must even dog the barricades.” Throw in Ermintrude taking up painting (and going through a Blue Period, naturally), a scarecrow one-time regimental officer who bemoans Dougal’s appearance (“funny chap, needs a good haircut”), and of course Buxton, a Yorkshire-accented moggy who sounds like a demonic Alan Titchmarsh and lands on the moon looking very disinterested muttering “what a place, worse than Barnsley!” There’s a train so slow Dougal jokes that they’ll arrive at Watford Junction in 4 days, while Brian the snail races past it and the train is left to bemoan that it’ll “never be able to show my face in Crewe again.”
On top of the choice script there are barely hidden subtexts of the plot. Take a wannabe despot who wants to turn the world one colour – blue, how very Tory – and wants to eradicate all other colours (so adios to heliotrope). There’s race and politics for a start, and then there’s the hint of forbidden substances, from whatever spaced-out rabbit Dylan happens to be smoking to turn him into Rip Van Rabbit to whatever Zebedee is on, and of course the sugar; oh, the sugar. Poor Dougal has to go through the ultimate torture when, in disguise as a blue dog to fool Buxton, he is tossed into a cell including all variations of sugar, and one hardly needs to be a narcotics expert to draw parallels. All the characters are as loveable as they ever were, but it’s Dougal’s show, and never was that furry draught-excluder on speed more hilarious. Whether he’s quoting Hamlet or Julius Caesar, avoiding the temptations of sugar or merely trying to get back from the moon before the biggest animated catfight takes place since Duck Dodgers took on Marvin the Martian, he’s just fab. How can you not love Dougal, dyed blue, doing a tango with a villainous cat, breaking into a duet (I haven’t even mentioned Thompson’s simple but haunting song lyrics) about how evil they are declaring “we may be mad, we may be bad, but most of all we’re evil.”
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There’s an interesting point here you’re raising about how a local dub can affect the meaning and reception of an animated film when it’s exported beyond the borders of its native language. I tend to watch most of my anime in English, mainly so I won’t have to be distracted with subtitles in the midst of all that visual density (especially with guys like Anno– Gunbuster and Nadia are fine enough in their original Japanese, but Evangelion and especially His and Her Circumstances are positively dizzying experiences without the dub). Most of the time, the difference between the translations in each version is absolutely minimal, befitting localizers who take care in being as faithful to the original audio as possible, making sure their scripts match the spirit and lip-flaps as much as possible (Asuka’s oft-quoted cry of “Anta baka?!?” becomes “Are you stupid?!?” in English not so much because it’s a close translation– though it is– but because it matches the number of syllables).
This is where you can actually see the prestige that anime recieves in America nowadays, relatively speaking, as translators make sure they don’t bastardize the film or series they’re creating an English version for. This hasn’t always been the case, of course, with some anime in years past being given loose translations (Space Battleship Yamato being simplified into Star Blazers) or wholesale rewrites that even attempt to stitch completely different cartoons together into new stories (Voltron and Robotech are largely inventions of American editing rooms). Even today, you’ll see people occasionally relaxing on the restrictions of their translations in order to match the spirit in ways that invent material that wasn’t in the original work (inserting self-aware anti-semitic jokes into the dub of the WWII historical parody Hetalia, for example). For the most part, though, local producers know that the fans want a faithful translation, and will even resort to pirating fansubs or fandubs if they can’t get what they want legally.
Other animated works from abroad, though, don’t always fare as well, or at least they haven’t in the past (as really, little in the way of foreign animation tends to reach American shores unless it’s from Japan). Rene Laloux’s last film, Gandahar, was utterly wrecked by a translation-effort headed by Harvey Weinstein and Isaac Asimov and turned into The Light Years, which is the only state it’s had an official release here in the States (I’m eyeing a Masters of Cinema DVD of the original French version currently). It’s especially odd looking at Dougal, as that franchise itself found itself updated in a recent CGI film that was released both in the UK and the US, with the American version given a largely new cast and script to attract an audience that had never heard of the series before (it didn’t work). Perhaps they figured the same approach that you’re alluding to in the UK localization of the original series/film could work in America, but who knows. In the end, probably the best way is to just rely on subtitles as a default practice, but obviously there are things to be gained by the more immediate experience of a good dub.
Interesting point, Jaime, but with the Magic Roundabout, it wasn’t a question of a just a good translation, or local dub. Legend has it that Thompson just watched it with the sound off, and said whatever came into his head. Luckily he was an incredibly funny and erudite man, with a surreal sense of humour you can trace back to Edward Lear and the kind of post-war mood which produced the Goons. Now I can’t help watching it and seeing his characters – as voiced – as being rooted in Oscar Wilde, BBC post war radio comedy and the Boulting Brothers – there’s more than a touch of Margaret Rutherford in Ermentrude, and Dougal is Tony Hancock, down to his manic moods and sense of being a misunderstood genius. Spaced out Dylan provides a contemporoary touch but he works because the others are completely straight. At the time I took it completely for granted, now I can’t help seeing it as a kind of miracle, and unrepeatable.
I love that idea of Dougal as Tony Hancock – this had never struck me, but yes.
Isn’t the backstory that the BBC figured they could pay less by only purchasing the footage, and not the scripts, which they’d have to translate from French? It might be interesting, but it’s as far from the original writer/director’s intentions could be, and something I find fairly troubling.
Oh, and Jaime? What?
What? What?
Must agree that Eric Thompson was brilliant – when they tried remaking The Magic Roundabout with another narrator some years back, I watched it with one of my kids, but the magic had gone. Anyway, I remember seeing and loving this film at the cinema with my family when it had its UK release in 1972 – I would have been 11. Don’t think I’ve seen it since, but, despite my often bad memory, I can still remember the tune of the main song and quite a few scenes… and I’m intrigued by what you say here about the subtext in painting the world blue. I know my brother has this on DVD so I will have to borrow it soon and take a trip down memory lane.
@Bob, According to a Magic Roundabout fansite, the ‘retelling’ was down to Thompson, who hated the original story concepts and thought they were puerile. Thompson did get flak for using ‘long words’. And this is what the site says he did: ‘He once replied to a viewer who complained that he used too many long words by writing them a letter using all of the longest words that he could find in the dictionary, and is said to have sent a ‘strong’ letter to a mother who had written to express her concern over the fact that her son had started to refer to his sister as a ‘mollusc’.
And I say, good for Eric Thompson.
It’s still an approach that I think is rather distasteful, all things considered, and something that people only get away with in animation because they take for granted the fact that all the dialogue is dubbed. If it’s a faithful translation, that’s fine, but whenever people think they can “improve” upon somebody else’s original, it just bothers me terribly. It’s the equivalent of voice-over graffiti.
I’m reminded of the studio heads who thought they were “improving” Metropolis by cutting them to shreds and adding new intertitles that invented a new story out of thin air because they figured local audiences would be too bored by the original, or that dumbass who released a version of the film with 80’s music (which has sadly become surprisingly popular way to show it to film students in school).
Also, has anyone else seen the mashup of the Blue Cat with the soundtrack of The Wicker Man? Florence to the tune of Britt Ekland? One of the most disturbing things I’ve seen for a long time.
I just have. I might need therapy.
Please, someone enter this as a proper video link…