What You See Is Not Always All You Get

When I think of female voice over narration, the following films come to mind: To Kill a Mockingbird, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence and Cinderella. But while studying the latter's voice over narration I stumbled upon a peculiar irregularity on my Cinderella DVD when my player accidentally turned on the German dubbed soundtrack. So instead of writing about narration I found myself exploring what gets lost in translation. 
If you're only interested in the Cinderella bit, then scroll down to the corresponding pictures.

Living in Switzerland I'm used to seeing movies in their original language with subtitles (nowadays the negative influence of dubbed German television is spreading around the multiplexes, but this is another story). Having been exposed to dubs as a child I decidedly disapprove of foreign language dubs for the following reasons:

1. dialogue changes are bigger than with subtitles that basically serve as summaries of the spoken. Dubbed lines are substitutes that have to match the length and vaguely the mouth shapes of the original. While not all languages take the same amount of words to state the same, dubbing often results in odd accents and unintended pauses. The fundamental difference to a translated book or radio play lies in the fact that these are not limited by shotlengths and therefore allow for faithful literary translations.
2. Nevertheless, dubbed dialogue is always out of sync with actors' mouths and facial expressions.
3. The dubbing not only robs an actor of his distinctive voice (sometimes dubbed voices don't even match actors' bodies), but mainly replaces half of his performance. Just think of how essential nuances in the delivery of dialogue are to a performance.
4. What's more, the whole cinematic realism approach is lost when voices aren't incorporated into the sound design. More often than not they are too loud compared to the rest of the soundtrack and almost always it sounds like people close to microphones rather than sounds emanating from the pictured environment.

Overall it can turn a film into a totally different experience. For me personally point 3 and 4 are the most annoying because they keep me from suspending my disbelief. There are some instances of primarily dubbed original versions like the films of Rosselini, Fellini and most other Italian auteurs of the era when dialogue was only written during post production. As an animation counterpart to Fellini Miyazaki (and the anime tradition of post-dubbing) comes to mind. Even though initially I had the same problems with those, I still prefer to see the original versions because in rhythm, tone and sound they represent the directors' original intentions. But these films are not the issue here.

However, I acknowledge a certain necessity for dubbing when it comes to films for people who are not able to read subtitles yet, children mostly. Disney was aware of that right from the beginning and even prepared title cards and other written stuff in his early features in several European languages. With the advent of restored editions, by the time these films got to DVD, most of these carefully translated shots have gone forever. Newer films like Lilo & Stitch are available in different versions on DVD. Regarding point 2 and 4, Illusion-of-life animation lends itself easily to dubbing. Although there's a fundamental difference between building a drawn performance according to an existing voice track and dubbing it after the animation, the strong headaccents and less specific mouth shapes are a lot more easily matched than live-action actors. In fact, Disney has been doing some pretty decent foreign language versions (unfortunately not on all films and some of the original dubs from the heyday of German dubbing studios during the 1940s and 1950s have treacherously been replaced by cleaner but sloppier soundtracks).

What bugs me is the indifference with which dubbed versions are passing for the real thing. Sometimes classics are altered, even mutilated, without any acknowledgement or caveat whatsoever. I have even witnessed a scholar dissecting a classic American film without noticing that his German soundtrack was way off target. Don't get me wrong, I like different versions of a movie as long as they are declared (as a remix, director's cut, redux, final cut, the Italian cut, etc.). Nowadays at least the dubbing writers and directors are credited at the very end. 

A short bit of history
The following comparisons are sound only, so point 2 will not distract from what I want you to listen to.

Nowadays dubbing means substituting the dialogue track only leaving the tracks for sounds and music untouched. This hasn't always been the case. While Disney seems to have always prepared separated tracks for sync studios, most American studios have only done so for high "prestige" films. Before WWII, European voice actors have been brought in to dub their lines in Hollywood. During the war and afterwards, the dubbing has mostly been done in the respective countries. In Germany, every occupational sector had at least one post-sync studio.

To cut a long story short: When a studio didn't receive separated tracks, they couldn't divide the dialogue from the music and the foley and thus had to a add a different background score that often sounded more like uninspired temp music on a rough cut. 

B-pictures: changing the whole soundtrackThough producing some of the most well-aging genre classics, Film Noir was considered a low-budget run-of-the-mill back then. Just listen to this excerpt (about 55 minutes into the film) from Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1944/46): Someone is shooting and taking flight, Marlowe follows him in his car, then catches up with him.
The Big Sleep (1) English
The Big Sleep (1) German

In the German version, the brooding music in the car is missing. Instead we hear a highly agitated piece that conveys the same mood like during the shooting.

That was certainly weird, but listen to the following example from about 31 minutes into the film:
The Big Sleep (2) English
The Big Sleep (2) German

There is no background score whatsoever which alters the mood quite remarkably. A whole layer of commenting on the screen action is lost. Just listen to the comic bassoon motif accompanying parts of the dialogue. And this, by the way, is not some Hollywood hack at work, but the celebrated Austria born Max Steiner, a direct disciple of Gustav Mahler. I wouldn't want to know what Casablanca sounds like in German.
Not taking into account lost linguistic ambiguities of the original, points 3 and 4 are definitely at work here. Without seeing the picture you wouldn't guess that these voices are supposed to come from the same room.

Losing the distinct quality of a voice
Later on, separated track became standard. So let's focus on the voices themselves. For a voice that is fairly well-known and specific I could have picked James Stewart or John Wayne. They sure have their instantly recognizable manner of speaking, which is something dubbing voices hardly ever capture. Instead I chose Marlon Brando because with his kind of method acting there's another layer involved. Method actors don't always go for intelligibility.
Here's an excerpt from the first scene of Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972):
The Godfather English
The Godfather German

To be fair, the dubbing is relatively well done. But the rather odd quality of Brando's dialogue delivery doesn't translate that well. When you hear him mumbling with his rather high, throaty voice, it sounds as if the words are reluctant to climb out of his mouth. Speaking seems not to be one of his pleasures. The German actor sounds just like a thoughtful old man with a slightly rusty voice, but not without grip. The inherent laziness is translated quite well. The little pauses during the speech are often in different/wrong places so different words are accented. Notice that Buonasera's Italian accent is retained. You could say I'm looking for nuances, but isn't a director when directing the original performance?

Toned down narration
Translating voice over narration has the benefit of not having to correspond to onscreen mouths and accents. Even the timeframe is somewhat more open. Therefore translations can be more accurate in meaning and in tone. Let's listen to the prologue of Robert Mulligan's To Kill a Mockingbird (1962):

To Kill a Mockingbird English
To Kill a Mockingbird German

Except for the lack of any geographical hint in the voice, this German voice over does the original justice. German voice overs of the time most often sound more stern or serious than American ones, almost like sober news anchors. What we have here is a most faithful adaptation that lacks the lazy feel of the southern drawl but doesn't distort the tone much. If anything, it tones down specific traits of the original without adding new ones.
This is what voice over narration usually sounds like: in order not to give it any different meaning, the speech is delivered in High German, the standard language devoid of any regional accents. After all, this sounds sensible to me because most of the time there are no clear analogies to German dialects that wouldn't widen the gap between image and sound. I have chosen this example because it is so close in tone to Cinderella's prologue.



At a loss for words: Cinderella

As I have already stated, I grew up on dubbed versions of most Disney classics. I still think that many of them have held the test of time quite well. As a teenager I discovered the original voices and had hardly any trouble accepting them, most of them adding several layers of meaning. There is one exception, though: Hans Conried as Captain Hook. He works pretty well as Mr. Darling, but Hook for me is always linked to the voice of Eduard Wandrey. Part of that familiarity is my being raised on a couple of Disneyland storybook records that combined an adequate narrator with excerpts from the German soundtrack including dialogue, sounds and music.

So when my DVD drive selected the German Cinderella soundtrack by accident, I was rather flabbergasted. At first I wasn't sure if I was in for a parody along the lines of Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily? (1966) (I have even read about German dubbing studios during the 60s and 70s that purposely injected corny jokes into long stretches of serious dialogue).
But then, the dialogue was from the familiar 1951 dub I have always known.

Cinderella dialogue English
Cinderella dialogue German
It sounds fairly accurate, if a tad more old-fashioned which is due to different acting habits in 1950s America and Germany.

But the prologue reminded me of the fact that voice over narration is also the part that gets most easily away with changes in content. As opposed to synchronized dialogue you wouldn't be able to judge the accuracy of the direct relation to the images if you don't know the original.

Even if you don't understand a word of German, listen to this:

Cinderella intro English
Cinderella intro German

Although on my Disneyland record (dated 1969) I hear a woman narrating the prologue, on the DVD I hear this man bragging away without really telling us anything. This new introduction is said to be on the 1992 VHS but there are rumours of it already having surfaced on 1980s re-release prints (which I can hardly believe). The original narrator is none other than Betty Lou Gerson who later provided the voice for Cruella DeVil. With her southern accent that has a singing quality to it she delivers a lively retelling of the prologue that closely matches the background score and the visuals with just enough left to the imagination.

On the other hand Joachim Pukass (who replaces Erika Goerner from the 1951 dub) sounds like a mocking teacher talking down to a couple of toddlers instead of a general audience. He mainly explains that this is a Disney film coming from the US and that "Aschenputtel" is called "Cinderella" over there. He mentions this twice and also comments on the running time of the film. He speaks in commonplace phrases and glosses over everything that is in the pictures until we see the stepsisters. He then asks in a heavy-handed manner: "who is also in our story? - Oh, yes, Anastasia and Drizella". The images are rather treated like annoying background noise. The death of Cinderella's parents is omitted completely. Rumor has it that this was done in order to get a "General Audiences" rating in Germany as opposed to a "from 6 years up".

Selfconsciousness was the least of Disney's intentions with that film. It is a classic (if Americanized) fairy tale, more consistent in tone than many of his later films. And yes, in the new intro there is not a single remark or allusion concerning the dream theme that is so central to that story. Oh, did I mention that the chorus was removed from the title and end theme?

I just wish Disney would pay as much attention to their foreign versions as to the commercials advertising them.

Nostalgic and contemporary - part 3

What the colors tell us
This has been lying about for some time now and after almost two weeks of color guessing posts, it's a good moment to take a break. The guessing will definitely continue after the weekend. But for now, I'd like to focus on TPATF one last time before going to see the completed film. At the risk of stating the obvious, let me comment on the color schemes visible in that first-five-minutes-preview. In a nutshell: no surprises but lots of polish and warmth.
Nostalgic and contemporary - part 1
Nostalgic and contemporary - part 2

Warm yellow light

left: original still   -   right: with adjusted white balance

All the dolls on the shelves in combination with the dominating pink leave no doubt that we're entering a girl's bedroom. The whole room is bathed in warm yellow light. I have tried to eliminate the golden light (on the right) from the screenshot in order to see the "real" underlying colors. This little experiment tells us a lot about our perception of color constancy. Even in the first picture we instantly identify the top of the small carriage on the lower right as turquoise, when in reality we see a greenish brown (see color swatches below). But in combination with the salmon pink and the beige spotlights our brain immediately takes the warm lighting into account and makes us perceive the hues as they would look like in white light.

These color swatches on the left are taken from the exact same spots on both of these pictures. As abstracts they immediately demonstrate how strong the effect of color constancy can be. It also shows how much colored lighting (left square) unifies colors from different hues. As I have pointed out here, yellow light is always handy if you want the audience to feel nostalgic and warm. Without the yellow light, the picture looks a lot less heavy. After all, yellow light is associated with autumn and golden hour. The fresher impression comes from the delicate pastel colors and all the balancing white in the picture. Needless to say that without the nostalgic effect, the colors look like the standard "little princess" scheme that is exploited in every children's section of department stores as can be seen in the following "Disney princesses shelves".

Princesses are pink and frogs are green, aren't they?

As the title suggests that this is a film about a princess, it leaves us wondering who lives there in this very rich and ornate room.

This picture is interesting for two reasons: It immediately tells us that Charlotte is the one living in this room. In fact, if Charlotte wouldn't move she could be mistaken for another piece of fluffy furniture, she's so tone-in-tone with the room colors. Her face and the kitten are the brightest spots in the picture so our eyes should be immediately drawn to her. But the real contrast in this picture is one of hue and not of value. It's our introduction to Tiana and she's wearing roughly complementary colors. Her dark hair and brown face make her look like the complete opposite of Charlotte.

left half: background, right half: Charlotte  -  left half: background, right half: Tiana

If it hadn't been clear already, this illustration makes the point. 

 

Tiana is not only the foreign body in this nursery, she's also the one most reluctant to even think about kissing a frog. But her green dress connects her to the frog (or the frog-like cat).

High key lighting

The other reason is lighting: One advantage of yellow light is that it doesn't distort skin color all that much and thus is a lot less distracting than blue light, for example. It's interesting to note that the dolls and teddy bears next to the girls are not competing for attention because their faces are closer to the room color and there is no white in the eyes. This way, they can lie in the light and still don't attract our interest.

This is important because the whole color scheme relies more on contrast of hue than contrast of value. For me, it makes perfect sense because it helps overcome the problem of having dark-skinned characters next to white faces. Traditionally, Disney favored a kind of artificial lighting that based on high contrast of value (an animation equivalent of traditional low key lighting). Of course, within the characters it is not practical to have high lighting ratios, but compared to their immediate background they are either considerably darker or brighter, whatever looks best (think of Alice in Wonderland or even the underwater scenes of The Little Mermaid).

Even on a black and white TV Cinderella would stand out from the background by sheer contrast of value.

The different hue of her princess dress makes for a lot more contrast, but is not indispensable. Note that here the same pastel colors are used without any hint at nostalgia or warmth. She's living in the cold house of her evil stepmother after all.

Here now Tiana's green dress is by no means different from Charlotte's or from the walls behind her.

So rather than having to contrast the dark faces with even darker backgrounds to prevent them from becoming silhouettes, the lighting in these early scenes looks more like high key lighting to me, where everything is more or less evenly lit (not completely flat, of course), so the differences in hue stand out more. This is also underlined by a tendency to have almost monochrome color schemes. The whole high- vs low-value-contrast thing is rather subtle, though.

While Charlotte and her daddy are not too different from the room, Eudora stands out against the wall because of her darkness and because of her olive coat that connects her to the green of Tiana. But as we tend to focus on the bright parts of an image, she's not the main interest. The book under the lampshade is. It's also interesting that the parents' clothes are underlining their difference (white wearing white, dark wearing dark), whereas the children wear clothes of roughly the same values.

Two worlds linked by warm lighting

But there's also the other world, the one where Tiana's family lives on the other side of town. Not unexpectedly browns and greens are dominating over there. Since green is a blend of blue and yellow, the blue clothes of Tiana's parents fit in easily.

Tiana's family seems to be more down-to-earth which is reflected in the more earthly colors as opposed to the highly artificial pastel colors of Charlotte's bedroom. The dim hallway makes for a nice transition from one warm place to another.

 

 The cable car's warm brown interior is very close to the protagonists' clothes and faces. The whole image is basically confined to two hues. The cold blue of the night is present throughout the whole prologue, if sometimes only seen briefly outside the window.

If you watch closely, you can see the same kind of warm light emanating from Tiana's house as well. Interestingly, this isn't present in the next outside view of the house, where Tiana stands in the door inviting the folks to taste her gumbo. 

These screenshots show that the carpets in Tiana's home are the same colors (salmon and turquoise) as Charlotte's bedroom, only less saturated and here the green/soft turquoise prevails. As you can see from the beige frame of the magazine ad, warm light is still key. With a color scheme that relies on golden light and warmth so hard, it's no wonder Tiana's life's dream is associated with a yellow picture. After all, yellow is close to brown and green. And green under strong golden light results in a nicely tanned color.

Except for the blue of the night, there's a pleasant absence of pure primary and secondary colors throughout the clip. While the trailer still heavily relies on images of the eye-hurting, oversaturated kind, I'm looking forward to that film's color concepts. I'm still not expecting any surprises, though.

I apologize for the quality of the screenshots, they are from online sources as I can't get them directly from BD on my computer yet.

Heightened Concepts and Expressionistic Color

(all screenshots from Cinderella 2005 2-Disc Special Edition DVD PAL RC2)

In preparation of the next Dalmatians installment (Hell Hall) I’d like to post about two general subjects:
The first one came to my mind while I was watching Sleeping Beauty on BD: The Platinum Editions - however flawed they are (enough of a subject for a future post) - make it a lot easier to study color schemes. In fact, artistic concepts are easier to discern because they have obviously been emphasized by the restoration team.

Whatever one may think of the restorers tastes or their supposed lack of faithfulness regarding the “original” celluloid versions, one thing is for sure: Everybody involved put considerable amount of thought into these restorations and it seems to me that the picture gets attuned to what the researchers believe would be (and actually might have been) the underlying color concept. So the resulting saturated digital pictures look less ambiguous and the concepts become more apparent. Thus, analyzing Platinum Editions is far easier (which doesn’t imply that they are aesthetically pleasing or historically more accurate than previous video versions).

This, of course, involves the risk of going blind for anything that hasn’t been heightened by the restoration technicians. But a look at the different versions (in the case of Sleeping Beauty two completely different wide-screen restorations on DVD) prevents us from taking anything too literal. As you may know even the re-release prints throughout the 20th century haven’t all been exactly the same, thus making it almost impossible to “remember” the original colors of a certain scene without having access to the successive exposure negative.

Without such reference or the necessary historical knowledge preferences come down to personal taste. After all, nowadays there are even people who treasure their memories of blurry VHS tapes not because these were made comparatively direct from actual prints (although Technicolor never looked right on a TV screen) but because that’s the way people have grown to love these movies as children.

Expressionistic Color

One of most controversial restorations was the 2005 2-Disc Special Edition of Cinderella (1950), to my knowledge the only DVD to date of Disney’s post-war success. This brings me to the second topic of this post: the expressionistic use of color in otherwise “straight” Disney features.

When expressionism is mentioned, most people immediately think of German movies of the 1920s, film noir classic or maybe Tim Burton’s gothic fantasies. Harsh low key lighting as well as distorted sets and architecture come to mind. The most famous Disney example might be Snow White’s fleeing into the woods.

It has often been said that Disney abandoned expressionistic techniques more or less after WWII. I don’t think this is simply because the features went increasingly straight under the regime of the Nine Old Men. It can be seen throughout American film history that directors of emotionally engaging movies constantly moved away from expressionistic devices towards more unobtrusive storytelling. One explanation may well be that obvious expressionism - stagy, distorted sets and lighting - is amplifying the emotional distance because it makes us aware of the style of a certain scene. This leads to a state of aesthetical appreciation rather than one of emotional involvement.

The advent of color has been important in developing less obvious effects while still expressing the feelings of a character through their environment. Hitchcock among others used color photography to get rid of unnatural lighting which he found too distracting. Color on the other hand was and is something most people absorb unconsciously, so it remains a powerful expressionistic tool.

Although no one could actually forget that they are watching animated drawings, in Disney’s “illusion-of-life” type animation of the 50s and 60s (e.g. Cinderella, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians) color may have been the only visual effect that didn’t break the painstakingly created illusion of reality. The era of giant menacing eyes was definitely over…

The scene where the stepsisters tear Cinderella’s ball gown apart because the mice have used some of their discarded beads is one of the often mentioned examples of expressionist colors. In 13 very brief close up shots we witness the sisters’ accelerating rampage followed by 3 increasingly longer shots of the stepmother gaining control again. It’s not exactly the Psycho shower scene, but about the same idea. Like in Alice (1951) and Peter Pan (1953), characters are clearly separated from the backgrounds by strong contrast of value.

Now look at the same scene in color:

We start out with a grey background with not too many details. Apart from vertical ornaments an organically shaped shadow in the upper half is its most important trait. Starting in shot 5 the bluish grey background is gradually replaced by hues closer to red (16). The lack of detail is working because in the close up we don’t expect to see anything else than the wall and because every detail would distract from the main action that has to be exceptionally clear if the shots are only a few frames long.

From the very moment the stepmother stops the action, we’re back in reality with a grey background without details. Note also how the stepmother’s earrings and the green sister’s necklace are similar in color to the beads in question. We can clearly see them on Cinderella because they stand out from her pink gown.

What makes this scene special in my opinion is that the color effect is on for just a moment of highest tension. As soon as we are able to think again and have time to consciously look at the pictures everything is back to normal. It’s also important that the characters’ color schemes stay intact throughout the whole series of shots. The effect is striking and very obvious on the 2005 DVD.

Special Features

Sometimes I have a feeling that trailers on DVD are simply there to show the discrepancy between unrestored material and the digitally remastered main attraction. In Cinderella’s case we get the original release and five re-release trailers. It’s interesting to see what scenes made it into which year’s trailer and how voice over narration changed over the years.

In the 1980s action and excitement became more important than romance so a shortened version of the beads scene was included. Overall color is expectedly ugly with skintones pinker even than your average 1980s TV character (all the trailers emphasize the film’s basic pink/turquoise contrast). With the saturation pumped up so high all subtlety is lost. This results in the absence of the expressionistic color effect because the wall behind the characters is constantly pink-tinted. While these may be worst case examples, they show how different we experience a scene with different colors.

These are not matching frames but they are from the same shots (ghosting due to poor NTSC-PAL conversion)