Soundtracks - German or English?
I finally managed to see “Enchanted” in the German version last night. See, here in Germany we dubb all the movies. Whether this is good (young children can enjoy a Disney movie) or bad (if there would be subtitles they would learn English playfully) is up to everyone. I personally do see some problems, especially if they choose a very unique voice to dub a certain actor / part. But hey, that even can be in favor of a character, as a different speaker can also positively influence a performance. Where it does get IMHO very problematic is with songs…
See, here in Germany we also dubb movie musicals! Unfortunately not in allc ases the vocal performances is up to the original quality. Lately some productions luckily chose to dubb only the dialogue and keep the original song performances (”High School Musical”, “High School Musical 2″ as well as ”Hairspray” come to my mind) - which seems a good enough solution allowing everyone to follow the story and still retain great vocal performances. And this finally brings me around to what I started the post with: watching the German version of “Enchanted” finally last night.
I loved it - just as much as the English language version. A great movie survives anything. But then writing that would be wrong since the dubbing was very well done and the voices fit the characters wonderfully. About the songs? They were dubbed as well - and it worked OK. The German lyrcis were actually very good - better than the translation of the movie’s titled as “verwünscht” which would translate as “cursed” into English and not as “enchanted” (which would translate as ”verzaubert” into German).
Still I wonder why they went to the length of dubbing them. Afterall Disney did not dubb the songs in the HSM franchise and the lyrics of those are just as important / unimportant for the story as in “Enchanted”. Well, maybe it has something to do with the impression of quality considering that dubbing is usual and subtiteling might be though by some audience members as being “cheap”? I don’t know - but I hope that HSM3 when it opens on the big screen will retain the original song performances.
Anyway, I am digressing. Back to the big surprise of the movie’s German version for me: guess you all remember that great song played during the Queen & King ball when our lovers are dancing? “So Close” performed by Jon McLaughlin? Great song, isn’t it? That’s what I thought till the scene came up last night … and they played the German version of the song titled “So nah!” (which actually is a correct translation) performed by Gil Ofarim.
And for the very first time … I enjoyed the German “re-recording” more than the original! I am not a fan of Gil Ofarim who, by the way already was chosen by Disney to record the German version of “Another Believer” by Rufus Wainwright for the German version of “Meet the Robinsons”. But his version of “So close” titled “So nah!” is just perfect. There is a warmth and emotions in this version which the (still great) original version can’t muster IMHO. The realyl well done German lyrcis certainly help us well. I never had anything like this before … but this recording is just perfect, feeling incredible intimate. All I can say is WOW!
Which bow gets us back to the question of dubbing. Being generally opposed to dubbing / re-recording the English songs in German an experience like this makes me wonder, maybe it is a good thing to dubb the songs as well, if it get us a song like this every now and then?? What do YOU think?