Tora-San's Dear Old Home: Technical Notes

Video & Audio
This is a weird one. Although English subtitles of Asian movies are sometimes famously inept (e.g., "If you've gut, shoot at me!"), Tora-san's Dear Old Home has an especially bizarre and unforgivable subtitling snafu that, if the film weren't as good as it is, would make it unwatchable. Apparently the label acquired English text from The Japan Foundation, a fine organization. However, somebody screwed up big-time encoding the subtitles onto the disc. For example, three subtitles that should read:

"There are some things one shouldn't say."
"Sure, our house will be cheaply constructed."
"A little breeze might blow it down."

...instead reads like this:

"There are some things one shouldn't"
"Sure, our house will be cheaply say."
"A little breeze might blow it down constructed."

After 20 minutes of this Beckettian dialogue, I finally realized the problem. Subtitles two lines tall were reversed, and the dialogue only made sense when read from the bottom-up. None of Panorama's previous Tora-sans had this problem, but boy, oh boy this one sure does. Once the problem was recognized, it still took several more minutes to adjust one's eyes to read bottom-to-top. All-in-all, it was nearly a movie-ruining experience. (Two words, Panorama: Quality Control) Chinese subtitles are also available.

The rest of the presentation, as usual with Panorama, is unexceptional. The original Shochiku GrandScope photography (i.e., 2.35:1 CinemaScope) is presented in non-anamorphic 1.85:1 widescreen, using a worn print with its share of scratches. Shochiku has beautiful (but not subtitled) 16:9 transfers of all 48 Tora-san's on DVD in Japan, but apparently will not allow foreign licensors of their films access to these masters, at least not without paying exorbitant access fees. This is apparently also the case with Empire Picture's Region 1 release of Twilight Samurai, which has a gorgeous 16:9 transfer in Japan. Read here for Matthew Millheiser's glowing review of the film, less-than-glowing review of the transfer.

Panorama claims the disc is in stereo and the ever-present Dolby Digital flyover precedes the movie, but Tora-san's Dear Old Home is and always was mono.

Extra Features
Common with Panorama's Shochiku titles, extras are limited to a director's biography and filmography (in both Chinese and English), both repeated in the CD-shaped booklet included with the disc.

Parting Thoughts:
...Now, with Panorama working its way through the series, they can at last be experienced around the world. But fix the subtitles, huh?

(For those keeping score, the next film in the series is Tora-san's Dream Come True.)

** and at age 59 she still is extraordinarily beautiful. Her new movie is Year One in the North.