Dear Manga Entertainment

Posted On February 26, 2007

DIE IN A FIRE

After a couple of months, I finally popped in Manga’s re-release of the classic Lupin film “Castle of Cagliostro” into my DVD drive with high expectations. I figured their last release was bad enough, so they couldn’t possibly do anything worse to the film with this new release, right?

Boy was I wrong.

Ok, first off. First off. First FUCKING off, the menu. It is looks like the kinds of things I made in Flash 4 when I was eleven years old. It is this image with the car being motion tweened left and right, bigger and smaller over bad quality picture of a road. The autogyro in the back is also animated poorly, firing at them (with god awful gun sound effects.) However, all is not lost as the good ol’ Theme to Lupin III ’80 is playing in the background. Time to navigate to the audio and subtitle options.

Rule 1 about making a menu where one selects things like audio and subtiles: it’s good idea to let the person know what they selected by way of underlining the selection, change its colour, etc. Manga does no such thing. In fact, Manga only confuses us by making the different selections alternating colours initially, so you really don’t know what’s going on.

Ok, Manga’s bad at menus. I don’t expect menus out of a DVD, I expect a good movie. So, putting my menu woes aside, I start the film.

Hmm, anamorphic widescreen. Good start. Will look good on the big TV at home.

Ah, they don’t have that nasty English overlay over Lupin’s written message. That’s nice.

Oh hey, it’s the opening. Wait… what’s with that tacky English logo over a stupid still image?

I guess some jackass at Manga Entertainment decided it was an absolutely brilliant idea to take all the animation out of the opening sequence. How did they possibly do this? Well, it’s quite simple! What they did was take screen captures of each cut (sans credits), used those as a substitute for each cut, while flashing big blocky English credits over the image. After this, I just turned it off. I had no more desire to continue on with the film. The opening sequence is probably one of the most beautifully animated things I’ve ever seen, and they fucking shat on it. SHAT ON IT.