I completely forgot to mention this, but on my birthday, Nate and I watched My Neighbor Totoro because it was one of those movies that I watched repeatedly as a kid and he had never seen it before.

The “original” one with the first set of English-dub voice actors is, I guess, ridiculously hard to find now; the only English-dub version you can find now is the Disney dub version.

It makes a huge difference. It’s not nearly as enjoyable in my opinion. That might just be because I’m *that person* who memorizes every inflection, pause, and emphasis in dialogue because my brain has decided that’s more important information than, say, remembering to shower every once and a while—but the only thing I could focus on for the whole movie were all of the differences in the dialogue and the way it was spoken.

I hope Nate found it okay (he probably did because he hadn’t seen the original?), but it was super distracting for me and detracted from the amazingness that is My Neighbor Totoro.

Edit: this was the best comparison I could find. It’s hard to tell what’s what if you haven’t heard both of them; maybe try with earbuds and listen to the original through the left ear only and the new one through the right ear only.