I’m glad that Project Fanning scares you aswell! I didn’t know that there was a younger sibling and was alarmed to discover the 100% increase in the ammount of Fanning that we are likely to be exposed to in the future. Down with this sort of thing!

I was very disappointed with the new dub of Totoro. Most Ghibli fans welcomed the new version with open arms, but I reckon it’s a lot worse than the original, and not only because of my fear and loathing of the Fanning creature.

Yeah, I was looking forward to more Miyazaki like “Whisper…”, “Pom Poko” and “The Cat Returns”. I liked the fact that they got some great people in to do the dubbed versions – Michael Keaton as Porco Rosso was particularly inspired.

I’m not sure why so many superhero films fall back to the origin. Part of it is because of what they are; you don’t need to establish how and why Dirty Harry became a cop, but there is a feeling that you need to show how Spidey got his powers. I’m not sure it’s strictly necessary myself; you had a little “Stan Lee presents…” text box in each and every Marvel comic that would briefly explain the premise in about eighty words, so I don’t see why they can’t adapt that format to the films, especially for the well-known characters. To be fair, the X-Men franchise and both Spider-Man 2 (much better than you give it credit for, by the by) and Superman II do excellent jobs of recapping the premise in the opening credits. True, no one’s yet done it in the first film, thus doing away with thirty minutes of origin stuff, but the tools are there.

I think it may come down to the weird episodic nature of comics; the story structure doesn’t translate especially well to self-contained films, even in a series.

I’m not sure what Film Four are playing at with the Miyazaki movies. They made no indication at all that they’d be showing both the subs and dubs, a bunch of their advertised films haven’t shown up (where’s Whisper of the Heart, for example?) and ther preliminary advrtising said all this was going to be happening in April! Still, bits and pieces of Miyazaki is better than none at all.

Oh, and you may be interested to know that Nausicaä as filmed takes in about the middle fifth of the manga, so it’s a bit more involved and epic still!