Spirited Away: Sub or Dub?
Disney's English version changed only its titles and credits on screen, plus a handful of lines. The cast, what Zac Bertschy found in 2002 and thought in 2015, and why the Blu-ray subtitles help the Japanese track.
Either track is a sound choice for Spirited Away. Disney's English version changed almost nothing on screen and added only a handful of lines, and the critic who checked it frame by frame in 2002 came away relieved. The case for Japanese is the performances, and the Blu-ray makes that easy, because it carries a separate subtitle script for the Japanese track rather than a copy of the dub's.
The short answer
Watch in Japanese for the original cast and the original script. Watch the English dub with younger viewers or anyone who will not read subtitles; it is careful, if a little flat. If you have seen one, the other is worth a second viewing for the few places where the dub adds a line.
Who made the English version
The film opened in Japan on July 20, 2001, according to ANN's encyclopedia. The entry credits John Lasseter as executive producer of the English version, Kirk Wise as its director, Cindy Davis Hewitt and Donald H. Hewitt with the English adaptation, and Jim Hubbert and Linda Hoaglund with the translation. It lists Disney as the original U.S. licensor and GKIDS from 2017.
| Character | Japanese | English |
|---|---|---|
| Chihiro | Rumi Hiiragi | Daveigh Chase |
| Haku | Miyu Irino | Jason Marsden |
| Yubaba and Zeniba | Mari Natsuki | Suzanne Pleshette |
ANN's English credits also include David Ogden Stiers as Kamaji, Susan Egan as Lin, John Ratzenberger as the bathhouse manager, Lauren Holly and Michael Chiklis as Chihiro's parents, Tara Strong as Boh, and Bob Bergen as both the frog and No-Face. In both languages, one actress plays the twin witches.
What the dub changed
Zac Bertschy saw a new 35mm print of the dub before its American release and wrote a frame-by-frame report for ANN. The only altered images, he found, were the opening title card and the closing credits, which scroll in English. The changes were to the script. Where the camera cuts away from a character, the dub sometimes adds a line: Chihiro says "Haku is a dragon?!" as he flies off, and a short exchange between Chihiro and her father in the car closes the film, which he thought helped an abrupt ending. It also adds a joke about No-Face's throat and rewrites the foreman's song as a crude rhyme. The closing song stays in Japanese.
Bertschy liked the casting. He thought the English Yubaba a better performance than the Japanese one, more understated and better suited to the character, and that Lin was "just as spunky and sarcastic in English as she was in Japanese." He also noticed that some of the original vocal sounds were kept: No-Face's "Eh! Eh!" and the River God's laugh are the Japanese recordings.
The same critic, thirteen years later
By the time Disney's Blu-ray came out, Bertschy was cooler. His 2015 review placed the dub with "the other Disney Ghibli dubs": "it isn't particularly special, and has the same hushed, monotone cadence of the others," and he listed "dub is a little stilted" among the disc's drawbacks. The same review is the reason the Japanese track is easy to recommend: the disc "doesn't appear to be dubtitled," with one subtitle script for the dub and "a different subtitle script for the Japanese track, which is significantly different."
A note on quoting
The lines on our Spirited Away quotes page are checked English transcriptions, and this page does not claim any of them for the dub or the subtitles. Given how different Bertschy found the two subtitle scripts, a line remembered from one may not appear in the other. The ending explainer covers the last act, with spoilers.