Reflections on the Subtitling and Dubbing of Anime: The Translation of Gender in Perfect Blue, a Film by Kon Satoshi

Abstract

Perfect Blue is an anime (Japanese animation) film directed by Kon Satoshi released in 1997. The film revolves around a female idol (a pop star) named Mima who quits her career as an idol to become an actress. She gradually loses her mind, as the pressures from her acting career, her managers, fans and a stalker catch up to her. Perfect Blue touches on the blurring line between fiction and reality, the objectification of women (and idols) as mere products, and the role of women in the idol industry. It is also a stark critique of the hegemonic masculinity and the gender roles that are imposed on women in Japanese society. This thesis presents anime as an important pop culture phenomenon with a massive influence worldwide. The thesis examines the gender stereotypes propagated by this phenomenon and proposes a that Kon’s work is different compared to other anime. This work compares how gender roles are portrayed in the different versions: The Japanese original and the US English subtitles and dubbing. Methodologically, the analysis relies on close observation of the use of the Japanese first and second person pronouns and sentence-final particles in the characters’ language, since “the use of these features is known to be highly gender-dependent” (Hiramoto 2013, 55). This study comes to the conclusion that the subtitles and the dubbing provide a relatively close rendering of gender of the Japanese text, even if the linguistic resources of English do not allow for the translation of gendered Japanese pronouns and sentence-final particles. This means that the subtitles and dubbings maintain the feminist message Kon wanted to give in his film. The study concludes by stressing the importance of taking into account the use of specific pronouns and sentence-final particles when translating Japanese, as these particles are gender-loaded. It also emphasises the importance of being critical of anime’s hegemonic masculinity, and argues that Kon goes against hegemony by portraying a strong and independent female character.