Region 4 Winners and Losers

    This title was released in 2000 in Region 1. It was released with a fancy cover image featuring Ashitaka, including foil. I prefer the Region 4 cover — after all, it shows the title character!

    The Region 4 disc is missing:

• French soundtrack in addition to the English and Japanese
• a short (about 5 minutes) making of featurette with the English-language actors
• the American trailer.

    The Region 1 disc is missing:

• the complete storyboards as an alternate angle
• the Japanese promotional material
• reversible cover

    The Region 1 transfer doesn't show quite as much aliasing, and doesn't have the interleaving troubles, but the colour doesn't appear to be as well-rendered: it looks a touch exaggerated, almost as though someone had raised the chroma level a little to try to make the picture more colourful. I don't like it. It's really only noticeable when you compare the R1 and R4 discs, but having watched both, I think I prefer the look of the R4, even with its aliasing and interleaving. The R1 has a much better layer change, though, at 72:51, at a scene change.

    This is tough. The choice between these two versions really depends on what you judge as more important: do you want a puff-piece making of, or storyboards? Do you want slightly over-bright colour, or a bad layer change? For my tastes, the R4 is slightly preferable, but you may feel differently.