Japan: Super Mario Galaxy Movie wasn’t localised from English to Japanese, but rebuilt

Shigeru Miyamoto has revealed that The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which launched later in Japan than the rest of the world, wasn’t just localised from English to Japanese but was instead rebuilt. Shigeru Miyamoto said that the team were told to “use the visuals as a base to create something entertaining in Japanese.” So this presumably makes a big change from how things are normally done with Hollywood films which eventually debut in Japan. Here’s what Mr. Miyamoto had to say:

“Since this is a project made both in Japan and the US, we didn’t want the Japanese version to be just a localization of the English version, we wanted to properly write and craft it in Japanese,”

“Makoto Ueda from the theater group Europe Kikaku, who handled the Japanese script, is someone I’ve known for a long time. I want Mario and company to speak with the kind of natural dialogue you’d hear in one of their stage productions, but localization tends to alter the rhythm of conversations. Jokes differ between Japan and overseas, so we wanted to make the dialogue feel as natural as possible,” Miyamoto explains.

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