Video:

Video is great actually. Considering this is a 15-year old anime movie, it possibly can't get any better ! This, like Porco Rosso (MAC) - see my review - is a widescreen release so it's great on TV, but has (at least on my setup) black borders on all four sides when watching it on a PC monitor. If you happen to be running Linux, mplayer can crop out these black borders like this: mplayer -dvd 1 -vop crop=667:449:27:13 pp=0x20000 When I switch to full screen then, I'll have no left and right borders, only upper and lower borders, which is normal (and perfectly watchable) for a widescreen dvd. So for me, it's not a problem. However I recommend you watch this on a TV set for maximal viewing pleasure.

Audio:

Japanese and English audio. Dolby Surround stereo (2.0). I watched the movie with Japanese audio and it's great. However, just for testing, I tried the english audio track and seems like this one is in inferior quality compared to the Japanese track ! I could test this perfectly with the intro song, which is clearly a lot more crisp in the original Japanese track. Personally, I couldn't care less since I dislike dubbed anime (I always prefer original over modified or adjusted things), but if you plan on watching this in English, you should take notice of this. Music is great (I'm talking about the Japanese track now), as you can expect from a Ghibli title.

Subtitle:

Let's see what we have here. Subtitles in Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean. Since I'm not that fluent in either of those three Asian languages, I only checked the English subtitles, and they seem ok. No lines missing, no timing problems. Songs are subtitled too, some ambient noises are subtitled aswell (like animals making noises), which I didn't like that much. Not sure if this is a subtitle rip from a DVD, I guess not. But nevertheless, I don't see any reason to complain about them. EDIT: After a second revision of the subtitles, I'm going to deduct two points, to get a fairer score: 1. Translation is poor. I'm not fluent in Japanese but I can understand enough to know that sometimes the translation is way off. It doesn't affect the overall story however, and I'm a being a bit picky on these things. 2. Translation is not based on the original Japanese audio. So sometimes there are subtitles, when nobody is speaking. A bit annoying.

Comment:

Packaging is ok, what you'd expect from a MAC release; nothing more, nothing less. No extra's, but who cares ? I haven't watched the AS/AC release, but from what I've read of its review, this MAC release seems superior in both video, audio and subtitles. However if you want a good English dub track, perhaps you're better off buying the AS/AC release than this one. I, for one, would advise you not to, since the English voice acting is lame, compared to the original Japanese. So it's up to you to decide, I'm perfectly happy with this set.