Utsu no Miko (Laserdisc)

Last year, Orphan subbed Utsu no Miko (Prince of the Skies), a 1989 movie prequel to the better known Utsu no Miko OVA series. The raw was from the Internet and not that great. As I wrote at the time, "The raw is an HD Kids Station rip from heponeko. It is watermarked and, frankly, it looks like an upscale. If we find a laserdisc source (there's no DVD or Blu-ray release), we'll do a second version." Well, we did, and we have.

The movie is based on the first arc of a 52 volume (!) light novel series by Fujikawa Keisuke. Because the show is unchanged, I won't go over the plot and voice cast again. The source this time is a Japanese laserdisc. The disc was letterboxed, and the source wasn't good enough to allow much upscaling, so this release is standard definition. One key difference from the previous release is aspect ratio. As I've noted before, Japanese movies tended to use VistaVision (5:3 or 1.66:1) aspect ratios, and that's how the laserdisc is formatted. However, the TV broadcast was done as 1.85:1, cutting off a bit at the top and bottom of the frame to meet "theatrical" widescreen format. Thus, this version provides a bit more of the video, although you'll have to squint hard to see it.

Laserdisc:

Web rip:

In addition to a bit more watermark-free video, this release features the trailer, which was included on the laserdisc. It's all signs, which certainly made translation easier.

The movie mixes historical figures from the Heian period with fictional and supernatural figures:

• Fujiwara no Fuhito was a major political figure during the Asuka and Nara periods.
• En no Ozuna was a Japanese mystic and ascetic, the founder of Shugendou. He was in fact banished by the Imperial Court to Izu Oshima.
• Kaguyahime is the Moon Princess from The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter. 

The inclusion of Princess Kaguya highlights the plot's lack of coherency; as the song says, she's in the wrong story. 

For the movie, Perevodildo translated and timed. ninjacloud fine-timed the original release and retimed the script for this release. I edited and typeset. ImAWasteOfHair, Paul Geromini, and Topper3000 QCed. For the trailer, Google translated the signs, with a few corrections from the Discord kairetsu, and then I typeset. For both, the encode was done by an anonymous friend.

So Utsu no Miko the movie remains a pick-your-video-poison proposition: a larger but blurry and watermarked HD version, or a smaller and less vivid SD version. Neither the movie nor the OVA versions of Utsu no Miko have ever been popular enough to get a digital release, let alone remastered release, so WYSIWYG. You can get this version from the usual torrent site.