To live in Sweden, and be a huge animation nerd, it's not that easy. The amount of time we have to wait for some (and by some I mean most) animated movies from the other side of the Atlantic is ridiculous. For example, Book of Life, that came out now in October in the US, will not premiere here until April. That's six months! Let me tell you what is going to happen in those six months, in particular on the Internet. The first month is going to be a lot of hype around the movie. People will go see it, they will tweet their non-spoiler thoughts, and write reviews, most often non spoilers. The second month, people, and the companies, will start to slowly spoil the movie. They start to write more details, make and upload gifs and so on, so you start to get more insight into the movie. The third month, it's full on quotes, whole scenes in gif and reviews with spoilers. You start to get a pretty good idea about a lot of things happening in the movie. Then it's month four. Now the DVD and Blu-ray comes out. Then the companies start to release behind the scenes footage, which gives you more of the movie and now you're starting to figure most of the movie out. Month five, if you're unlucky you will read what the twist ending is because people don't write "spoiler" anymore, because now the movie has been out for ages. After that it's finally month six, and our turn to watch the movie. And no one really cares anymore. It's now time for the next animated movie to premiere over there, so if you want to write about the movie that just premiered here, it won't be current anymore. People will not care as much, and they won't participate as much and discuss it with you (they have probably forgotten what happened).
The Internet life certainly has it's up and downs, and I'm not blaming it for this. These six months of life the movies get is great, if you live where you're in the swing of things. Well okay, this is probably an extreme example, most recent movies are about two to four months. And once we even got it before the US, at least according to Imdb. Ice Age 4 came out a little more than two weeks earlier in Sweden. My question is why we always get the long wait. I understand that they need to dub and sub the movie and that takes time. But they can obviously do it faster and get it done earlier, so why don't they?
A second issue which will bug any nerd, is that it's very hard to find a showing that hasn't got a Swedish dubbing. Our dubbing, and weather it's good or not aside, I want to see the original voices, because that's the voices they have animated after. They are the people that have been part of the project for a long time, and they are the people who own these characters (in a "own the stage" kind of way.) But when I go to the cinema, I find maybe one of fifteen screenings that are in English. Most of them are in Swedish, the Swedish dubs get's the best times, the biggest screens. And it really limits my ability to go and see them in English. I know that countries like Germany and Spain has it even worse, they seem to get most things dubbed, but I still think we can get better at this. Now Sweden is a country that is pretty good at speaking and understanding English, since we learn it from early on. So I don't know why they have to force everyone to just watch things with Swedish voices. I get that small children need that, but as soon as they are pretty capable of reading, why not take them to movies with English voices? They will greatly improve their English skills, which is much needed in this day and age, and they will also be faster readers. I know it's about money, most people do go and see the Swedish version. But how can we make that choice if we're not allowed to make a fair choice?
Images: Disney
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