I would've preferred to have watched that dubbed, and preferably by Disney. Reading text for 1:30 to 2 hours while listening to gibberish (as whatever foreign language you're listening to, you don't understand a word of it) makes it harder to connect with characters and hence care for them.
Like, I enjoyed "Porco Rosso" where the main character, the fighter ace, was voiced by Michael "I'm Batman!" Keaton; he brought an old skool cool to it. In "My Neighbor Totoro" the girls were voiced by the Dakota sisters (Fanning & Elle Dakota) and I think they did a great job as well. Christian Bale voiced the lead in "Howl's Moving Castle" and I could tell it was him - I was at first very surprised that they got someone as high profile as him to do an anime as that was one of the first Studio Ghibli animes I watched localized by Disney. It's a weird one, but I liked it too and thought his voice fit.
Anyway, with GotF, that was the only one I watched subbed while listening to Japanese. The difference in that is you don't connect to any characters by their voice obviously, there is far less memory of it when it's over too, and it might as well be or could have all been voiced by one person in whatever foreign language it's in, you just sat there and read text through the whole thing, like a book or an article... That's just a different experience and it's not gonna be as enjoyable, moving or interesting, etc.
I agree with somebody earlier who found parts of it boring, I did as well. Maybe dubbing would've helped, but my first experience was without it and that's how I came to feel what I do about this one. It's understandable that it's not as good as their later work, it's one of the first ones they made. But yeah, I just didn't think it was all that great and I'm kinda surprised a movie critic like Roger Ebert considers it to be one of the best and most powerful war films and had added it to his "greatest movies" list... It just wasn't THAT good in my view, but yeah, I get that some came away with a far more intense reaction to it...
