Seems there’s a hiccup in The Animatrix DVD — in this modern day of subtitles on DVDs, you don’t usually get a ‘dirty’ print mastered onto the disc, that is, a version of the film with captions strewn upon it. [Incidentally, I’m using the archaic word ‘print’ when I’ll wager most, if not all, of the Animatrix DVD content was mastered digitally from end to end, including the making of stuff]

If a film has to stick subtitles or captions up for some reason — perhaps characters are speaking in a foreign language, or the director didn’t think you were intelligent enough (or he wasn’t creative enough!) to figure out where the scene was set on your own — the people who design and author the DVD will usually use a ‘clean’ print, without any captions placed onto it, and insert subtitle captions so that your DVD player does all the hard work. It’s also handy to annoy people who aren’t l33t enough to rip the subtitle stream from the DVD when ripping to DiVx or VCD ;)

Anyway, the point — on the Animatrix DVD there are interviews with both English- and Japanese-speaking people. What it looks like they’ve intended doing is use subtitle captions from the DVD to show in English what the Japanese-speakers are saying, but they mucked up the triggers and nothing actually shows. You have to manually switch on the subtitles, which means you get subtitles for those people speaking in English too!

If anyone else is seeing this problem, or if you have some confirmed contact details for Warner Bros in the UK or US, let me know.