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VLC 0.9.4 does not correctly play the movie on this commercial DVD:

Whisper of the Heart
Walt Disney / Buena Vista Home Entertainment
ISBN: 0-7888-3404-5
Disk 1

The DVD menu comes up okay, but once I select "Play" from
the menu, the screen turns black. After about 35 seconds,
I hear the soundtrack. Even after 5 minutes, the screen
is still black, with the audio continuing. This movie has
occasional subtitles; these translate signs on buildings,
which are in Japanese. I see these subtitles, but not the
video.

I wanted to prepare a small sample of the movie which would
have the same problem described here, but the tools I
normally use for this sort of thing all have problems
reading the files from this DVD. For example, one says it
found a "multiangle cell", a feature which the program states it
does not support. In the process of attempting to make this
sample, I discovered that the problem may be caused by one
of the IFO files. When I play the movie starting from the
DVD menu, I get no picture. However, if I have VLC directly
play the first VOB file of the movie, bypassing the menu,
everything works as expected: I see the video. This
suggests there is something in an IFO that is causing the
problem of no picture. Furthermore, I found that, after
starting the movie from the DVD menu, if I jump to the next
chapter, I get the picture, but it freezes after a few seconds,
while the audio continues on normally.

I uploaded the file robinel__whisper_of_the_heart__no_video.zip
to ftp://streams.videolan.org/incoming . It contains the
two relevant IFO files (the movie is in VTS_07) and a text
file containing this post.

Here are the Messages for the first 5 minutes, with
verbosity = 2. It was originally 7,094 lines long;
I indicate where I've deleted large numbers of identical
lines.

Try using DVD Decrypter to make yourself a copy onto HDD. And then try playing it in VLC.
I had Lost in Space DVD that had problem: choppy video, and even transfered on HDD it played the same, until I passed it through decrypter, and everything played fine.

Try using DVD Decrypter to make yourself a copy onto HDD.
And then try playing it in VLC.

Thanks for the suggestion. Same result: still no video.
Which indicates that encryption is not the source of the
problem.

Tried to play with (no menu) ?

Tried to play with (no menu) ?

No, I didn't think of that. Thanks.

Now that I've tried it, it doesn't fix the problem.

In fact, I tried it five times and got several different
behaviors. The first two times -- with "No DVD menus"
checked on the Disc Open dialog -- I saw the menu any way.

The next three times I never saw the menu, and I had trouble
getting to the movie at all. That may be due in part to
there being so much stuff on the DVD, including about five
previews. I tried using the "Next media in playlist" and
"Next chapter" buttons to skip the previews, legal warnings,
and studio logos, but it seemed I kept going around in
circles, seeing the same things over and over. I never did
get to the main movie until the third time, when I used the
Playback > Navigation feature of the video context menu.
But then I had to guess which Title corresponded to the
movie. That took several tries, but then, all I got was
the soundtrack and subtitles, but no video, as described in
my original post.