I’m definitely an older weeb (since the early 90s) and I hate dubs, so this tracks.
I’ve been told that English dubs are way better now than 10 years ago for the last 20 years, but every time I hear something from a new dub, it still ends up having the same old problems. Like, my throat ends up aching because they insist on doing everything in falsetto for some reason.
they insist on doing everything in falsetto for some reason.
I mean, they’re doing that in the Japanese version too.
That’s the thing, though: they don’t, usually. Falsetto doesn’t simply mean forcing your voice to be higher than it is naturally (which is, of course, very common in anime), it’s a particular way of using your voice. You can also create a higher pitch with a head voice or even a chest voice. Falsetto is the easiest way to do it, but it’s also the hardest on your voice, which makes it hard to listen to for prolonged periods of time.
It’s not just the squeaky little girls either, even the young men are always very throaty.
On the one hand, all anime and cartoons are dubs. Duh.
On the other, I think the last decade of English dubs have mostly been brilliant. But then I thought the same for Astro Boy in the 80s or Akira in the 90s. 🤷♂️
Some dubs are poorly done or made bad by external factors (politics, budget, half arsed production, retconning, etc), but that’s not a problem with the practice of dubbing.
I feel like it’s the opposite, I don’t like dubs but I have to admit a lot of recent ones are not bad.
Previously the ONLY dubs I tolerated was Ghibli movies and Stand Alone Complex.
Two things with subtitles I do not like:
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I watch anime primarily for the animation and having to read tbe text on the bottom or top of the screen takes my eyes away from the action.
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They usually condense the thought into a shorter sentence and you lose a lot of flavor in the dialogue.
The most egregious thing I have seen regarding item 2 was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It’s so bland and boring with the subtitles vs the english dubbing. And it annoys me that every streaming service that has the film, has the subbed version.
And another thing regarding the argument itself is that how would you know the Japanese acting is good unless you understand Japanese? Ironically, the Japanese ends up more hammy than the English, because that’s what Japanese theatre is all about: wild exaggeration.
They usually condense the thought into a shorter sentence and you lose a lot of flavor in the dialogue.
I have never found this to be true (as someone who knows some Japanese). If you’re just comparing sentence lengths, that’s a broken comparison: it’s been shown that Japanese is less information dense per-syllable than English, so an English translation of Japanese will tend to have a shorter length. (And to compensate, Japanese is spoken faster than English on average.)
I am not just comparing the length of the words. I am talking about how subtitles tend to be very basic and just get the gist of the point across.
I would respond to that also with “I have never found this to be true” (or at least the vast majority of subtitles I have read I would not characterize that way). But of course there’s no real way for me to deny your own experience, unless you want to give specific examples.
(Also, l am talking about anime and typical anime subtitles. I just noticed that you mentioned Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; I think it’s very possible live-action subtitles are done in a categorically different way from anime subtitles.)
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Good dubs have always been a rare gem.
IMO the key to a good dub is two things:
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Actors and direction that prioritizes caricature without becoming “campy”. This is something JP VO is ridiculously good at. They identify a character’s personality, crank it up to 11, but still make the emotional delivery feel genuine, even if extreme
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Direction that understands the characters as intended by the author. This is where a lot of dubs fall horribly short. They do not consult with the original content creator, and wind up with voices and characterizations that may seem to work on the surface but are lacking the depth of understanding for a character needed for the performance to make sense over time as we learn more about them.
Just my 2c, but IMO this is where most of the problems with dubs come from, and why they wind up sounding either generic or campy.
Good way to put it; I’ve been a subs person for anime as long as I remember but I make an exception for games, I think in large part because they consult the devs more during localization. When anime does that, it seems to hit those two points.
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Me, a sub Connoisseur looking at all these dub peasants(also me looking at the subs themselves);
To be fair, dubs used to be really, really bad back when us old weebs were growing up.
Nowadays, studios think about localization from the start when creating the original dialogue, leading to much better quality dubs. Thus, the newer weebs never developed the cringe reflex we have.
The quality and quantity of voice actors has exploded, there are still plenty of places that cheap out, but the baseline level of voice acting in dubbing now is barely even comparable to 15 years ago.
Finding decent dubs used to be a needle in a haystack with big studio money required, you can name them all off on one hand, the OP did later on in the thread. Now it’s almost the opposite!
There’s also a shift in western, especially American, voice acting away from subtle emotional performances to the emotive and excitement filled performances of the Japanese voice actors too. It’s a few things right now.
theres just so much bad american english dubbing you can take before its unbearable
This has to be sampling bias or something; most classic dubs sucked.
Or it’s just nostalgia. MS Gundam Wing, Trigun, YuYu, DBZ, Tenchi, Bebop, all those Toonami era shows feel right dubbed. Tho watching stuff like DB Super I prefer the sub now.
As someone who just watched Trigun dubbed for the forst time a year oslr so ago… I would not call it a great dub. It wasn’t awful by any stretch, but it doesn’t hold up against something like Cowboy Bebop either. The truth is, there have always been, and there continues to be, really good dubs, but they have also always been few and far between. It takes more money than most are willing to invest to make them good, but there’s always a few gems that are willing to pay up and make them work.
As bad as the translation and other changes in Pokémon were, the voice acting was great (English and German dubs)
Probably because it was actually a show for ~10 yo kids, so the style the 90s dub studios were doing was appropriate.
Specifically the 4Kids dub and early TPCI dub (up until XY Kalos Quest) for me.
rewatch and compare closed captioned (Japanese with Japanese text). Then localized on your own, and review how Toonami butchered a LOT.
whole ass episodes they omitted.Yeah, the ones that made it to TV in the late 90s and early 00s had mid to decent dubs. But anything else was localized as cheaply as possible. There’s some gems in there, but mostly the dubs sucked until business realized how deep the market was. Evangelion is a good example. Great show, but it was clear when it was brought over they thought they were doing some cartoon and not a generational existential crisis.
It’s all in Tuna’s title:
Classic dubs seemed so much better. Now most dubs seem unwatchable
Anchoring to nostalgia is one hell of a bias.
I’m an older weeb, dubs are the only way I’ll watch, reading subtitles is exhausting and takes all the joy out of watching the show, dubs are the only reason I actually like anime
That’s interesting, when I watch something that was in English from the start, I often turn on English subtitles to reduce the cognitive load.
Good dubs are good, bad dubs are great mediocre dubs suck donkey balls.
I don’t watch dubs so can’t know for certain, but I can’t imagine newer ones are worse than the horrific cringe that made me decide to not watch dubs in the first place.
Pretty much the opposite for me. The older the dub, the cringier it tends to be.
To me, dubs make the characters feel out of place.
If I’m watching an English show, I assume the characters speak English. Same reasoning can be applied with Anime.
It’s just distracting to me when there’s a language mismatch. I would rather read subtitles on a screen, but have the ‘correct’ audio, than having characters speak a language they shouldn’t.
You should watch James Cameron’s favorite B movie: GUNHED. In its original release, characters in the movie spoke their own language.
