Not all dubs are good, but being snotty about them as a dogmatic stance is 
Dubs are typically bad because the same handful of localisation teams get hired over and over again to do them cheaply. They don’t do casting, they don’t do effort, they have an in-house team that they re-use over and over and over again. They are just phoning in the work and aren’t really trying to elevate the performance or do it spectacularly or anything.
This is different in the cases of some dubs. Ghibli has a habit of only getting serious actors for their voice-acting roles even in English. Howl’s Moving Castle’s main characters are played by fucking Christian Bale(batman), Jean Simmons and Lauren Bacall. A-list voice acting team.
So yeah some dubs are really seriously done by people who really genuinely have talent and care. But many are also not. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with acknowledging this.
I generally prefer proper voice actors to hollywood stars. Ghibli works turn out well enough, but I suspect if they spent that same amount of money on professional VAs and allowed the team to focus on quality instead of speed and low cost, it would be much better.
Almost the entire budget of Princess Monoke’s North American release was spent on celebrity voice actors lol. I think they paid Billy Bob Thorton more money than the actual film cost to make. Stephen Spielberg picked up the tab, though. He really wanted it to get distributed outside of Japan.
And Thornton fucking sucked in that.
It’s like how Dio’s voice actor keeps getting cast over and over even though he’s got an extremely familiar voice.
I preferred subs when I used to watch a lot of anime. But there were some anime that I found much better in their dubbed version. Ghost in the shell, dragonball z and recently cyberpunk edgerunners (which I can’t even imagine watching the subs for). Like I mentioned I don’t watch as much anime any more (prefer manga because I’m super impatient) but I’m sure that subs have gotten much better as well.
Also with the death of fansubs the quality of subs seems to have declined, ironically. Not sure if that also affects dubs if they get the same script but id think so. So both lose out on that front.
I liked when fansubs would include little bits of language trivia marked with TN
even keikaku means plan
Yeah. In gintama those notes were so good because some jokes would make no sense to non Japanese viewers.
But yeah while dubs seem to be getting better and subs seems to have gotten a bit worse with the death of fansubs, the sub vs dub choice seems to be just a matter of personal preference. Like for me I could never watch a slice of life in dub. But for scifi I would much rather watch a dub.
I noticed when watching season 1 of The Founder of Diabolism that the donghua community seems to still be in its fansub TN era
That’s pretty dope because even though companies screech about piracy, fansubs were a huge factor in popularizing Japanese animation all over the world, not just in English speaking countries.
I couldn’t have vegeta any other way than dubbed
That’s Goku for me. Watched DBZ from like 2000 through GT and when super came out and I watched the first episode in Japanese my brain couldn’t handle it.
Back in the 90s and early 2000s when voice acting was barely seen as a real job in the first place, especially for this weird niche Japanese cartoon industry that probably won’t get much popularity in the west, it made a lot more sense to discount English dubs. These days they’re generally good.
I still watch subbed as my first choice because I know just enough Japanese vocabulary and phrases and stuff to glean some extra depth from the original script and the choices the translators make. Even as just some guy with no strong grasp on Japanese I identify outright translation mistakes surprisingly often, I guess translators / localizers are dealing with a lot of challenges and deadlines and shit that I don’t really have any conception of.
But I don’t mind dubs. If I’m watching anime with someone else and they prefer dubs it isn’t gonna bother me. And chances are if a scene is weird I can look it up and someone’s already broken down how that translation happened lol
YES!
I think the reason Delicious in Dungeon rekindled my love of anime is because the dub is so good.
Humour in particular relies on delivery and timing which can be lost if you’re not fluent in the language you’re watching it in.
English dub actor provided genuine certified autism for Laios
He’s just like me fr fr
I usually prefer subtitles when I’m watching foreign media because the bizarre current obsession with perfect lip sync often means there’s a lot to be desired with the translation
I have watched German shows in German too
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Seeing a “dubs bad” take nowadays is so jarring, it used to be unanimous between anime watchers because anime wasn’t all that popular yet and people were mostly watching shows that didn’t have dubs anyway, but now as more people start watching someone would only develop a take like that if they dip into oldschool anime culture
Good dubs do exist but i really do just prefer the japanese voice actors most of the time and the dub in a lot of cases just doesn’t come close. I do give it a go to see what its like because sometimes i find good ones.
Cowboy bebop is and always will have the most immaculate dub out there. But most dubs lets be honest just sound like pokemon and totally ruin whatever emotion was supposed to be imparted and sometimes can completely ruin the feel of an entire anime. I wish the companies would just invest more money and time into making a good dub
Reading cringe dialogue is less jarring imo
I’ll usually have subtitles on regardless, so it doesn’t matter too much
Same. They can help. I prefer them for non-anime films and shows too, even while in English.
Fellow old person identified!
the canon dub is actually the spanish one
I’ve seen clips of Chainsaw Man dubbed in Spanish and can confirm this.
Why can’t you secondaries just read the manga, and buy the English translated tankobon at your local bookstore when they come out
Sub snobs make no sense to me. They say you get a “more authentic” experience hearing the original team, but animation is also a very visual medium, and your play of the eye over the canvas is a big part of the vision too.
If you want the full experience, learn the language. Otherwise, do what you feel is best for a given work.
but animation is also a very visual medium, and your play of the eye over the canvas is a big part of the vision too.
Maybe if you’re a slow reader but I just glance at the text or pick it up from my peripheral vision. It’s less distracting than watching the dubs either repeat frames or just not match up with the voices. Plus most dubs are just kinda mediocre which really lowers the product.
Also white people going “Onii-chan!” in some dumb cutesy voice is so cringe I literally can’t continue watching it. It’s cringe when Japanese people do it to be clear but less so.
I’m convinced that a lot of the (mostly old now, thankfully) takes about English dubs being worse than the original Japanese VA boil down to 2 things.
- Cringe dialog is the same cringe in both languages, but a foreign language gives the viewer a language and cultural buffer to hide behind. It’s the same cringe people!
- Non Japanese speakers have a hard time telling if Japanese VA is any good. How would they? Understandimg VA quality requires a nuanced understanding of language (inflection, word emphasis in a sentence, region, time period, etc etc).
Not saying that all, or even most, dubs are as good as the original language VA, but they are certainly of a similar quality level as a lot of other Western animation VA (that is to say, a generally accepted level of quality). And you cannot convince me that all anime has good original VA, that’s just super unlikely. That would be like saying because America has Hollywood most movies made there have good acting.
The full-volume American accents in most English dubs break my suspension of disbelief. It just sounds weird.
What sucks is that dubs and subs usually aren’t the same and for non-native speakers that like having subs on top of english voice (like me), it becomes too jarring to watch.
Then again, I don’t really watch anime anyway
