Forum - View topicAnime Dubs as Good as Cowboy Bebop
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mdo7
 Posts: 8238 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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English dub has came a long way from being horribly acted to critically acclaimed, thanks for writing this up. English dubs in anime and foreign animation don't get the appreciation it deserved.
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penguintruth
 Posts: 8632 Location: Penguinopolis |
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Robotech?! An inaccurate dub is not a good dub. You might as well say Dragon Ball Z or Cardcaptors.
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rahzel rose
 Subscriber Posts: 851 |
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I absolutely agree that Jerry Jewell was fantastic as Claire in Baccano. The rest of the cast was mostly fine although the French(?) accents for Huey and Chane were not my favorite and unfortunately took away from the characters for me.
Some old school dubs I still love even now are Escaflowne and Gundam Wing. |
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mdo7
Posts: 8238 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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Japanese voice doesn't equal superior voices. Beside anime, I've watched some of our American cartoon and video game in Japanese dub/voices (even with those that used well-known seiyuus), they can be a hit or a miss. Yes, there are medicore voice acting in Japanese too, so there's no such thing as superior voices. |
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invalidname
 Contributor Posts: 2554 Location: Grand Rapids, MI |
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I hoped and expected to see Baccano! here, and Christopher Farris did not disappoint. Was also happy to see Pop Team Epic, and I’m still salty that Crunchyroll hasn’t put the superb second season on Blu-Ray.
Fanboy pick. I met Colleen Clinkenbeard at a convention years ago, when I was cosplaying as her character from Rumbling Hearts. The interesting thing she said was that that performance felt to her the most like acting on stage, more naturalistic and without any conventional anime affectations. It kind of makes sense because the melodrama is highly naturalistic — no Super Saiyans or rubbery pirates in sight — and also because the characters age out of high school in a timeskip prior to episode three, allowing the cast to play them as adults. It’s a pity the show disappeared from Crunchyroll sometime in the last few weeks, but it’s been available digitally since Funimation first put a few of its titles on the iTunes Store back in like 2008, so it’s had a good run. (Also, for god’s sake, why is Baccano! not streaming anywhwere?) |
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Iritscen
 Subscriber Posts: 910 |
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I've been rewatching Mob Psycho 100, and it has a very natural sounding English dub that retains all the humor of the Japanese original. In fact I think it's one of the best dubs I've ever heard.
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Tiago97
Posts: 24 |
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FMA and FMA:B are two of the best dubs I've seen. I think I prefer the English cast. Or maybe it's something in those stories that feels somewhat Western? Because hearing those characters speaking English just feels right in my mind.
Baccano as mentioned has an incredible dub, Bryan Massey's performance as Ladd Russo is particularly memorable. |
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Chris Handsome
 Posts: 362 |
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No Goldenboy?
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Atelier
 Posts: 45 |
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The way I understood it is not so much that Japanese is better than English, but that the original is always the best, whether it's Japanese or English (or any other language). Not trying to derail this conversation into a dub vs sub discussion. I just think the creator's intent holds a lot of weight for me as well, which is why I watch everything in its original language (be it animation, live action, video games). Which is not to say, that there is no value in dubbing. As someone who grew up in Germany, we get everything dubbed here, and I have a lot of great memories with certain dub versions. Somehow, even some of the american dubs, I ended up watching, and Cowboy Bebop and Beck are definitely great examples of quality dubs. I definitely think we have come a long way, and the small snippets that I'm seeing from recent shows, show me that the quality has improved drastically and is a lot more consistent, which is great to see. Some more english dubs that I got familiar with through social media osmosis and that really left an impression on me was Love is War, FMAB and Fruit Basket. |
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malvarez1
Posts: 3026 |
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I was going through the article silently begging for Death Note, and lo and behold! Death Note’s dub is amazingly strong, and considering how the dialogue makes the show, that’s a good thing.
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Zerreth
 Posts: 218 Location: E6 |
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Christopher Farris nails the philosophy that I generally follow regarding context. Baccano and Black Lagoon have been shows I cherish for their strong dubs in both languages.
I think it's probably also important to look at the actual spoken context as well because a lot of the narou fiction works are, more often than not, incredibly thinly-veiled fantasies and have characters effectively speaking in Japanese anyway with uniquely Japanese idioms and figures of speech, and/or also have the creator give up building the world a few volumes in and new characters just ultimately have Japanese sounding names. An example against this would be something like Re:Zero where Subaru is repeatedly very confused at Garfiel's in-world figures of speech that other characters have no problems understanding.
I don't mean to pick on her specifically, but the emphasis I placed in the quote is admittedly some of the problems I've generally had with English dubbing. I will preface this with I haven't heard the English dub of Rumbling Hearts so I can't judge that performance specifically, but voice projection in stage acting specifically requires you to exaggerate your voice and syllables in a particularly unnatural way which often then seems to be reflected in English anime dubs. The (personally) infuriating aspect for me is that this doesn't seem as pronounced in American cartoons. I'm aware that Japanese dubbing does the same with scripted mannerisms and tonal cadences for easy character identification that (from my understanding) has roots all the way back to kabuki theater and Takarazuka Revue productions, but also in that vein, I'm not very fond of those ultra exaggerated mannerisms and performances in Japanese either. As a side note, one part of English dubs that still bothers me is that when the setting is Japanese, the dubbing and many, many voice actors still don't seem to quite be familiar with the context of the setting. Names are still pronounced with incorrect syllable emphases (or just flat out getting the name wrong) with a general hesitation that's still present in the final cut. I don't want to pin the blame on any one person but it's been so longstanding that I can't tell if it's an issue with the voice director not guiding the actors to get a cleaner take, or if it's the actors simply pronouncing it however they want rather than taking efforts to try and incorporate Japanese proper nouns more smoothly into the line. |
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1778 |
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As someone who is not a native English-speaker and who grew up and continues consuming a lot of media dubbed into Neutral Spanish, I always find it fascinating the perception of actual native English-speakers towards their own dubs, particularly towards anime. Dubbing in general in Spanish-speaking Latin America is kind of complicated, most of it is done in Mexico City, but there're plenty of dubs made also in Argentina, Chile, Colombia and Venezuela for the whole region. But in regards to anime the thing that I found most interesting is that I get the impression that it seems most English-speaking VAs tend to work only in anime and nothing else, maybe also in video games, but I do know that, VAs like Steve Blum, who voiced Spike in Cowboy Bebop, does a lot of work in cartoons and video games, but here in Latin America dub VAs work in everything, live-action, cartoons, anime, video games, audio books, etc., for example, you have Mario Castañeda, famous for voicing Goku in Dragon Ball, but he's also the usual dub VA for actors such as Bruce Willis and Jim Carrey and voices characters like Zapp in Futurama,
The quality depends on the studio, the director, the VAs and sometimes even the country, there's a lot of people who tend to complained about modern dubs, but I have seen several dubbed movies in theaters completely full so I guess people don't mind not hearing the original actors, most of the time at least. Of the anime mentioned in the article, it's kind of curious that some of them have had more than one Neutral Spanish dub made, Cowboy Bebop's original Neutral Spanish dub had an incredible voice cast, but it had a lot of translation errors, in 2021 it got redubbed twice, one for Funimation and another one for Netflix and they were find and some of the original VA reprised their roles but they didn't have the same impact. Robotech was dubbed into Neutral Spanish in the '80s and it's considered a classic, but in the 2000s it got redubbed, and desptie both dubs being made in Mexico City none of the original VAs came, despite most of them active, so people didn't like the redub. While I'm on the subject of multiple dubs, I thought I might mention a recent example that touches on a controversial topic, it turns out that Dan Da Dan has two Neutral Spanish dub versions, one made for Netfix and another one made for Crunchyroll, both made in Mexico City, and while Netflix's dub is a pretty straightforward dub, Crunchyroll's dub has a lot Mexican slang in the dialoge which has become kind of divisive, but this is something that has happened with other dubs made in Mexico in the past, not just in anime, and it's that some phrases are not used in other Latin American countries outside Mexico and some people thing it's annoying. I personally don't care, I find both dubs to have a great cast, and Crunchyroll's version at least adapted the songs into Spanish unlike Netflix's version. I also find it funny that Marc Winslow voices Jiji in CR's dub and Kinta in Netflix's version. |
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Oggers
 Posts: 468 Location: Ontario, Canada |
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Baccano and Aggretsuko definitely have excellent dubs, the former especially due to all the period-accurate accents and slang. While the dubs for Studio Ghibli films are generally quite good, The Boy and the Heron having Robert Pattinson, of all people, do an almost completely unrecognizable voice for the Heron stands out for sure.
I'm surprised the Yu Yu Hakusho dub wasn't mentioned, though, since that dub has also held up pretty well. I've heard some people say that they even prefer watching the dub over the original Japanese. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 19150 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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This isn't just an English dub thing. I've also heard Japanese VAs butcher the pronunciation of Western names on countless occasions over the years. That aside, I agree with many of the selections on this list, especially Baccano! and DiD, though I'm a little surprised Black Lagoon was only mentioned in passing. Other older dubs that might merit mention here include Hellsing and The Twelve Kingdoms. (The English dub for the latter was even praised by the anime's director.) Among more recent titles (prior to this season), I'd point to 86 and Frieren as highlights on the English dub front. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 5303 |
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I've watched so many great dubs over so many years that it feels nearly impossible to single out just a few of them. What first comes to mind for me aren't individual series dubs, but a few specific dubbing studios. Animaze (who were associated with ZRO Limit Productions) gave us the Cowboy Bebop dub, and their catalog reads like a who's who of some of the greatest dubs ever created. Big O, Ghost in the Shell: Stand-Alone Complex, Outlaw Star, Serial Experiments Lain, Trigun, Wolf's Rain...all of these from the same studio. They were absolute masters at getting talented actors together to create incredible performances, and I dearly miss them. Rest in peace, Kevin Seymour.
The other studio I think of right away is New Generation Pictures, whom I tend to associate with Geneon's prestige titles. They produced fantastic dubs including Ergo Proxy, Haibane Renmei, Hellsing (Ultimate), Paranoia Agent, and Texhnolyze. Their best dubs always managed to sound very subtle and naturalistic in a way that most other studios couldn't match. I want to give a special shout-out to R.O.D. the TV, an incredible dub that took the extra step of hiring talented child actors to play a few of the lead roles. Outside of Ghibli movies that almost never happens in the anime-dubbing scene, and the results spoke for themselves. Unfortunately New Generation is only active on the video game side of things these days, but when they worked on anime it was almost guaranteed to be great. A lot of the other series I would have mentioned have already come up, whether it's Funimation's excellent work with the likes of FMA, Baccano, and Beck, or The Ocean Group's gloriously profane Black Lagoon dub. More recently Funiroll has been putting out some fantastic dubs, with Frieren and The Apothecary Diaries being particular highlights for me. I think One Piece also deserves a special shout-out for the sheer insanity of juggling hundreds of roles over 1100+ episodes. And as far as one-off dub efforts go, I don't know that anything can top what Synch-Point did with the original FLCL, featuring Barbara Goodson and Kari Wahlgren embracing every single ounce of its insanity. |
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