Forum - View topic

Answerman - Why Don't Dubs Cast Real Kids?

Because most anime might not have suitable content for them to cast KIDS in.

The questioner is mistaken on School Babysitters. I don't think there are any child VA's in its cast.

I figured it's because boys' voices change so much.

Hey Arnold's title character was voiced by about six different little boys (counting the newest movie) If you watch the show in order, the changes can be a little jarring, somewhat.

Top Gun wrote:

Greed1914 wrote: I suppose that is one advantage of recording in LA since child actors are more common. On one of the commentaries for R.O.D the TV it was mentioned that Rachel was already involved with other non-anime productions. She was in the later seasons of Ikki Tousen that New Generation recorded, and she sounded different, which isn't too surprising since she was in her 20s by then. Heh, I was going to mention Rachel Hirschfeld in ROD the TV as being the best example of child acting I've ever heard in a dub. Then again both that show and Ergo Proxy were dubbed by Jonathan Klein and New Generation pictures, and they were the top tier of all anime dubbing studios.

You're mostly correct, though Taliesin Jaffe was the ADR Director of R.O.D. the TV. I know this because R.O.D. the TV has what is probably my favorite English Dub of all time.

Even if you can't cast kids in America, you can at least cast people (women) who try to sound like kids. So many cartoons these days have kid characters who have voices that don't even attempt to change their 30+ year old voices, like Gravity Falls or the Ducktales reboot. It's so offputting.

Famously, Charles Schulz insisted on only using child actors for all the animated Peanuts specials, starting with A Charlie Brown Christmas (one of several reasons CBS was hesitant to produce it in the first place). And, well... you can tell those were not professional actors. (Sally's actor was pretty much recording only a few words at best at a time instead of entire lines. Hence her delivery of "All I want is what. I have coming to me all I want. Is my fair share.")

And to be clear, I'm not knocking the Peanuts cartoons. I watch A Charlie Brown Christmas and It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown every year. But if you want to know why children aren't cast more often to play children, they're a pretty good example of what that can end up sounding like.

Because most Canadian dubs are unionized, they tend to cast kids more than a lot of U.S. dubs do. The ongoing Beyblade Burst dub features a lot of teenagers, for example.

Boys are difficult to cast on long runners. The original Beyblade's dub had the five leads played by pre-teen/early teenage boys. By the time recording for the series and movie wrapped, at least one of them (the kid that voiced Max) had their voice drop. IIRC, the same one even wound up moving out of the Toronto area, requiring Nelvana to lease out studio time locally to him. That Beyblade series "only" ran for 3 years. Ocean's pilot for One Piece had a very young Andrew Francis as Luffy. Imagine if they got the dub and it was successful. They'd either have deal with his deepened voice or recast the lead.

If we lived in an alternate timeline where the dub wasn't maligned because of its U.S. TV run, recording Card Captor Sakura: Clear Card with its original cast would be difficult. Not only were the actors behind Sakura and Li both children when the dub was recorded, Rhy Huber, the actor behind Li, pretty much quit acting years ago.

One thing that Eng. dubs sometimes have over some Japanese versions is that the former often get adult men to play adult versions of the boy character. Compare this to Mayumi Tanaka playing an adult Krillin.

I remember watching Hey Arnold as a kid and thought it was so cool that the actors were all kids, but I imagine it was an absolute pain in the ass to constantly coach and recast those roles on such a regular basis. Fun story, Eugene grew up to be Joseph Joestar and that will never not make me laugh.

Famously, Charles Schulz insisted on only using child actors for all the animated Peanuts specials, starting with A Charlie Brown Christmas (one of several reasons CBS was hesitant to produce it in the first place). And, well... you can tell those were not professional actors. (Sally's actor was pretty much recording only a few words at best at a time instead of entire lines. Hence her delivery of "All I want is what. I have coming to me all I want. Is my fair share.")

Finding kids that can actually voice act isn't that easy either.

One thing that Eng. dubs sometimes have over some Japanese versions is that the former often get adult men to play adult versions of the boy character. Compare this to Mayumi Tanaka playing an adult Krillin.

Heishi wrote:

Because most anime might not have suitable content for them to cast KIDS in.

I can almost guarantee that is not the reason. You can see child actors all the time in live action horror movies, and most anime that has child characters is not going to be obscenely objetionable anyway. And if it is, the content of the work means very little in the first place, as voice actors generally know only the immediate context of a scene when they go in to voice it, unless they happen to be a main character. It's not at all difficult to shield a child from the content of the work they are acting in.

David Matranga's session was considered fast for the first season because his character spoke so little that his recording for that season was done in half a day. If that is considered fast for an adult, I have to think that kids a realistic option.

This sort of thing is less of a problem in Japan, where anime voices are recorded in a big ensemble session. Having everyone voice their lines at once makes for a much more engaging experience for kids. That said, even in Japan it's pretty rare for kids to voice a major ongoing character. Almost all major child roles in longer TV series are filled by adult women.