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Answerman - Can English-Speaking Fans Critique Japanese Voice Acting?

Quote:

In the original making, animation is matched to a seiyuu, and not the other way around, due to the process of animation.

The only anime to use this process (that I know of) is Akira, Red Garden and parts of Only Yesterday. All other anime is dubbed, even in Japanese, because it's cheaper.

voice acting takes a lot of queues from Japanese classical stage acting

That being said, this article is full of balogna. One of the first points you bring up, about cues and timing, is quite vague. In the original making, animation is matched to a seiyuu, and not the other way around, due to the process of animation. English dubs often end up more unnatural sounding because they do have to be matched to the timing set by the Japanese seiyuu. The way you put it sounds as if seiyuus time their voice to the animation.

Drama CDs are another gateway for seiyuus, and also a real show of their skills, as they have no animation to back up their acting. It's purely reliant on their skills to get the message and emotions across.

But a good chunk of the time what I'm hearing isn't really convincing as realistic acting, either. It's "anime voice work," and it usually doesn't need to sound realistic because anime is inherently an unrealistic medium.

Alkeia wrote:

That being said, this article is full of balogna. One of the first points you bring up, about cues and timing, is quite vague. In the original making, animation is matched to a seiyuu, and not the other way around, due to the process of animation. English dubs often end up more unnatural sounding because they do have to be matched to the timing set by the Japanese seiyuu. The way you put it sounds as if seiyuus time their voice to the animation.

While I appreciate your efforts on defending the seiyuu industry, you seem to be quite misinformed yourself.

As others have mentioned, most recordings are done with the animation barely completed. The seiyuu are most definitely matching lip flaps rather than the other way around. However, ufotable is one of the very very very few (perhaps even the only) Japanese studio who will do things the American way and do the animation after the voice recording so as to match the animation to the acting.

Here is a screenshot from the recording of the last Angel Beats! episode.



This is actually one of the cleaner examples. Like others have said, sometimes the seiyuu only have really rough storyboard sketches to record to. And by rough I mean you can barely make out what's going on. There are also many times where they will change parts of the script right before recording. It's up to the seiyuu to make sure the changes fit the animation timing.

For the most part I agree with what you're saying, but this part here is just plain incorrect.

Back on topic: " That's a major reason why so many people just can't deal with watching a dubbed anime, even if it's a really good dub."

My response to this is that I rarely hear good dubs anymore. Most the best dubs in terms of capturing emotion, believable performances and overall a more genuine sound, seem to be from the late 90s early 00's. I do agree that people's inner voices probably do make JP acting sound better than it really is and there's many popular seiyuu that I find to be "Bad" since they honestly sound the same in every show they're in. But then we have extremely diverse seiyuu like Chiwa Saitou and Yukari Tamura that have proven time and again that they are top tier that no dub can come near. Their time in voice acting school, years of experience, and raw talent are just obvious to me at this point. Overall, I think the problem of dubs vs subs is less that Japanese are "better", and more that the dubs are just bad on average in overall acting ability.

"Most dubs and dub voice actors" being bad is a fallacious claim

"It's about ACTING. Not just funny voices. Learn to act." - Rob Paulsen

This holds true regardless of whether the voice acting is in English, Japanese, or any other language. If a voice actor can't actually, you know, act, then what's the point?

On the subject of "doing voices": Not everyone can be Frank Welker, Harry Shearer, or Billy West. Or, for that matter, Steve Blum or Scott McNeil. A lot of Anglophones like to emphasize the "voice" part of voice acting over the actual "acting" part.

Dubs on the other hand are different. Because dubs are localized to certain audiences, only those audiences should have the right to praise or critique them. Let's take English dubs from North America. From what I can tell, based on searching on Amazon.JP, the English dub of Gundam Unicorn seems to be liked a lot. I also know that Tiger and Bunny's English dub is technically more popular in Japan than it is in the US. Does that even matter, though? Do the Japanese even have the right to praise or critique something that is not for them?

Actually, you can easily make similar claim about Japanese dubs as well, just look at Japanese voice overs of Western games or films. There's a reason why Squeenix got so much flak for their dub work on CoD, despite the fact that Japanese public used to watch stuff dubbed in their native language and probably has more tolerance towards dubbing.

I thought that was because the audience for the Call of Duty games in Japan contain a lot of diehard and vocal Americanophiles who consume a lot of English-language media subtitled into Japanese, and that it is their version of the subs-versus-dubs argument.