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Answerman - Why Do Dubs Cast Men As Boy Characters, while Japan Casts Women?

I was speaking in general terms, not specifically limited to anime. I live in the states now but I was born in and lived the early years of my life in Denmark. Easily half the programs on television were from other countries dubbed into Danish. Subtitles were prevalent as well but the dubbing really stood out to me because I found the change in voices so odd.

Remember that many massively popular American TV shows going back decades have been dubbed into a huge variety of languages: old westerns, "classic" shows like I love Lucy or Dick Van Dyke, Happy Days, Partridge Family, Brady Bunch, Seinfeld, etc... all that stuff has been dubbed for release worldwide.

I doubt Jose Cruz was trying to be rude here, he was just stating an observation. Frankly I think he is right. It's easy to miss if you live in the US and you don't have a foreign perspective, but it is very true that the US produces the majority of its own video content and imports relatively little. That is the opposite of the situation in most countries where a substantial part, if not the majority of the video content is imported from other nations and is dubbed or subtitled into the local language. "Primitive" might not be the best choice of words, but it's not very far from the truth. Dubbing is very much a niche thing is the US and is much more common elsewhere. And, of course, the opposite is also true: original production is more advanced in the US than elsewhere. That's not a statement of which is "better" or "good vs bad", it's simply descriptive. Nobody was insulting your favorite dub actors/actresses or saying there was anything "wrong" with dubs.

the Elric brothers by Vic Mignogna and Aaron Dismuke

Personally, I think Team Four Star's DBZ Abridged does the best Goku voice....

..........course that's also the best way to watch the show, period.

Rosette's voice in Chrono Crusade is bad in both languages, but exceptionally so in the English version,

I guess I should have used the word "small" instead of "primitive". That is, since the US doesn't import a lot of foreign media it's dub industry is small so the range of different voice acting styles is smaller, hence why they don't have voice actresses who specialize in voicing boys.

Also, I should add that Japan anime voice acting has a different style than live action dubs. I watched several Hollywood movies dubbed in Japanese and the voice acting in those movies sounded more natural than in anime voice acting which tends to be more extreme in the sense that in anime male characters often talk in an extremely rude fashion while female characters often talk in an extremely cute way.

The issue of watching anime dubbed in other languages besides the original Japanese is that the dubbing art of Japanese animation is unique to Japan.

The approach Japanese animation industry has to dubbing is unique: the greater gender fluidity in dubbing roles is part of that approach. When they are dubbing a character they don't associate the character's gender with the gender of the voice actor/actress instead they think "oh this character is supposed to sound cute so we get this actress who does this kind of cute voice", the gender of the character being irrelevant.

But the Western mentality is different: if you have character X is supposed to be a "young boy" then you are supposed to use an actor that more closely matches the demographic profile of the character he is dubbing. That's because the Western cultural attitude towards art dictates that representational art has to be adherent to reality while the Japanese cultural attitude regarding artistic expression allows representational art to be disconnected from reality.

By the way, this fundamental difference in cultural attitude regarding artistic expression is the fundamental reason why Japan has developed the manga/anime cultural sphere and the Western world has not. The contrasting gender dub casting decisions are also a reflection of these two contrasting mentalities. Another consequence of this contrasting mentalities is that anime voice acting tends to be so much more irrealistic than live action voice acting in Japan (hence why people often say that Japanese from anime sounds different from Japanese used by real people in daily conversation, because the Japanese cultural mentality allows it's fiction to radically depart from reality).

Another good example in the difference in cultural mentality regarding representational art is the attitude regarding lolicon manga. In Japan, since representational art doesn't really need to accurately represent anything in physical reality, the lolicon girl is an "abstract entity" that only exists on a piece of paper. In the West, people can go to jail from carrying this kind of manga because lolicon manga is regarded as child porn, why? Because westerners see the lolicon girl as an representation of an actual human child. Hence, from the Western cultural perspective, lolicon manga is child porn, from the Japanese cultural perspective it's not.

I think you should focus on a less confrontational interpretation when you read what other people write.

Maile Flanagan has been playing Naruto for years, so there's at least one prominent male role that has had a female dub actor.

Japanese audio directors cast women in male voice roles not just for boys, but teens and even adult men like Himura Kenshin. That would never happen in the US, because they just wouldn't sound right to us, and the sociology of American media consumers definitely plays a part in that. The Western idea of what guys sound like is simply lower.

Honestly, your posts sound like you're taking a passive-aggressive stance against English dubs and praising Japan like it can never do anything wrong with voice acting.

The part about watching live action Hollywood movies in Japanese is also quite peculiar. Live action movies should be watched in their intended original language, not a dubbed over one, since those are the live actors presenting the material as intended. It's why I would watch Toho brand Godzilla movies in Japanese, but I wouldn't watch Marvel and DC movies in any language except English because it wouldn't make sense to otherwise.

Voice acting is very subjective, and as such anime and game dubs can often be considered amazing in their own regard, often surpassing the original. For example, Grandia II's English dub is preferred to the original Japanese voices, which make everyone sound like generic stock fantasy anime characters. They also sound very listless when delivering their lines.

The US anime-dubbing industry hasn't been "amateurish" as a whole since at least the early 2000s, if not the late 90s. Like, when's the last truly-awful dub produced for a widely-released series?

I also find it strange that you're holding up Japanese voice acting to American dub actors in particular, instead of voice actors as a whole. If you're going to talk about skill level, the US has a longer voice-acting tradition than pretty much anyone, given that Disney and Warner Brothers (et al.) essentially invented wide-release animated works.

The Ghost Stories dub was fantastic and the only feasible reason to watch a terrible anime take on Scooby-Doo. I've never seen anyone claim that the Japanese producers requested it, only that they didn't really care what ADV did with it so long as they kept the basic plot intact. (I can't even fathom that people still complain about that dub in 2018.) As for the other shows you mentioned, given that they're all intended to sell toys and games to 6-year-olds, they're adapted in kind. There's not exactly much artistic integrity to lose in the first place.