Is it worth it to throw a big name Hollywood actor into an anime dub to get more eyes on the project? Chris and Lucas discuss.
Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network. Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.
Lucas
Chris, it turns out that great minds do, in fact, think alike, and everyone in the anime biz seems to be talking about voice acting this week! ANN's Answerman, Jerome Mazandarani, shed some light on why there are so few British dubs of anime last Saturday, and the Otaku Without Borders Isaiah Colbert just published a fantastic deep dive into the experiences of Black voice actors over on Aftermath. We're gonna get left behind if things keep progressing at this rate!
So, what do ya say? Wanna head into the booth with me and put a This Week In Anime spin on a discussion about voice acting???
Chris
Everyone's talking about talking, appropriately enough, and we wouldn't be This Week In Anime if we didn't follow that flow of conversation at least occasionally. Besides the delightful deep dives you mentioned, this past week also saw the news that the fourth Sonic the Hedgehog movie had found its voice actress for Amy Rose, and it was...Kristen Bell! As opposed to any of the professional VAs who have played Amy over the years.
And so our discussion here at Castle TWIAskull turned to the subjects of adaptational actor choices and stunt-casting in this space, and how that...speaks to industry and audience expectations of the profession.
Man, I am really of two minds about this casting decision. On the one hand, Kristen Bell already has big Amy Rose energy, will likely do a great job in the role, and the secret sauce of the Sonic movie franchise is that it's cast is stacked with performers who were big in the 90s that parents will appreciate even if they don't share their kids' affinity for the Sonic IP.
On the other hand, a lot of voice actors have brought the Sonic cast to life in animated and gaming mediums over the years, and it'd be cool if more of them could get a summer blockbuster-sized paycheck! These movies did bring veteran voice actress Colleen O'Shaughnessey in to play this version of Tails, and I think people were hoping that there would be additional opportunities for more traditional voice actors to join these films.
Personally, I do think it's very funny that Ben Schwartz keeps getting cast as classic blue cartoon heroes.
Because I agree that it's an odd phenomenon to judge, as professional voice actors have long labored under the perception that they were somehow "secondary" to live-action actors, to say nothing of how anime dub actors are seen as even tiers lower. The story goes that Joshua Seth, iconic voice of Tai in the Digimon dub, made more money playing this bit part in a SpongeBob movie than he did for all his work on that old dub.
That's uncool, and indicates why it might be nice to see these guys make it into movie roles instead of people famous for sitcoms!
While that rumor is deeply depressing if true, I also wouldn't be surprised that having a small role in a movie that featured the likes of Jeffrey Tambor, Alec Baldwin, and Scarlett Johansson (she played the mermaid princess Mindy) would net someone a better paycheck than even a leading role in anime dubs.
For as much as we folks in the anime sphere talk about voice actors, it's not a high-paying gig. Most folks in the profession that I've spoken with also have to juggle a few other side gigs to have any degree of sustainable income. So even if Ben Schwartz's line read of "I coulda been Turbo" will forever live in my memory, it's easy to understand why this kind of stunt casting can get people's hackles up.
DuckTales (2017) is an interesting iteration of this, since so many of the "celebrity" VAs it brought on, like Schwartz or David Tennant, ended up embodying their roles and giving incredibly strong performances in the show. It makes clear that you can't dismiss this sort of casting out of hand. Here's a screencap from the Astro Boy themed episode featuring "Inspector Tezuka" to keep things tangentially anime-themed as I round back to a more website-appropriate point:
Conversely, you have Netflix's Scott Pilgrim Takes Off anime, which pulled the "stunt" of reassembling almost the entire Hollywood cast from the Edgar Wright movie to reprise their roles. And they were...okay, mostly, at the voice acting thing. But the Japanese version, with a cast of true, talented seiyuu, acted circles around them and stands as my soundly recommended way to check out that great series!
Has enough time passed that we can finally start having more critical discussions of Scott Pilgrim Takes Off? Don't get me wrong, it's an interesting reexamining of the series in the context of a social and entertainment landscape that the comic and movie helped create, but it fell flat in its execution, and the flat performances of its non-voice actor EN cast definitely played a role in that.
Though, even as I say that, I've got to admit that Will Forte as Old Scott is pretty inspired casting!
On the one hand, casting celebrities in voice roles can result in compromised performances and lock professional VAs out of higher opportunities. On the other hand, sometimes it results in Will Forte singing "Konya wa Hurricane," so who can say if it's bad or not?
Downstream of this, I think of the films of Studio Ghibli and their often star-studded dub efforts for their Western releases (which, not for nothing, can generally coincide with big-name Japanese stars in the original versions).
These tend to be directed well enough to match the vibes of the original, plus give us neat bonuses like Robert Pattinson being an absolute gremlin.
Ignoring Christian Bale doing like three different accents for Mahito's Dad over the course of The Boy and the Heron, I actually really love that Ghibli casts pull from wildly different pools of actors than what we're used to hearing in any form of animation, as well as different directional inspirations. Ghibli films often feel very singular or only in conversation with other entries in the studio's body of work, and these casting choices feel like they were made to make a Ghibli film feel distinct, rather than to get butts in seats.
For as much as I love the rhythm, nuances, and traceable iteration in the micro-discipline of anime voice acting, I love hearing something totally different or unexpected in this medium from time to time!
Which is why I'll always hype up Love Through a Prism for having a British vocal cast to further drive home its English setting, even as the story was less than gripping for me personally.
Ah, reminds me of when the new Anne Shirley anime was getting ready to premiere and fans were insistent it should have a Canadian voice cast for the dub! Which didn't happen, but nevertheless!
Your example also makes me think of Funimation's Baccano! dub, which went all-in on the 1930s American accents for an exaggerated, authentic flavor, and wound up with something incredibly memorable as a result. Especially notable was Bryan Massey's incredible turn as Ladd Russo, when he apparently hadn't had a lot of voice roles by that point! Not the same thing as a celebrity stunt cast, but another example of the fact that you can never be sure where a strong vocal turn is going to come from.
Dude, I had a first class ticket on the Anne Shirley Canada Dub Hype Train! Hell, I still think the 2022 reboot of Urusei Yatsura should have gone with a British cast, as the BBC dub of select episodes of the original anime really helped me click into the grounded absurdism the show was going for.
It cannot be understated how inspired choices like these in the casting process or while directing talent can elevate a good show into a great one, or at least make a middling production more interesting. Maybe that's why I have such a negative and reflexive reaction to stunt casting to get more eyeballs on a project, because there are so many memorable examples of other productions making similarly distinct choices but for more creative, and far less overtly cynical, reasons.
To be fair, sometimes those stunts totally intersect with that creative distinction. I can think of at least a couple of recent times this happened—in the same show, even! Dan Da Dan giving into popular request and choosing Barbara "Rita Repulsa" Goodson as the dub voice for Turbo Granny...
...and then getting Marc Hudson, singer of freaking Dragonforce, to perform the English version of the "Hunting Soul" song!
Both standout choices that fit with the absurd, anything-goes nature of Dan Da Dan itself, I think.
I stand corrected! If stunt casting is what it takes to get songs in anime dubbed again, I'm all for stunt casting!!!
Though that being said, I'm still a little miffed that Channing Tatum was cast for a new supporting role in the Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle movie. Once again, he did a great job and by all accounts he took the role super seriously, but it cannot be understated how much a feature credit on a Demon Slayer scale project can help the careers of most voice actors working today. These instances of stunt casting feel more like an effort to further elevate an already successful IP through Tatum's celebrity, when this role on this project could have been someone's big break.
It's interesting, because big-name celebrities could pay tribute to anime through their mainline work. You can see this in, say, Michael B. Jordan being a massive weeb who allegedly convinced the costumers on Black Panther to craft him a Vegeta cosplay, and brought a whole host of explicit anime influence in his direction of Creed III.
By comparison, yeah, taking a cut and a role from a professional VA to give Demon Slayer a bump feels just a tad disingenuous.
True! More and more actors are letting their weeb flags fly in Hollywood nowadays, and the last thing I want to do is feed into gatekeep-y discourse of how only "real" anime fans should work in anime. We also live in a world where it's rumored that the only reason the Afro Samurai anime exists is because Samuel L. Jackson agreed to lend his voice to the project, and I really don't want to live in a world where the Afro Samurai anime never existed for obvious reasons.
There's also the point that, for as many people who are struggling who shouldn't be in the voice acting scene, the industry has also been an entry point and career launcher for several stars. By which I mean I'm not sure when I'll get the chance to share this again, so here's Bryan Cranston as Fei Long from Street Fighter:
I would not describe Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie as a "good" piece of cinema, but the project being a treasure trove of incredible nonsense like this is exactly why so many people love it to this day!
Myself included! It also serves as a standard-bearer for the stunt soundtrack treatment that some anime movies got back in the day, in case you ever wanted to see anime street fights set to Korn or Alice in Chains. It's an interesting point of promotion parallel to what you brought up about Afro Samurai. Several co-productions would go this route, like my beloved IGPX putting Haley Joel Osment and Michelle Rodriguez in the leads alongside a host of voice-acting royalty like Steve Blum and Tom Kenny.
Though notably, this wasn't even Osment's first voice-acting gig, since he started dubbing Sora in Kingdom Hearts like a year earlier. And man, if you want to talk stunt casting, just check out some of the names in that first release!
When will Square Enix bring back Sephiroth's original voice actor? He was so in synch with the rest of the cast!
I'm also starting to pick up on a trend here where overtly anime-inspired, or US-financed, pieces of media that US executives thought they could make big bucks on were just jam-packed with as many recognizable names as possible. Who knows! Maybe we all would have been nicer to the Uzumaki anime if it were filled with voice and live-action actors from our collective childhoods!
(For the sake of this column's comments section, please know that I'm being entirely facetious in my previous sentence.)
I mean, you say that, but the fact is that most of these examples we've brought up thus far were good or at least interesting enough to the point that even faltering stunt casting could only cause them to stumble a little bit. Generally, the issue is more with what it does to the scene and profession of voice acting itself when these kinds of castings happen.
On the flipside, you've got cases where a big-name stunt casting actually does drag down part of an anime. Such as, say, Gundam GQuuuuuuX bringing back Tōru Furuya for a surprise cameo even post-exposure as a serial scumbag.
Like man, this would've been one case where it was fine to replace a major voice actor in a role. With a big-name celebrity or otherwise.
Instances like the one you've described also hit particularly hard because Japanese talent agencies and production companies seem to be pretty good about sunsetting a performer's career after improprieties have come to light. That's in part why there's so much drama around the game Yakuza Kiwami 3 right now, as director Ryōsuke Horii is seemingly leaning into a performer being accused of sexual assault to further embellish a role.
I'm also curious about how exactly this kind of stunt casting works in anime, which famously have super tight budgets, especially when it comes to localization. I imagine Bryan Cranston worked under a pseudonym on the Street Fighter II movie to avoid getting in trouble with the Screen Actors Guild, but how does Channing Tatum get on Demon Slayer when his minimum quote is likely higher than the rest of every other voice actor on the project combined?
Hollywood unions are still unions, and folks can get into a lot of trouble, or worse, for skirting rules and regulations meant to help everyone in the profession, like not working non-union productions or agreeing to work for below industry standard rates and thereby lowering everyone's potential payment ceiling.
You're right about Cranston working under a pseudonym on Street Fighter (as did virtually everyone else on that movie, including other professional VAs who are major players today). As for Tatum, if Sony and Aniplex did have to shell out the massive bucks for him to appear in Demon Slayer, that funding was likely worth the offset due to the obscene amount of money that movie made in the theaters...which it was pretty much guaranteed to do by way of Demon Slayer's astronomical popularity. It begs the question of whether it wouldn't have been more cost-effective (and maybe set aside some additional funds for the rest of the cast and crew) if Tatum hadn't been brought on. Was he actually that much of a draw for the non-anime crowd who wouldn't be interested in this movie otherwise? It honestly makes the whole endeavor seem more akin to Sony funding their own awards show—more as a sign for their investors that they can, as opposed to anything they thought might help grow the medium. A stunt in the purest, most indulgent sense.
Or maybe Tatum and his family really are just big fans of Demon Slayer, like so many other people here, and he wanted in. I can't say for sure.
What I can say for sure, Chris, is that you've helped me rekindle my appreciation for stunt casting through this column! While the practice (such as it is) can inspire bigger professional and ethical questions, it's also often a means for a work to feel and sound distinct! We talk all the time about how there are too many anime releasing each season, and taking risks during the casting and vocal directing processes can go a long way in making a work feel unique, and this artistic medium more eclectic.
As we've covered, there are ups and downs to the practice. And we barely got to touch the instances of stunt casting on the Japanese side of things—a column for another time, I suppose. My last point on this subject is that I think it's just cool when dub actors get to the point where their casting is treated as a celebratory stunt in its own right, as Discotek has done a few times now when announcing new dubs by the "official" Lupin the 3rd cast.
To me, these guys are celebrities.
They got me to put this Steelbook at the top of my Christmas list last year, and I should have known that the Lupin crew would steal the show in a convo about voice acting! Sometimes, the best stunt any production can pull is bringing on the best people for the job and letting them prove why that's the case on screen.
Now, if only they could please pay all these folks a living wage.
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