Metablog

I think a lot of Anime series are pretty cool. I even think a few are really cool. And many Japanese movies are very enjoyable. But most Anime? Not so much.

Now, it’s not that the plots aren’t enjoyable, and the animation is generally really good. It’s simply that, for most series, the dubbing is just terrible. (Notable exceptions: most Miyazaki stuff, though even there there’s room for improvement.) Characters almost always have a monotonous cadence, like the translators are trying to fit too much English into each line of dialogue. The phrasing tends to be complex and awkward—stuff that probably sounds OK written on paper, but that sounds weird coming from people’s lips. The monotony is only intermittantly broken, by strange gutteral noises corresponding to some body language completely foreign and nonsensical to Americans.

On the other hand, much of this seems to be unavoidable. The voice actors have it pretty tough, after all. The original voice actors started out with a script. They performed the script, and then the animation was done around their performances. Dub actors have to do the reverse, which means they have to constrain their natural expressiveness to follow pretty precise timing. Languages tend to be about as concise as each other, on average, but individual phrases can occasionally vary widely in the length of representation between two languages. If the speaker in Japanese pauses after a particular phrase, as the phrase in English is likely going to be in a different place in the sentence, to make the pause have the same effect in the translation, often you have to squeeze several extra words in before the pause, and spread them out afterwards, or else just leave the pause in a weird place in the sentence that makes no sense and leaves viewers wondering what the point of the pause was.

I have to wonder whether it wouldn’t be possible to rearrange the frames in the animation to follow a translated performance, instead of vice versa. After all, most dialogue, especially in lower-budget shows, takes place with a single mostly static animation cell with two or three mouth positions switching around. Surely most of those could be rearranged to follow a more Americanized dialogue rhythm?

And while I’m sure that Japanese experience the same basic emotions as Americans, there are still a few body vocabulary differences between the cultures. And even worse, the animation idioms to express different feelings are very culturally specific and stylized, and tend not to make much sense to Americans. (I’m sure the same goes for American exports to Japan.) Often they’re wildly exaggerated—for instance, the character will, with no intermediate animation, go from standing to fallen on their back with legs up in the air, or suddenly have their jaw drop a foot or two and eyes widen to plate-size and a huge shiny spot appear on their head. I don’t mind that animation so much, but it would be better accompanied by sound effects than voice effects. But something that really annoys me is the “huh” sound you hear so often when, for instance, character A is speaking and the camera switches to character B for a reaction shot. That really disconcerts me.

But these difficulties can be overcome, and occasionally are. (The Cowboy Beebop movie had some great dubbing, for instance.) It just seems like the shops that do this don’t spend nearly the effort they need to to get a good result. And it really shows. And when they aren’t overcome, the result tends to be so bad that I simply don’t watch the show.

UPDATE: Hehe.

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