Why are dubs so bad? No, I mean seriously, on a technical level, how does this happen?I'm not a dubfag to begin with. The thing is, I can listen to a dub and immediately recognize "this is bad. this is just awful". Why can't the people MAKING IT realize that?All the voice actors are bad. None of them fit the characters they've been assigned. They all sound like they're embarrassed to be there. They're all doing some kind of weird whisper-acting like they're afraid to actually emote anything. They're wooden, static, don't know how to read lines or ever change their tone of voice between them. Even if the lines themselves tend to be poorly translated and awkward to begin with due to elements of the language patterns that are hard to localize without experience, they still just don't even bother try and find a way to wrap them into some kind of cadence that fits the context. It's always just such a shitshow. How can people invest time AND MONEY in this, and not realize it's terrible and be embarrassed about what a shitty effort they've done?
>>287257830Dub watchers have no standards, so trying isn't necessary.
>>287257830Not to sound xeno but it's about the way americans talk. In casual conversation it's fine, but while voice acting they ham it up and their voice gets a specific range of inflection that's really irritating.
English is a shit and inferior language.
>>287257830Because the dubs are all done by weirdos in california who don't know how normal people act. They're all nepo hires, too.
>>287257970Voice acting in American cartoons doesn't sound anywhere near as bad as their voice acting in dubbed anime, though.
>>287258276You're a talented American voice actor in the 90s. You can get a job on the hit primetime animated show The Simpsons paying $300,000 per episode, or you can get a job dubbing foreign cartoons for $350 per episode. What do you do?Dubbing by its nature attracts dogshit voice actors. The good voice actors are all on Fox/Disney/WB/Nickolodeon/etc.
>>287257830From when I watched them, directors had a weird obsession with trying to fit the sound to the mouth flaps. This not only limits how they write the lines, but severely restricts how the actors can deliver them. And they aren't good actors in the first place.There's nothing they can really do while working within that self-imposed restriction.
>>287258514Not to mention, they almost never pronouce the names correctly
Not everyone in Japan likes anime. The voice acting can sound bad to them. A lot of people get the impression that anime fans are societal dropouts and serial killers
Jap voice acting and acting in general is also awful
>>287257830Picture unrelated I assume as the OG Giant Robo The Day the Earth Stood Still dub is a classic. Technically the main reasons are.1. tempo and flow, Japanese just puts out information in different places in a conversation, so you need to do some real extensive re-writing if you want to avoid it sounding a bit wrong in English.2. Repetiition sounds good in Japanese, English hate it.3. You underestimate how much everyone sounds like a collection of pigs from how hammy it is in Japanese too a lot of the time too.
Since there's a lot of cope and excuses about this topic let me explain it in definitive terms.Anime dubbing was originally done by zero budget studios that hired essentially "local talent" aka someone's weeb nephew or whoever is the local weeb club. These early efforts were utter dogshit.Later on, as the market expanded it never really ditched this concept of hiring "fans" since anime for a long time had a stigma of being for losers so the talent pool was extremely limited.This created some sort of stylistic drift where hammy garbage voice acting was considered the norm so new people entering the field tried to emulate it. That is somewhat changing in recent years since the video game industry and the anime industry merged a bit so they share VAs and it's now for normies instead of dorks only.
>>287259330There's at least one I can recall from way back that used proper actors for the English dub, but that was definitely not the norm. Usually it was exactly as you said, local talent that wasn't really talented at all, they were just available and willing.A lot of anime dub actors are theater kids who failed to make it in the big leagues, so they churn out garbage for peanuts. Most licensors aren't going to put up the money required to source actual voice talent, with Ghibli being a noted exception because it's Disney.
>>287257830American voice acting is low pay, low talent. Anybody with talent is voicing AAA rating video game characters or is in certain high paying western cartoons (the main Simpsons voice actors get over 300k PER EPISODE for example).Other countries tend to be better - Germany has a good dubbing scene because the pay is better and consequently talent and training is better.Note as well, however, that real Japanese sounds very different to anime. Japanese voices in anime are artificial themselves, most non-speakers just won't realise because they don't understand the nuances and inflection of how there are very specific voice types that they train seiyuus to do, rather than a natural mode of speech.
>>287261111It's true that anime voice acting is different from normal speech, but too many people use that to excuse bad dubs. You can listen to shit voice acting and know it's shit even if you don't speak the language. Certain things are universal.
>>287257830Aside from simply being fewer people that are actually good at voice acting in America, any anime will have japanese names and words in it and just as how japanese pronounce engrish funny, native english speakers pronounce japanese like shit.
>>287257830Because they’re no longer actors but instead just voice actorsMost of the good ones in the west just do games
>>287260016Fotm screen actors =/= "actual talent"
>>287259330For better or worse, Netflix has been putting actual talent into their dubs. Pluto had Keith David as Dr. Tenma while their ither dubs have western VA's who otherwise don't do anime like Corey Burton and Michael Bell.
>>287263332The biggest problem is unions
>>287263480That and Jewchiroll having a monopoly on anime licensing
>>287263516Yeah, but you’d think Sony would have access to a lot more
Why the fuck do people try to pretend that Japanese anime voice acting secretly sounds bad when I can hear that it doesn't with my ears.
>>287263177>Most of the good ones in the west just do gamesBut game dubs are also very bad
>>287257830Dialogue translated from Japanese to western languages always comes off as stilted, which makes it harder to deliver lines.Also American dubs are just bad by deisgn because the VAs feel the need to do funny and over the top voices instead of trying to sound natural so it's almost never going to sound good. I'm not trying to shit on America in general but this is what I've noticed, I'm sure it happens in other languages too.
>>287257970I agree with you there. It's that standardised generic American accent that 99% of all VAs speak in and it feels completely false. Same thing with American football commentators and news anchors, etc. I don't feel the same way about the regional accents though (southern, north-eastern, etc.).
>>287257830This anime been dubbed twice, they're both cheesy but it fits the show.
>>287257830Anime will always have a sound to it, doesn't matter what language it's in due to the voices being done after the animation vs western way of voices first then animation, anime lack of lip sync gives it the unique sound it has but also makes it rough compared to western animation or live action because of how it's produced, though it's basically design to be dubbed due to the lack of lipsync but I personally think anime just has a sound to it no matter the language even if the acting good in a dub or sub.
>>287257830
>>287257830>Seen multiple anime in both>They sound about the same most the time unless it's adaptation type dub that changes the story and tone I don't know, man it's usually not that different https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO5hSrlhYf0
>>287263954Dubs, sureBut a lot of games use good actors now, unfortunately the ones with good actors often use their likeness as well
>>287264648The way anime made you can't have improv shows like Home Movies, not that Japan does improv anyways.
