Some dubs are pretty good to be honest
I’ve been told that English dubs are way better now than 10 years ago for the last 20 years, but every time I hear something from a new dub, it still ends up having the same old problems. Like, my throat ends up aching because they insist on doing everything in falsetto for some reason.
they insist on doing everything in falsetto for some reason.
I mean, they’re doing that in the Japanese version too.
That’s the thing, though: they don’t, usually. Falsetto doesn’t simply mean forcing your voice to be higher than it is naturally (which is, of course, very common in anime), it’s a particular way of using your voice. You can also create a higher pitch with a head voice or even a chest voice. Falsetto is the easiest way to do it, but it’s also the hardest on your voice, which makes it hard to listen to for prolonged periods of time.
It’s not just the squeaky little girls either, even the young men are always very throaty.
Yeah most English dubs are low quality, unless it’s for a big, mainstream anime. Unlike German dubs, which are amazing. Some dubs, like Witch Watch in German, are even better(!) than original Japanese. Herecy, I know, I’m mad at myself.
But dubs are great when you want to multitask while watching.
older weeb here, quality dubs are rare but when found are a tasty choice.
now that most anime sources have become corporate wage slavers and are pressuring teams to use AI, those tasty dubs will become even rarer.
I still enjoy subs, but as I get older and start falling asleep earlier, dubs is the only thing that I can watch for more than 30 minutes.
Truely TERRIABLE dubs are also absolutely fantastic. Looking at you ghost stories.
Its when it’s in that sad depressing middle range that things suck. Which is what ai tends to do. Ai doesn’t make bad things. It makes painfully mid things. Which is just infinitely worse.
You don’t get the fun joke projects, the awful amateur nonsense, or the overly try hard cringe.
Ai could never make a true early 2000 cringe naruto amv with bad voice overs of some tween singing their soul out off key. It just can’t capture the truely bad.
Its also why I hate ai hentai dialog. Its unironically too good. It doesn’t capture that truely TERRIABLE bad hentai translation that makes up half the fun of reading it!
Ai just turns out 5 outta 10 quality no matter what. Its fucking terrible.
I’m getting strong AMV Hell vibes. 🤌
now that most anime sources have become corporate wage slavers and are pressuring teams to use AI, those tasty dubs will become even rarer.
So far I’ve only seen one brief push to do the dubbing itself with AI, and it was a disaster. As far as I know those dubs are lost media now; hopefully someone backed them up but I’m not seeing them.
It’s possible they’ll try to push AI for translating the dub, but I think that the AI would be really really bad at things like matching lip flaps so I think it’ll be a while before we really see much AI interference with dubbing. I see a lot of accusations that companies like Crunchyroll are using AI to translate subs, but even then I’m skeptical. There was an incident where a specific show clearly was doing that, but according to Crunchyroll that was a breach of contract from the 3rd-party translators they hired. As much as I distrust Sony, I’m actually inclined to believe them here. Honestly I’m not even convinced AI would speed it up that much, and they’re already not paying especially well, so hopefully there won’t be too much pressure to use AI (even though lots of big companies are pushing it to a comical degree).
Older weeb here; I have ADHD and the attention span of a goldfish, so I prefer anime in a language that I can speak.
Dubs have always sucked, still do too. Fansubs specifically are where the true experience is, they are of much higher quality (or at least used to be).
Two things with subtitles I do not like:
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I watch anime primarily for the animation and having to read tbe text on the bottom or top of the screen takes my eyes away from the action.
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They usually condense the thought into a shorter sentence and you lose a lot of flavor in the dialogue.
The most egregious thing I have seen regarding item 2 was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It’s so bland and boring with the subtitles vs the english dubbing. And it annoys me that every streaming service that has the film, has the subbed version.
And another thing regarding the argument itself is that how would you know the Japanese acting is good unless you understand Japanese? Ironically, the Japanese ends up more hammy than the English, because that’s what Japanese theatre is all about: wild exaggeration.
They usually condense the thought into a shorter sentence and you lose a lot of flavor in the dialogue.
I have never found this to be true (as someone who knows some Japanese). If you’re just comparing sentence lengths, that’s a broken comparison: it’s been shown that Japanese is less information dense per-syllable than English, so an English translation of Japanese will tend to have a shorter length. (And to compensate, Japanese is spoken faster than English on average.)
I am not just comparing the length of the words. I am talking about how subtitles tend to be very basic and just get the gist of the point across.
I would respond to that also with “I have never found this to be true” (or at least the vast majority of subtitles I have read I would not characterize that way). But of course there’s no real way for me to deny your own experience, unless you want to give specific examples.
(Also, l am talking about anime and typical anime subtitles. I just noticed that you mentioned Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; I think it’s very possible live-action subtitles are done in a categorically different way from anime subtitles.)
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I’ve been watching anime my whole life (I’m 30) and almost always do dub unless it’s not an option. Never had a problem with it.
“Older” weeb here: I don’t care about subs vs dubs anymore. I used to be a sub or die guy. But now I like dubs more since I can watch anime while in the gym or doing chores or after a long day of work, I can just chill watching a show without bothering with reading. If I want to read, I read a book and not watching a show. Also once I’ve gotten used to the dubs I started to enjoying them way more than the japanese ones and I often cringe listening to japanese voice when watching.
This made me realize it never was about the quality of subs or dubs, but just about watching enjoyment and mood and neither is right or wrong.
I feel like it’s the opposite, I don’t like dubs but I have to admit a lot of recent ones are not bad.
Previously the ONLY dubs I tolerated was Ghibli movies and Stand Alone Complex.
On the one hand, all anime and cartoons are dubs. Duh.
On the other, I think the last decade of English dubs have mostly been brilliant. But then I thought the same for Astro Boy in the 80s or Akira in the 90s. 🤷♂️
Some dubs are poorly done or made bad by external factors (politics, budget, half arsed production, retconning, etc), but that’s not a problem with the practice of dubbing.
theres just so much bad american english dubbing you can take before its unbearable
Good dubs are good, bad dubs are great mediocre dubs suck donkey balls.
I usually prefer subs for serious works and dubs for comedy – assuming the dub doesn’t completely suck.
I’m definitely an older weeb (since the early 90s) and I hate dubs, so this tracks.
This has to be sampling bias or something; most classic dubs sucked.
Or it’s just nostalgia. MS Gundam Wing, Trigun, YuYu, DBZ, Tenchi, Bebop, all those Toonami era shows feel right dubbed. Tho watching stuff like DB Super I prefer the sub now.
And then there was Ghost Stories.
That was either the best or the worst dub to exist, depending on how you look at it. They somehow managed to insult every person on the planet regardless of race, gender, nationality, political view, or anything. Yet its still hilarious at least to me.
Ghost Stories is literally the only one I’ll watch dubbed.
As someone who just watched Trigun dubbed for the forst time a year oslr so ago… I would not call it a great dub. It wasn’t awful by any stretch, but it doesn’t hold up against something like Cowboy Bebop either. The truth is, there have always been, and there continues to be, really good dubs, but they have also always been few and far between. It takes more money than most are willing to invest to make them good, but there’s always a few gems that are willing to pay up and make them work.
Dubbed is the only way to watch Yu Yu.
rewatch and compare closed captioned (Japanese with Japanese text). Then localized on your own, and review how Toonami butchered a LOT.
whole ass episodes they omitted.As bad as the translation and other changes in Pokémon were, the voice acting was great (English and German dubs)
Probably because it was actually a show for ~10 yo kids, so the style the 90s dub studios were doing was appropriate.
It also helps that the voice actors for the Rocket Trio in every language seen to have a blast.
Specifically the 4Kids dub and early TPCI dub (up until XY Kalos Quest) for me.
Yeah, the ones that made it to TV in the late 90s and early 00s had mid to decent dubs. But anything else was localized as cheaply as possible. There’s some gems in there, but mostly the dubs sucked until business realized how deep the market was. Evangelion is a good example. Great show, but it was clear when it was brought over they thought they were doing some cartoon and not a generational existential crisis.
It’s all in Tuna’s title:
Classic dubs seemed so much better. Now most dubs seem unwatchable
Anchoring to nostalgia is one hell of a bias.
