Anime releasing from Shinichiro Watanabe coming to America first before Japan?

Odd development. Not only will I, being of a weird mind that likes dubs more than subs, not have to wait a year+ to see this in a format I prefer, but it's actually releasing around the same time! From my favorite director!

Hoping this sparks a revolution and things just start releasing globally like our good ol gamin' industry.

ALSO YES I'M GLOATING

 

I've been pretty much looking at SPACE DANDY with a wary eye. I'm very much against dubs for television and film to begin with, and anime dubs even moreso. On the one hand it's a Watanabe series, and they've almost always done his stuff justice in the past. But on the other hand, that was a different world back before 2007. So I'm not gonna expect much out of it right now. I hope it's part of the movement that has started towards saving anime, but it's far too early to tell.

Spoiler: For anyone who wants to know what I have against anime dubs

Anime dubs are, usually but not categorically, bad. Why are they almost always bad, though? They are of a lower quality than you'd expect from a thing that is attempting to make money. Okay, what do you mean by quality? I mean, it sounds like the people doing the voices are bad at acting. I mean, it sounds like the director missed the point of the character and ruined the dynamics presented in the original as a result. I mean, you are guaranteed to lose meaning when you translate it completely into English. I mean, the industry is toxic and should collapse from their awful decisions.

Alright, so I made a lot of assertions. Let me start explaining why they are all, to one extent or another, true. First up, the voices are bad. Anyone who has tried to watch a show like Genshiken or Raildex or Deadman Wonderland or Soul Eater or PMMM or just about anything released after the recession hit could probably sympathize with this point already. There is a very good reason for this very bad thing to happen. As always, it's money. Believe it or not, the anime watching community isn't a very good source of income here in the west. In fact, most studios over here try to get the dubbing done in one day if possible, because sound work costs money based on how many days you rent out the space. So we've got a lot of people rushing through their work and not getting paid a bunch. Kinda obvious where this is leading. Here's the next problem with that, they don't hire new people. There are a lot of capable voice actors who speak English. Yeah, you wouldn't think it from what they're peddling half the time, but they exist. They don't get jobs though. New people always have a hard time breaking into acting, because there aren't a lot of jobs and there are a lot of people. So why are the good people so frequently cut out? The way they do casting, of course. From what I can glean, you send in your voice reel, they look through a bunch until they find some people they know will show up on time for work and then they do callbacks. The reason for this is because studio space is expensive, you don't want a flake even if the alternatives are completely mediocre. Yeah, how good you are is usually secondary if it is at all considered. And that is all a matter of budgeting. So the voices are going to sound bad unless you get a company like Sunrise doing it. You ever noticed that most of the Gundam series, even now, are passable? Yeah, it's because they're willing to drop the cash on quality. My point here amounts to this, the industry is full of cheapskates who don't care about quality so it's completely random if it turns out sounding good at all.

Next point is the direction. The reason why the direction is bad a lot of the time is time itself. Studio time. Yep, same reason why VAs don't get a fair shake. Direction isn't exactly an easy job, but when you've got limited takes, you're always gonna settle. Another reason is, guess what, it's a Japanese series. Whenever you're localizing a foreign show you're not gonna get it. You may think you get it, but a lot of the time there are many little things that pass you by when you're running through it the first few times. So when you try to localize it straight off with possibly no prior knowledge of it at all while trying to adapt it such that a western audience will get it, you just lose even more. Fact is, you can't really dub certain character types because of cultural boundaries. Certain shows do a lot better because they have more universal messages and characters. Gurren Lagaan has a lot of western fans because the show is trying to communicate freedom, manliness and never giving up. Really generic messages that all people are gonna get. Oddly enough the Gurren Lagaan dub was also passable and is only so overlooked because it was so overshadowed by the original, which probably had a higher budget. Go figure that one out.

I started building into this earlier, but I'm gonna really get to it now. Language barriers will always exist. I like watching subs, personally, because I can understand tiny fragments of what's being said, and that enriches my understanding of the background. A really good example is honorifics. No translation, because it's a pure cultural difference. In the States we use Mister, which was short for master which connotes respect in a certain way. It is used for adult males. Then we have Miss, Missus, and Ms. Yep, three different words and three different meanings. Dubbing this into Japanese would have all four of these words combined in to the -san suffix. Yep. That's an accurate translation. The same goes the other direction. We don't have honorifics for children and we don't use the same word for uncle and random dude on the street. But in the end these examples are pretty tame and don't really take too much away. It's stuff like puns that really kill it. English is poor in puns compared to a lot of other languages to begin with, add the fact that you can't get equivalents anyways and you get a lot of dead jokes. Seto no Hanayome is a really go example. The main character's name was used as a pun in the first episode. In the dub they had no option but to drop the joke and the scene felt empty. A more current example, Shingeki no Kyojin. The title is a pun, oddly enough. It can either mean advance of the giants or advance against the giants. This actually tells you a lot about the series and the concepts it conveys, but the English title, Attack on Titan only gives you half of the literal meaning and none of the context you get from the opposing meanings. So, there's that.

Final point, the industry is bad. We have Funimation buy of the rights to series that they have no intention of releasing or dubbing at all. Yep. Go check their site. They've got Detective Milky Holmes LICENSED. That's the worst part, we've got larger companies buying stuff up like patent trolls just to prevent their competition from getting their hands on them. This is throwing money away and taking it away from real projects. It's completely stupid and I hate them for it.

 

Not all anime dubs are bad.

In fact, I think they did the voices perfectly in things like Digimon.

 

Good, 'cause no one said that.

 

Funky.

 

i sure cant wait for bouncing alien tits

 

A MAN CAN DREAM DAMNIT

 

So what's the deal with Toonami? Is it a TV channel of it's own or is it just a kinda program that shows anime. In any case I've seen nothing of it here in the U.K. so I'm wondering if it even exists over here. As for the program, it looks a little bit crazy but Cowboy Bebop is one of my absolute favourite series ever, so high hopes :)

 

p.much this but I think I'll enjoy it anyway because I have a critical boner for Watanabe even if the lines are butchered

 

Toonami is a programming block shown on Adult Swim every Sunday morning from midnight to 6 AM.[DOUBLEPOST=1383004893][/DOUBLEPOST]

I'm confused here. Do you dislike the entire concept of dubs or do you dislike the quality of most dubs? I can understand the latter, but why would you be against one of the only ways to make things appeal to wider audiences? Believe it or not, subs aren't very accessible to people who don't already like foreign media and the whole point of localization is to widen the audience. If I watch a Belgian movie for the first time, I'm not going into it thinking that it'll be awesome because BELGIUM. I'm going in hoping that it'll be a good movie. I probably won't even know that it's Belgian until I watch it, love it, and want to learn more about it. Only then might I think, "Wow! This Belgian movie is great! I bet other movies from Belgium are equally great!" Then I'll go watch some more Belgian movies and if I like those, I'll probably end up being part of the elite few who love Belgian cinema so much that I'm willing to watch them subbed instead of dubbed, probably because I can't wait for the dubbed. I agree when you say that dubs tend to sound worse than the original language (the Madoka dub is beyond awful in my opinion), but that doesn't mean they don't have a purpose in the localization market.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go make some big-ass waffles.

 

oh okay thank you for explaining :) I did a little digging on google and found this

So no Adult swim/toonami for us looks like :(

 

Why not just find a livestream?


Also, Protip: Ctrl+Shift+V pastes stuff without formatting. It's super useful for stuff like this where the background is dark.

 

Okay, so I don't like the idea of dubbing most things because it loses too much. Simple as that. There are things that can be adequately dubbed because of the universality of them, but at the same time those are usually awful. I kind of feel like I already said that, but if you did not see it, then I probably didn't.

Believe it or not, I don't want foreign films and television to be more accessible. Why? Because I'm not the lowest common denominator. I already like them in their current form and don't want to sacrifice purity for popularity. I'm the kind of person who, if I had the time, would go out and actually learn Japanese and French and Chinese and Spanish and so on so I could just watch these pieces of media that I already like in a more pure and accurate form in order to gain a better understanding of the actual content. Anyone who can't put up with even reading is being even lazier than me and shows their lack of actual interest in the media. They don't deserve to be spoon fed and catered to at the expense of the people who really do care.

Now your example on Belgian film is awful right here because it applies to the movies that dub well to begin with and it's specific to you and your experience. A good counterexample that shows where I approach the topic from follows, I saw a French film called Ridicule, it was about puns and humor in the court of Versailles. It would have been god awful in English. I saw it subbed and it was a bit taxing to follow. But, I could hear them saying things and I have a good enough ear to pick out some of the jokes and a good enough knowledge to understand the cultural context so I ended up liking it. A dub couldn't have conveyed that. So no, I've never had the experience you described and never will since I grew up with old school foreign film lovers.

I prefer pancakes.

 

Both are disgusting like dub and sub and you should both be ashamed.

If I'm eating breakfast I want to eat something wholesome with actual substance, not a bunch of unhealthy ingredients thrown together that produce equally terrible products. catchin my drift?

 

How cute, he thinks I'm talking about breakfast.

 

Have you never had Dutch pancakes? Put some pepperoni and cheese on them and it's like fried pizza. I make them for lunch a couple times a week. Besides, the only reason I mentioned waffles was that I had Belgium on my mind.

 

I generally don't like warm breakfast foods. I usually have dry cereal or fruit or something.

 

What breakfast food do you know of that has pepperoni on it?

 

Thanks for the tip :) Yeah I could do, it's just sad we literally have no channels or shows here that will air more mature anime. Still stuck in the rut of season 1000 of Pokemon on Cartoon Network and not much else

 

See I feel the same way; a dub is never going to perfectly capture the essence of the work in its original language

if the translation is plain

However I believe it is entirely possible to recreate the experience in a way that any audience can understand, and not to the detriment of the work in question

Exhibit A: FLCL, a dub which by any standard was essentially "butchered," but ended up brilliant as a result and is still fondly remembered by all and preferred in English by many - and not just the lowest common denominator. It is actually written in such a way as to effectively convey its message without wasting space or saying too much, a feat which is only possible because the translation is loose rather than precise; and while it is a shame to lose the many references to Japanese culture, they are replaced by references of roughly equal value, some just as obscure as their counterparts (SERIOUSLY I JUST FIGURED OUT WHAT THAT FUCKIN' SEVEN OF NINE BIT WAS ABOUT) and which an American viewer can identify with. More importantly, the original still exists for those who would rather have it, and more people will find out about it in the end

No dub should seek to recreate the experience of the original, because that experience already exists and trying to outdo it is more of an insult than an homage; however there absolutely is merit to the idea of making a work not more accessible, but more inclusive, for audiences naturally unable to understand the finer points due to language barriers. Ideally there should be no dumbing down, but merely an exchange of one nuance for another. That and some people may not have trouble reading subtitles or even learning different languages, but the latter is an extreme investment of time at best and both can be difficult on a sheer physical level for certain people; e.g. my mother gets headaches when she tries to watch subtitled movies and has difficulty sitting through them despite enjoying the few she's seen

#king of the run-on sentence