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).
“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.
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.
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).
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. 🤌
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.
Dubbed is the only way to watch Yu Yu.
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.
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.
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.
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.
To be fair, dubs used to be really, really bad back when us old weebs were growing up.
Nowadays, studios think about localization from the start when creating the original dialogue, leading to much better quality dubs. Thus, the newer weebs never developed the cringe reflex we have.
The quality and quantity of voice actors has exploded, there are still plenty of places that cheap out, but the baseline level of voice acting in dubbing now is barely even comparable to 15 years ago.
Finding decent dubs used to be a needle in a haystack with big studio money required, you can name them all off on one hand, the OP did later on in the thread. Now it’s almost the opposite!
There’s also a shift in western, especially American, voice acting away from subtle emotional performances to the emotive and excitement filled performances of the Japanese voice actors too. It’s a few things right now.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good dubs have always been a rare gem.
IMO the key to a good dub is two things:
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Actors and direction that prioritizes caricature without becoming “campy”. This is something JP VO is ridiculously good at. They identify a character’s personality, crank it up to 11, but still make the emotional delivery feel genuine, even if extreme
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Direction that understands the characters as intended by the author. This is where a lot of dubs fall horribly short. They do not consult with the original content creator, and wind up with voices and characterizations that may seem to work on the surface but are lacking the depth of understanding for a character needed for the performance to make sense over time as we learn more about them.
Just my 2c, but IMO this is where most of the problems with dubs come from, and why they wind up sounding either generic or campy.
Good way to put it; I’ve been a subs person for anime as long as I remember but I make an exception for games, I think in large part because they consult the devs more during localization. When anime does that, it seems to hit those two points.
I’m primarily a subs person, despite the fact that I prefer dubs if they’re actually good enough.
Cowboy Bebop and Fullmetal Alchemist are phenomenal dubs. I’ve watched both subbed and dubbed and think they are equally good, and thus prefer the dub so I can pay more attention to the animation and action.
The only recent dub I’ve thought was okay was ReZero. I don’t love it, and prefer the sub, but it is one of the better ones I’ve heard. Maybe there are other great ones but I stopped even trying to find them after a while 😂
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Me, a sub Connoisseur looking at all these dub peasants(also me looking at the subs themselves);
I don’t watch dubs so can’t know for certain, but I can’t imagine newer ones are worse than the horrific cringe that made me decide to not watch dubs in the first place.
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’m an older weeb, dubs are the only way I’ll watch, reading subtitles is exhausting and takes all the joy out of watching the show, dubs are the only reason I actually like anime
That’s interesting, when I watch something that was in English from the start, I often turn on English subtitles to reduce the cognitive load.
Pretty much the opposite for me. The older the dub, the cringier it tends to be.
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.
