Anime dubbing is truly a terrible art form, and there is no excuse for it to exist. While this sounds similar to harsh generalisation, unfortunately I have to admit that, in this particular generalisation, there are, and have always been, several elements of truth. One cannot dispute that anime dubbing is generally becoming more and more frowned upon each day, including by the author of this paper. But what is it that enables it to be that way? What does one have to extricate in order to convince the gentle reader of this article that it is indeed terrible? The answer is simple: anime dubbing is lacking in not so much ethnic diversity as national diversity.
In every single dub one manages to peruse for their viewing pleasure, most of them tend to be dubbed by American actors. No British, Irish, Scottish, Greek, Latino, or any kind. Always Caucasian Americans, as they, in their arrogance and lack of culture, refer to themselves. Even when they attempt an accent, I can still deduce underneath the surface that these are Americans talking. America has polluted popular culture, indeed; since our Empire — long may it be remembered — fell in 1948, we have been upstaged in terms of soft power by the filth of the American excrement. This filth allows actors such as Vic Mignogna, who has never acted in our Bard’s beloved work, to gain vast amounts of recognition, pretender that he is! A pretender to a throne of gold! Why should not Sir Ian McKellen, one of our country’s finest actors, provide the voice of an anime character? Why should not Colin Firth voice the depressed playwright Oscar Webster? One person I heard said this: “Anime dubbing is famously very low-paying work.” What if it weren’t? What if there were a way to invite mainstream English actors and famous actors from other nationalities into the anime-dubbing world?
That said, I understand not many are willing to accept change, especially the anime community. “I would rather watch an American accent than a bad one,” says one. Indeed, they lazily cite the US’ impact on pop culture as a foolish excuse. They are as ignorant as they are badly educated, which provides evidence that the Americans need to consider outside perspectives. Britain, in all its two-thousand year history, has also left an impact on popular culture, whether or not the United States wishes it to have done so or wishes to acknowledge it. Sherlock Holmes, Gulliver’s Travels, Doctor Who, His Dark Materials, The Gruffalo, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are all British works which have impacted international popular culture. Even William Shakespeare was not an American, nor ever showed any interest in emigrating to the colonies. The problem is more that the people I complain about are stubborn as a mule and will not accept change. These are the people who killed the adaptation of Larry Bundy Jnr’s Natural Born Kittens, after all, as well as the people who will criticise every single thing and do nothing but complain endlessly until Doomsday. At any rate, I despise having to listen to an untrained voice, and, indeed, Sir Ian McKellen could do a much better job playing so much as the Turtle Hermit than the person who plays him in the already-existing dub, whose name I cannot remember and have no desire to learn. I see McKellen as the true voice of Roshi and no one else, just as I see Daniel Radcliffe as the true voice of Vegeta.
If I had my will, Christopher Sabat and all his filthy ilk would well be out of work, starving on the street and struggling for food. It is indeed all their kind are fit for. Are we as British people to accustom ourselves to this wreckage, this hideous blot? One may indeed consider my acclimation to this plague to be a little too extreme; indeed, I have been called a troll, and anti-dub. But what I say has weight. I proposed the idea of a Royal Dubbing Society to my friends at the Anime Society of London, and what I received was nothing short of scorn and ridicule. That said, in the interim, I did indeed find a few people who took my ambition seriously, but they did suggest that the Dubbing Society would not get off the ground for very long, because of the tyranny of America trying to limit its range. Coupled with this, of course, is the risk of expense when it comes to recruiting the most highly-recognised British talent. Of course, the Big Green Dub may have been the detriment of the entire operation, but that is merely because, while the localisation was difficult, the company that made the Big Green dub did not even make an effort to hire any of the fine British actors that have been produced in the United Kingdom. Even if the dub’s script was less-than-serviceable, they at least could have provided a proper, solid performance as they are wont to do. The Big Green dub should have even recruited Shakespearean actors or actors from the theatre in general, if that would have meant enhancing their performance. That is the strategy I would have employed, were I in their shoes, but, unfortunately, I am not and there is nothing that can remedy it. The company who produced it obviously made such poor decisions, but it was not at all due to the niche popularity of anime in the United Kingdom; in Poland, anime as an art form is considerably less popular and even there it has a large following.
It is worth noting that I am not the only person to possess this opinion. When the dub of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure was released, it was heavily criticised for its inability to replicate a British accent, making people believe that it would have been better with British voice actors. I for my part am very much inclined to agree with them; the inability of the dubbing companies of America to actually hire British voice actors is further testament to anime dubbing’s lack of international diversity. I would much rather watch the original Japanese audio for JoJo’s rather than hear an atrocious British accent. Had I my way, Ben Barnes would play Jonathan, but as I have neither the funding nor the resources to found an organisation that can cast him, it may never happen. Johnny Yong Bosch, who voices Jonathan, has absolutely no classical acting training any more than Sabat or Mignogna, as evidenced by his Wikipedia article. He had no interest in acting when young and cared more for martial arts, and there is nothing mentioned in the biography to suggest that he ever attended so much as a theatre school. The world has inevitably gone into decline if it allows such things as these to happen. There are some actors who have had classical training, such as Caitlin Glass, but they are the exception, rather than the norm.
Mignogna does not even have classical acting training either; true, he has a degree in television and film, but nothing which suggests the career of a true thespian. Even after he has been accused of sexual mishaps, it is perhaps fitting to point out his lack of such Shakespearean training. He is no worthy competitor to the great Patrick Stewart or his friend Sir Ian McKellen. Mignogna follows a toxic American ideology which posits that if an actor playing a character is famous, then they will see the actor, not the character and vice versa. This is toxic for a number of reasons: firstly, it does absolutely nothing to justify allowing untrained hacks to take on roles. Secondly, it presumes that unknowns should pollute the acting world, and make their work cringeworthy. I found a comments section once which says that “99% of anime dubs are cringey to listen to”. Let us further expand upon Poland, where dubbing is rejected as a form of children’s medium and where television series from abroad are read by a monotonous, emotionless voiceover. Many of the dubbing actors who have taken part in certain dubbing roles are graduates of what I can describe as Poland’s counterpart to our most prestigious RADA, the Academy of Theatre Arts in Warsaw and therefore many of them have proper theatrical credits,and other theatre schools such as the PWST in Krakow. In Italy, the actress Alexandra Karpoff graduated from the Theatre Academy in Milan, while the actor Marco Balzarotti graduated from the CTA in the same city. In France, the late Pierre Trabaud studied at the Cours Simon, one of France’s oldest training courses for professional actors and had already had distinguished credits in film before he played the role of the Turtle Hermit. Elsewhere in the same country, Caroline Combes studied theatrical arts at the University of Paris All of these examples prove that, if anyone is to voice so much as Aliceliese or some-such-name, then that duty should befall those who have had actual thespian or theatrical training, not talentless churls who become conscripted into roles because no one else would take them.
The people of the KCL Anime Society already found dubs hard to sit through, due to their terrible acting and inability to capture the spirit of the Japanese originals, and they suggested that many of the actors I opted for were too old for their roles. Indeed, they also suggested that they would do no better than the American ones had done. Fools! Stubborn otaku mules! Set in their ways, weak, unaccepting of change! They have drunk too deeply of the American filth, the poison which gave us valley girls, the Mafia, obesity, and, of course, filthy, stupid, moronic adolescents! The Americans have no constitution of an understanding of what makes true art; they indulge in monumental and cultural degradation and idiocy. Their cities reek of sordidness and arrogance, and even their palm trees, a perversion against the temperate climate of the United States, growing where they are not supposed to grow, are testament to this decadence and excess! They believe, in their delusions, that they rule the whole world, that they control the international economy. Perhaps, seeing as Wankee expat Brian Rose is running for Lord Mayor, our once-great Empire has already succumbed.
Yet, those students are not entirely at fault. In every range of human psychology, there exists a voice, a small, tiny voice inside the human brain that utters one thing. In people of my kind, it is more amplified than most, and it proves an annoyance: “Fear change. You haven’t always done it.” That is why tradition has always been so persistent, why invention has often been suppressed and regulated, why novels that are controversial have been banned or censored, and also why everyone loathes, deplores and detests my opinion that anime dubbing should cast out those who spread their guano on it — the American VAs. Whenever these impostors attempt British accents, they are so demonstrably poor that I sometimes wonder why they would employ such people. Try as they might, I can always detect the American poison in their voices. It is as if they are trying to maintain a facade, which is slowly falling apart.
A second factor they apparently attribute to this deficiency is primarily the issue of salary; this was briefly mentioned above, and it is best to expand upon it here. One of the things I admitted to was that I cast Stephen Fry in the role of Whis, and Patrick Stewart as the Turtle Hermit, at first. The reply I received after I expressed such sentiment was less than pleasing: “Those two would never work for that kind of money.” Upon which, I learned that anime dubbing is quite notoriously low-paying work. It seems that dubbing is heavily scorned, in any case. If anime is to be accepted in the West, then it seems that companies that pay very little for acting, especially from actors with no classical or academic training or interest in the Bard, must be disposed of forthwith. We must furthermore accept that the actors who work for these companies are people who have no artistic drive or merit, beyond the capability to produce an ear-splitting shriek or to sound like an energetic monkey who has done nothing but drink excessive amounts of coffee since infancy, but are merely concerned with placing food on the table for themselves or their offspring. They are highly unlikely to see roles in mainstream acting, or to tread the boards or to attend America’s great schools of dramatic acting, or whichever equivalent of RADA they have. Indeed, several of the finest British actors and Commonwealth actors who work in the mainstream could play their roles better, with enhanced subtlety and nuance, rather than a mere cacophony of screeching and yelling.
I have sent demands to the government of this country, telling them to invest funds in a Royal Dubbing Society. Both demands have been ignored. If they do end up successful, hopefully more Greek and Irish actors would be registered for inclusion in the Society. Since that is hypocritical, it behoves me to stress that the Society would only incorporate them once it has accomplished its intended purpose. An example of a successful usage of British talent in the localisation of Japanese media I would wish to point to is the recent edition of Xenoblade Chronicles. At least one of the characters in the video game is portrayed by Jenna-Louise Coleman, the actress who is best-known for playing Clara Oswald in the most recent seasons of Doctor Who. Shulk, the protagonist, is portrayed with a Northern accent for some reason, which is more than appropriate considering his lower-class origins. This was perhaps because Nintendo originally intended the game to be released only in Europe, and did not distribute it in America until some time after.
A second example I wish to refer to is Netflix’s Castlevania, which, although not an anime, was based on a Japanese video game. Despite this, it is the closest the world has come to a British anime, seeing as it was scripted by a British comic book writer. American accents are avoided entirely in favour of British or regional ones, most of the cast are very well known English actors, including Richard Armitage, Bill Nighy and Graham McTavish. This does not clash with the art style at all; moreover, it is proof that British anime dubbing can succeed, because despite the fact that these famous names are among the cast members, nobody acknowledges it as presenting something of an oddity. Indeed, nobody calls that much attention to it, other than to point out that the usage of British accents supposedly makes sense for the Eastern European setting.
Furthermore, Square Enix cast a British actor known as Adam Croasdell as a character in their most recent video game, Final Fantasy XVI and an English actor known as Greg Ellis to voice Cait Sith in one of their Final Fantasy VII games. Indeed, the majority of Square Enix’s output that I have seen, namely Final Fantasy XIV and Kingdom Hearts, include much recognisable British talent, including Sir Christopher Lee, Robin Atkin Downes, Kathryn Beaumont, Nigel Polkinghorn, or even foreign-born talent such as Rutger Hauer. Why this should be I do not know, but I would assume that that is because they can afford to pay them, although why they fail to make more use of them is beyond my imagination. While there is a difference between a classically-trained actor and a voiceover artist, classically-trained actors have every right to partake in the voice acting of a Japanese property for localisation in the West, because this could provide aid in bringing their talents beyond Shakespeare and in the direction of the widest possible audience.
As another example, let us turn to the 1990s anime adaptation of Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books. This one is not as well known as the more famous examples of the art form that have emerged, primarily because it was never released in North or South America and was based on a series of novels published in the West. With that said, though, it does provide a good example. Very few of the actors involved in the dubbing process of that particular anime are American. Most of them are British, with some recognisable British talent, such as the late Dame Susan Sheridan providing the voice for Moomintroll. Of course, they all pull off convincing American accents, which displays their acting prowess, but also establishes them as far more superior to the likes of Christopher Sabat and Quinton Flynn.
Let us then turn to Studio Ghibli’s dubs; I sincerely regret mentioning them because they were produced by Disney, but I need to include them in order to justify my perspective. While Ghibli’s dubs tend to be primarily featuring American voice actors, such as the voice of Lilo, among their roster, they do have British voices as well, such as Sir Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame, Christian Bale (not even attempting to replicate an appropriate Welsh accent, since I must note that his character was intended by its author to be Welsh), Dan Stevens, Tim Curry, and Richard E. Grant. While it would be odd to see these actors in an anime dub, and audiences have been used to being deprived of their presence, Ghibli’s films are the closest we have received to inclusive anime dubbing in this present epoch. Even in their adaptation of the American Earthsea novel series, a favourite of mine since adolescence, Timothy Dalton, of all people, was cast to play the lead role of Ged. In Ghibli’s case, the dubbing is always appropriate. In both of the films I cite, Earwig and the Witch and Howl’s Moving Castle, the accents make total sense, seeing as both are adapted from British novels, both of which I have perused and greatly enjoyed.
Finally, let us turn, as an example, to an actual anime: Steamboy. The film stars Patrick Stewart, Alfred Molina and Oliver Cotton. These English voice actors supplement the film’s setting, obviously, but they are such names that you do not see anywhere else in anime dubbing. Take Code Geass, for example. Despite being set in an alternate Britain, none of the characters have the appropriate accent, whereas, in Steamboy, they do. Furthermore, from the small snippets I have witnessed, all the actors fill their roles to their full potential: Stewart really provides quality acting when it comes to fusing the character of the aged inventor with life, Molina delivers the cold, aloof qualities expected of the film’s antagonist. Both of the actors are used far better than their lowly, classically-untrained counterparts working for Funimation and other such studios, for the reason that they are able to use their acting abilities to infuse their characters with more reality than a peon could.
All of these point to a much greater problem: the Americanisation of anime. America is known for lapping up foreign properties like a dog drinking milk in a bowl, perhaps better so than those in the United Kingdom. The first translation of the Polish novel Quo Vadis was translated, of course, by an American, as was the first translation of Pan Tadeusz. Both of these Americans were different, but, of course, the Americans have never been good at lapping up Shakespeare. One is of course familiar with their outlandish protest at the premiere of MacCready’s rendition of King Lear on account that it was not rugged or masculine enough to appease American sensibilities. The first translation of the Austrian novel Bambi: A Life in the Woods by now-forgotten author Felix Salten was translated by an American known as Whittaker Chambers. Of course, those were translated in different eras. Americans during those epochs were much more intelligent and well-educated than they are today; nowadays they are Classically uneducated, a majority of them are stupid and obese, and anti-intellectualism runs rampant across the United States. Whose fault is that, but the Americans themselves? Hence, the Americanisation of anime is nothing particularly out of the ordinary, but the Britainisation of anime is, but such Americanisation has badly damaged anime’s image more than distribution. Let us look at this problem from the perspective of the elderly. The elderly will not get into anime because it is Americanised, and because of this, they will not get into anime because none of the actors who take part in voice-acting in it are famous names that they will recognise. Thus, the elder generation needs the media of the 21st century to be more relatable to them. At any rate, the British really need to improve localising foreign content, in order for their population to be better enlightened and for humankind itself to be healed from the poison of woke, that poison which has killed intellectualism.
In conclusion, I wish to stress that, despite the nationalistic facade that I have given during the reading of this paper, I have no nationalistic beliefs or intentions. I am simply disillusioned with a world that disavows classical actors in favour of ones with no talent or experience, and allows them to pollute the world’s most popular medium for little pay. As God is my witness, that needs to change, for the good of the economy and the wider world in general.
