I usually really like dubs, all the ones you guys mentioned, from what I saw, I really enjoyed.
One I didn't like at all was Higurashi no Naku Koro ni. Maybe it's because I was really into the
Subbed, then finally bought the dvd and watched it in english from beginning to end. Hated it.
Careful there... that's how you'll become one of the subfans. (^_~)
Until I listened all the way through a couple of subs and then compared them to the dubs, I thought it was too annoying to read the subtitles. After, when I realized 1) how much more talented and emotionally expressive seiyuu are on average and 2) how much they screw with the dialogue in a dub, I rarely watched anything but sub versions.
You're forgetting three main factors, though...
1) Seiyuu tend to be really terrible at their job when it comes to sounding like they're foreigners. My favorite example of this is Slayers, because it also has some that are rather good at it. I've seen & heard many people say Amelia's name is really Ameria, simply because some of the Japanese voices say it like this. However, if you listen to Megumi Hayashibara (Lina Inverse) and Hideki Midorikawa (Zelgadis) you can clearly hear an "L" rather than an "R". At least with English dubs, (especially over the past decade or so), they work on accents and pronunciations.
2) People watch anime to watch animation, not read. Subtitles make things hard to follow the storyline when you're reading something that often times is typed so poorly, you're left wondering "what the heck is THAT supposed to mean?" or "why aren't they proofreading their texts?" I've seen some incredibly poor subtitling, both by the pros and the fans. I don't care for it.
3) Do you realize how hard it is to get the English language to fit Japanese lip movements like that? Sometimes, the Japanese dubbing is quite off! From what I've been told by someone in the business, thsi is because sometimes there's such a time crunch that the seiyuu have to guess how fast the characters are saying each syllable, which tends to be off from time to time. This sometimes makes things even more challenging for the English dubbers.
Something else to think of...
Pick an American animation, any one of them. Now, if you can find the official Spanish dubbing of it, that'd be great! I've seen many examples of these on Telemundo. Their voice actors are terrible!!! Unlike English dubbers, they don't even try to have their voices line up with the lip movements of the characters. They just try to shove things in quickly enough so that the dialogue isn't lost. Reason: different language structures. We aren't that bad at this.
1) I agree about seiyuu having trouble sounding like a native speaker of English... even my beloved Ayako Kawasumi
painfully butchered her English scenes in Genshiken. But in the vast majority of anime I watch, their English pronunciation isn't an issue.
And our VAs are no better with Japanese than theirs are with English. I don't even speak the language, but it makes me cringe to hear an American VA pronounce Sasuke as suhSUkey, Asuna as essYUnuh, or karaoke as CArryOHkey.
2) I could understand if someone else feels differently, but for me personally that's not an issue. I speedread, so reading is rarely a distraction unless it's a really bad sub. (Or if it's Sana-chan from Kodocha talking.
) And while it's just my individual experience, the instances of script butchery by dubbers have been much more frequent than those by subbers.
3) I do, but I look at it from a different POV - I think that it's a terrible mistake for dub companies to have become slaves to WordFit. If it requires making noticeable changes to the original script, then they should stop being so obsessive about the number of mouth flaps.
The main reason that asynchronous mouth-flaps became a joke is that they used to make no effort whatsoever when they dubbed live-action kung fu movies. They would frequently overrun or underrun by several syllables, they had voice actors who went to the William! Shatner! School! of Enunciation! (which called sharp attention to any mismatches), and mouth movements can be perceived very clearly in live-action (so much so that you can even lip-read).
In anime, not only are syllables (mouth flaps) usually no clearer than the difference between O and 0 or o, most of the voice actors are subtle enough to not Emphasize! Every! Syllable!. If the writers sometimes ignored WordFit and let sentences be off by a syllable or two, it would be a lot easier to keep the translation accurate and avoid stilted language. But instead, for the sake of exactly matching mouth flaps that you have to pay attention to notice, they continue to make very-noticeable changes to the dialogue.
I agree completely. I was stating that I had preferred the Japanese actors over the English ones (At least in Higurashi). I know a few voice actors from the anime actually. Keiichi is played by the same guy that does Izuru Kira from Bleach and Mion/Shion is played by the english voice of Rangiku Matsumoto. They have great talent, that's for sure, but I didn't think they're voices matched for the Higurashi characters.
The problems with American voice acting certainly aren't limited to lack of talent or training, and it's rare that the problem is lack of heart or trying their best. IIRC, one actually did serious damage to her voice trying to match the phonic contortions of the original Excel Saga seiyuu. A
voice actress did this to herself because she was trying so hard to try to do the part justice. You just
can't say that's lack of heart.
The problem is that there are only a few handfuls of American VA's, and almost none that I've heard have a wide vocal range. By contrast, there are hundreds of seiyuu for any given project, many with a wide range. One of them is bound to have just the right vocal qualities for a part.
By contrast, American dubbers tend to rely on a dozen or so VA's at most, sometimes only a few, for all of their projects. When Funimation dubbed Negima!, which features a class of thirty-one students, they reached well outside their normal stable but still had to get VA's to voice
two or three different students at a time, because there just weren't enough of them. Or for a different example, the same American VA was expected to play parts that were originally voiced by Mamiko Noto, Megumi Hayashibara, Ayako Kawasumi, and Rie Kugimiya. (If you're not familiar with these seiyuu, don't worry about it. Just trust me that they have very different styles.)
Without a wide selection of different voice types, how can American VA's possibly be expected to match the part every time, or even come close?
