For a very long time I have been a purist when it comes to non-English movies, TV series and cartoons, especially Japanese anime: I absolutely loathe dubs and want to always watch them with the original soundtrack with subtitles. It's the best and most accurate original experience, exactly as the authors intended. Even when dubs are very well and professionally made and of high quality, they just cannot carry that same original tone, the way in which the native people speak, the mannerisms in the voice and how people speak.
This is particularly relevant when it comes to Japanese because it's a (quite strongly) pitch-accent language which, as a consequence, has its very peculiar cadence and sound to it, which English just cannot replicate. (Japanese also has many peculiarities that English lacks, such as literally dozens of different first-person pronouns, all of which have subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle differences in tone and idiomatic usage, and it's something that's literally impossible to replicate in English. There have been anime where that has actually been a plot point, and something that a dub will badly struggle with.)
For this reason I almost always play Japanese games and watch Japanese movies, TV shows and anime with the original Japanese voices rather then dubbed, with very few exceptions.
And one those exceptions is the Dragon Ball series.
There seems to be a somewhat strange custom in Japanese anime (perhaps not universal, but I have seen several examples), where if a character is a child at one point and then later a full-grown adult (either later in the series, or perhaps in a follow-up series, such as "Dragon Ball" vs. "Dragon Ball Z" in this case), the voice actress is usually kept as the same.
Indeed, most child characters in animation are voiced by adult women. This is done mostly for practical reasons: There are a lot of extra legal hurdles in using child actors, and thus it's much more convenient to use adult actors, both from a practical and from a legal point of view. And as it so happens, most adult female voice actresses can sound like a child very convincingly, which is why this is so common in most animation (be it eastern or western.)
In Japanese anime, however, there appears to be a somewhat widespread practice and custom that if said child character ever grows up and becomes a full-grown adult... his or her voice actress is kept the same!
This can sound very cringe even when the character is female. I remember one anime that I watched long time ago where a little girl later became a fully adult woman... and her voice was still kept the same! Even the actress didn't just start speaking like an adult woman, for whatever reason. It sounded ridiculous and horrible!
However, when it comes to the Dragon Ball series, it's even worse: In Dragon Ball Z and subsequent series Goku is a fully grown adult man, and a complete hunk... and in the original Japanese soundtrack he is still voiced by a woman!
It sounds so utterly ridiculous, cringe and outright annoying that I just cannot watch it. I'm serious. This is a huge muscular hunk of a man... with the voice of a woman. It does not only break willing suspension of disbelief, it does not only distract from immersing oneself in what's happening, it just sounds horrible! It just doesn't fit at all. I genuinely cannot understand why they didn't change his voice actor.
In the various English dubs they clearly didn't have any problems in casting male voice actors for his role, and it makes him sound that much better and more believable. Sure, they don't outright make him sound like Kratos, but at least he does sound like a man.
While I usually prefer watching anime with the original soundtrack, this is one exception where I just cannot. It's horrendous.
Comments
Post a Comment