Forum - View topicBad Japanese Voice Artists
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Kouji
 Posts: 978 |
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Whenever a dub vs sub war comes up, one of the reasons people use in defense of dubs is that the Japanese voice artists are just as bad as the English voice artists and that if you don't know Japanese, you can't tell how bad the acting is. That's all fine and dandy if that's what you believe but where are these "bad" Japanese voice artists that you speak of? I don't doubt that there are bad Japanese VAs out there yet whenever somebody says that the Japanese VAs are just as bad, nobody ever gives any examples of them yet they turn around and act as if they're just as common as bad English VAs. Out of all the anime I've seen, I think the only bad Japanese VA I can think of is that I thought Misaki's Japanese VA in Angelic Layer was pretty horrible because she was too high pitched and squeaky. I normally don't mind the higher pitched voices of the Japanese VAs, but she was obviously trying too hard to sound like a 12 year old kid that it sounded like nails on a chalk board.
I don't even know Japanese and even I could tell that no normal Japanese 12 year old sounds that high pitched. But that's one VA out of tons of others I've heard and that's nothing compared to the numerous bad English VAs I've heard over my past 9 1/2 years of being an anime fan. This is not meant to be a dub vs sub debate but I'm just wondering which Japanese VAs do you think are bad? Which roles did they perform that were so horrible that they made your ears bleed? Once again, I'm not trying to start another dub vs sub thread. I just want to know your opinions of what you think the worse Japanese VAs are. |
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frentymon
Forums Superstar
 Posts: 2362 Location: San Francisco |
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The seiyuu that star in lots of roles and/or memorable are at least pretty good, and the ones that I considered "bad" generally are those one-shot people who do one or two perhaps major roles and then fade away, never to be heard of again. Such seiyuus' names I never remember, nor care to remember, the names of. Thus, to save myself some effort in repeatedly searching the Enyclopedia for names of seiyuu I don't care about, I'll just list various roles in which the voice acting was not good. Before I do so though, I want to briefly talk about what distiguishes "bad" seiyuu, so to speak, from good ones. It's probably the same way here, but you can tell that a seiyuu is "bad" or at least inexperienced if they sound way too much like a normal person when they're doing their role. Any seiyuu who is really genki or energetic in their role most likely does not sound like your average real-life Japanese person, since if you're always that happy all the time then you're just the slightest bit odd. Real Japanese people talk pretty darned fast, and that is reflected in the work of "bad" seiyuu. "Bad" seiyuu often also sound muffed, quiet, more slurred, less distictive, unexicited, boring, etc. That said, I fully believe that you don't even need to understand Japanese to tell a "bad" seiyuu from a "good" one. Disclaimer: I'm throwing the term "bad" loosely here; I'm not criticizing the person, just their voice acting as I hear in the series they're cast in. And many "bad" seiyuu are only "bad" because they are inexperienced and new to the field (but while I don't doubt that they eventually can become good, I don't think they could ever be phenomenal, as the phenomenal voice actors generally start off that way right off the bat). Nanami Takahashi from Bokura ga Ita: Unemotive, muffed, basically many of the things I listed above. Her confessing was pretty much in the same tone as her joking around, so that was kind of...disconcerting. Himawari from Himawari: I dunno, too much like how a normal Japanese girl would talk (which is probably acceptable in some cases, but in an anime such as this, is way out of place). Supposed to be cute, not cute at all, cringed when I heard her voice, yeah. Everyone from Lemon Angel Project: All my complaints from above, only three times worse. I suppose the voice isn't terrible, it's just really unemotive...and really unfitting of the characters. 80% of hentai: Just listen to one, it's often really painful to the ears. I can probably come up with more if I thought a little harder, but when I hear bad voice acting it tends to escape from my memory quickly. I actually believe that seiyuu as a whole and average generally do a better job than American VAs of anime, but the quality of American voice acting as it pertains to anime is pretty high right now, and it's annoying when people harp on American VAs and believe every seiyuu out there is good because they're not actually listening when they watch their subbed anime. |
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Eruanna
 Posts: 451 Location: Canada |
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I think the general argument isnt that "See, so and so from such and such a show was bad voice acting" Its more like, "How do you know that the Japanese voice actors arent bad too?"
If I make any sence. People who use this argument dont know how good the Japanese voice actors are, and thats the point. If you dont speak Japanese then you really cant tell, and their point is that we dont know what the quality of the Japanese voice acting really is, wheather it is good or bad. |
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san-san
Posts: 26 Location: Far Reaches of Space |
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the only one i can think up of the top of my head is the guy who played Winner Sinclair in Karin. I forgot his name and I'm too lazy to reach for the mouse and click *no matter how much technology we get we'll always find a way to be lazy...heh* I don't think his voice acting was off (not that i remember much) but his voice was so grating and annoying esp. with him trying to pull of an accent....ugh! I mean I know winner is supposed to be annoying and everything but that went a little too far......
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frentymon
Forums Superstar
Posts: 2362 Location: San Francisco |
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I disagree. I think if you listen carefully you can generally tell when there's emotion being projected and when there's a flat monotone. Also you don't necessarily need to understand Japanese to know when you're not liking a particular voice you're hearing. Understanding Japanese definitely helps because you can listen to and understand the flow of the dialogue, but my cousin who doesn't understand a word of Japanese can tell me, "I don't like this voice, it's too scratchy!" And I forgot one: Shuffle! Sia and Nerine both had really scratchy and annoying voices. They weren't actually unemotive or anything, but their voices were really piercing and kinda not pleasant. |
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Mid-Boss
 Posts: 71 |
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Makes sense to me. If you need subtitles to understand the dialog, how can you accurately judge the voice acting? |
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Eruanna
Posts: 451 Location: Canada |
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That dosnt really refer to the quality of the acting though, moreso to the quality of the voice itself. |
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frentymon
Forums Superstar
Posts: 2362 Location: San Francisco |
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I dunno, I think if the quality of your voice isn't good then you can't ever become a really good voice actor because...well, no one would want to listen to your voice. That was just an example. I have friends who only know three words of Japanese who can tell me "the voice actress for this character sounds really into it", or "the voice actress for this character sounds like she wants to fall asleep." I think if you don't understand Japanese you'll miss some relatively more subtle things about the tone of voice and such, but you can at least distinguish between "good" and "bad" acting. |
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fighterholic
Posts: 9193 |
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I won't name anybody because I really don't know too many people, but there have been a couple series that I have seen where I wonder why they were even cast for the role they played. Pretty much the same as frentymon, I think a lot of the really bad Japanese VAs are in hentai. I especially don't like those momma-boy type brats who can't even do anything for themselves, let alone seeing them screw some girls in their own disgusting way. But VAs aren't the reason why hentai is at where it's at, they can afford to get bad VAs.
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Nerv1
 Posts: 601 |
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Japanese VA's aren't that bad. The only thing I can't stand is that most male characters are voiced by women. Then again, they sound better then the American VA's who voice over for the male characters. They just sound too deep...
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Mephistophilus
 Posts: 200 Location: Fresno, CA, United States |
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I'm assuming you mean most youngish (<15) male characters, which I've seen a lot of times is true, unless the series has that token "Hey, I'm a freshman and look like a college student" student. In the case of younger characters, it just kind of works I suppose, as males around that age (that can sound, you know, that age) tend to have... Issues that prevent consistent voice acting. This is all not mentioning the fact that most "child stars" I've seen are a "Western" creation. I suppose it's impossible to have a 12 year old voice a 12 year old, in any case, so the female VAs are the only alternative. I've heard some annoying Japanese VAs, but outside of hentai I suppose I haven't heard that many *bad* actors/actresses. Generally the annoying factor is within the character, though I will admit that at times the Japanese VA sounds worse than the English VA for various reasons such as the monotone mentioned before or the scratchy, high-pitched, beyond annoying voice that are generally out of character. Of course, as long as a voice makes sense for a character, I suppose it doesn't matter if it's annoying or not; however, there is a point where you exceed the limits of the character and sometimes the annoying voice just doesn't fit. |
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DemonEyesLeo
 Posts: 844 Location: Japan |
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Exactly. There are some who believe that the Japanese seiyuu are better simply because they are Japanese, and this is where the argument comes from. Unless you're fluent in the language it's very hard to get the whole story, so to speak. Yes, you can pick up emotion and tone because those things are universal to all languages. But emotion is not the only thing that goes into acting, there's subtleties that are also needed like enunciation and articulation that are very difficult to pick up if not fluent. People bash English dubs because they are able to pick up everything right off the bat; but with Japanese there's only so much that is immediately obvious. |
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PantsGoblin
 SubscriberEncyclopedia Editor  Posts: 2969 Location: L.A. |
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I agree with this. Although there are definitely subtle aspects that only fluent speakers can pick up, I would say that by far the most important aspect of voice acting (at least to me and what I care about) is emotion. There isn't really any point to voice acting without emotion, and emotion can be understood universally. Now, I wouldn't say that the opinions of people who aren't fluent in Japanese should count quite as much as someone who, because there probably are things they're going to miss. But their opinions certainly shouldn't be dismissed as invalid or ignored just because they don't understand Japanese. They should count just as much as they can understand (the emotion). Which would be, in my opinion, what counts the most in voice acting. |
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zaphdash
 Posts: 620 Location: Brooklyn |
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Yeah, but anyone can emote. It's not a matter of sounding emotional. If that's all there was to it, anyone could act. Obviously it's (probably) poor voice acting if the actor isn't emoting -- unless that's actually the way the character is supposed to sound -- but the mere fact that he is emoting doesn't necessarily make it a good performance. Beyond merely the presence or lack of emotion, there are so many more subtleties and nuances that go into acting. Particularly with voice acting, where the only thing you're evaluating is the delivery of the dialogue, I'm a pretty strong believer that fluency in the language is a pretty necessary requirement in judging the quality of the performance. Basically all acting is, is doing your best to make the audience believe you're actually in whatever given situation (or rather more accurately, to perfectly emulate a person's actions in said situation); when it comes to voice acting, this means that the viewer needs to know and understand how people actually speak, what they sound like, what their voice inflection is like on this word or that word or this part of the sentence, whether their voice should be rising or falling given this type of grammatical structure, and these are things you're not necessarily going to understand even as a well-educated student of the language, let alone a casual viewer who knows only what words you've picked up from watching these shows. People tend to take these aspects of language for granted, but they do differ (sometimes considerably) from language to language. If you're not fluent (or extremely close to it, anyway), you're probably not going to pick up on any of these things, and if you don't even know within what frame to evaluate it, then how can you say whether or not it's good voice acting? "Oh, he sounded really sad and his character is crying, so this is a pretty good performance." Not quite. If you don't know how real people talk, you can't evaluate whether or not the actor is doing a good job of emulating it. |
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PantsGoblin
Subscriber Encyclopedia Editor Posts: 2969 Location: L.A. |
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I'm not saying that having emotion is equal to a good performance. I'm saying that the fact that one can sense emotion should give one's opinion on voice actor performances credibility. Not total credibility, but at least some (imo, quite a bit, but that's just me). If you're going to tell me it doesn't count for anything... Well then, should probably just stop the argument there. Apparently I don't get along with you that well either (although those were like my first posts on this forum so you'll have to forgive me for them... I still don't see Robotech as anime though). |
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