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Answerman - Quick Answers Part 5

HeeroTX wrote:

The only one I ever remember hearing about Japanese fans liking the English dub (before today) was Lucky Star animenewsnetwork.com/news/2011-01-07/lucky-star-bd-ships-in-japan-in-may-with-english-track

Nothing in that article says Japanese fans like the dub, it just mentions the dub appears on the BD, which is not uncommon for rereleases since its an easy bonus. Any dub being preferable to the original in Japan makes little sense given the huge fandom of Seiyuu culture. It sounds like the whishes of American fans wanting to be relevant in Japan.

Kindergarten before first grade depended on the school system, some had it some did not. (a "Garden" of children, what a horrifying image.)

Since that time during boom, bust, re-boom, etc. school systems have been coping with constant demographic changes that have them assigning grades to schools mostly on the basis of room. They try to make it look good with various theories but the bottom line is if they have the money for new schools or not.

On the attacks of homeless people: Yeah, I always thought it was true. It matches with the fact that most youth in Japan feel like they have no power over their lives and some, sadly, want to feel powerful by attacking someone who is relatively defenseless. Combines with the fact that minors tend to get away with a lot in Japan and you have a recipe for heartlessness. Burning the possessions of a homeless man feels, to me, like an unredeemable act of cruelty. If you do that you should go on some sort of list, if you catch my drift.

I have a friend in Japan who's fascinated with English dubs for anime, but says she wishes she could understand it all better without needing subtitles as she does happen to like hearing quite a few of our VAs. "English is very complex!" is what she tells me a lot in emails.

Animation is rarely that detailed and doesn't usually go beyond mouth open or closed and in those instances you can put practically anything into that moment and unless you knew what was meant to be said you wouldn't be able to tell it was wrong. There are plenty of instances in anime where the Japanese dub doesn't even match the lip flaps properly.

I've even seen people believe that an animation was originally made in one language and will point out flaws in its real original language because they think it should be another one. They will point out ways in which the lip flaps don't match and use that as proof that it was meant to be in another language even when it wasn't, because it is genuinely difficult to tell in animation that something was meant to be in another language unless the dub was phenomenally bad or you already knew.

To them I'm sure it's more a curiosity bonus. Though I'm sure if we subtitled certain English dubs to anime for them where the dubbers added a wealth of profanity to the title that wasn't in the original they'd laugh their butts off. Or maybe just shake their heads.

belvadeer wrote:

I have a friend in Japan who's fascinated with English dubs for anime, but says she wishes she could understand it all better without needing subtitles as she does happen to like hearing quite a few of our VAs. "English is very complex!" is what she tells me a lot in emails.

English IS very complex. It began as German with French, Italian, and Spanish thrown into it (well, as they existed in the 11st century anyway), and it's co-opted so many words from other languages into itself that every rule has a long list of exceptions.

Me, I like to see what people in Japan think of native English language programming It's interesting to see cultural concepts we take for granted not be understood in other countries because they don't have such a thing, such as our spring cleaning, which in Japan is done at the beginning of the year instead.

The Old English period is considered to have evolved into the Middle English period some time after the Norman conquest of 1066, when the language came to be influenced significantly by the new ruling class's language, Old Norman.

Let's not forget the ADV dub of "Ghost Stories" (there was a more faithful Animax dub but Animax is notable for the low-budget dubs). While the show did have some success in Japan, it just didn't sell enough there to get their money back. The rules the Japanese licensors gave ADV were the following

1. They couldn't change the meaning of the episode.
2. They couldn't change the character names, including the ghosts.
3. They couldn't change the method the episodic ghost was sealed by.

Steven Foster was in charge of the dub, and he is a bit infamous in his scriptwriting even to this day.

@Stuart Smith: OK, so "Gakkou no Kaidan" did well in TV ratings for the time. That's great. However, home video sales are sometimes where the Japanese companies can make their money back. If it flopped in sales, I can see why they might ask ADV to do what's necessary to make it sell here.