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Answerman - Why Don't Dubs Cast Real Kids?

Top Gun wrote:

Greed1914 wrote: I suppose that is one advantage of recording in LA since child actors are more common. On one of the commentaries for R.O.D the TV it was mentioned that Rachel was already involved with other non-anime productions. She was in the later seasons of Ikki Tousen that New Generation recorded, and she sounded different, which isn't too surprising since she was in her 20s by then. Heh, I was going to mention Rachel Hirschfeld in ROD the TV as being the best example of child acting I've ever heard in a dub. Then again both that show and Ergo Proxy were dubbed by Jonathan Klein and New Generation pictures, and they were the top tier of all anime dubbing studios.

You're mostly correct, though Taliesin Jaffe was the ADR Director of R.O.D. the TV. I know this because R.O.D. the TV has what is probably my favorite English Dub of all time.

That said, even in Japan it's pretty rare for kids to voice a major ongoing character. Almost all major child roles in longer TV series are filled by adult women.

My favorite instances of an actual child actor in a cartoon is either Aang in Avatar: The Last Airbender,

The same can be said with Cathy Weseluck as far as Canadian voice actors go, which has led to her getting more or less typecast as little boys, even though she has a lot more range than that.

Ranma 1/2 cast real teenage girls as Boy-type Ranma (Sarah Strange), Girl-type Ranma (Brigitta Dau), Akane (Myriam Sirois), Nabiki (Angela Costain), and Kasumi (Willow Johnson). Of course, they got older as the show went along (with Sarah, Brigitta, and Angela quitting at different points), but they were apparently around 16-19 when the show first began recording in 1993. It was pretty bold for the time.

Whenever Pixar has a major character who's young, they'll always look for someone about that character's age to voice them. I remember the commentary for Finding Nemo and Up and how they said it was so much trouble and so expensive to find kids who could actually act well, be mature enough to stay in the recording booth for a while, and understood their character well enough to feel genuine. (Not sure if they say anything about that with Miguel in Coco--I was going to pick up the Blu-Ray in a bit, so I'll find out soon enough.) But this is Pixar, a company that can afford to do that.

One thing that Eng. dubs sometimes have over some Japanese versions is that the former often get adult men to play adult versions of the boy character. Compare this to Mayumi Tanaka playing an adult Krillin.

CelestialEmpress wrote:

I remember watching Hey Arnold as a kid and thought it was so cool that the actors were all kids, but I imagine it was an absolute pain in the ass to constantly coach and recast those roles on such a regular basis. Fun story, Eugene grew up to be Joseph Joestar and that will never not make me laugh.

He was BEN DISKIN?

Has anyone done the math and figured out how old he was when he voiced Nigel in Codename: Kids Next Door? It wasn't all that long after Hey Arnold!, after all.

In the English-language dub of the Monster Rancher anime, Genki Sakura was first voiced by Saffron Henderson. She was replaced by then-teenager Andrew Francis. The reason for this is that Saffron Henderson quit her voice acting commitments due to her wedding. Am I right?

Gemnist wrote:

Isn't it also true that kids have a much harder time reading lip flaps compared to adults? I heard that's why Aaron Dismuke was cast as Al - because Al has no lip flaps.

That's exactly why. He wouldn't have gotten the chance otherwise. Aaron also happened to be related to a crew member at Funimation, so that helped him get the role too.

Quote:

Child labor laws are one: kids can only work 18 hours during a school week. That's probably fine for a one-episode role or for a movie, but if their character is a major role in an ongoing series, that can be a pretty tough limitation to work around. Dubbing isn't a major enough production to take kids out of school for any period of time, and budgets are famously very tight, so hiring an on-set tutor to get around such limitations is out of the question.

A perfect example of this would be Anime Midstream's dub for the first half of Matchless Raijin-Oh. That dub did in fact cast a number of younger people for recurring roles, some of which were apparently still in high school when dubbing started. As a result, I'm sure that child labor laws, combined with having to work around the kids' school lives, were a major reason why Midstream only managed to knock out a single 5-episode DVD every year from 2009 to 2013; once the dub was dropped for the second half, Midstream was able to put the last 26 episodes out sub-only the following year.

Sure, it does allow for the dub to sound much more accurate in some instances, but it's just not something that can be relied on.

Greed1914 wrote:

David Matranga's session was considered fast for the first season because his character spoke so little that his recording for that season was done in half a day. If that is considered fast for an adult, I have to think that kids a realistic option.

Casting real children could be more feasible in traditional dubs (when all the episodes are dubbed together/at once), but with simuldubs it seems impossible.

KND aired from 2001 to 2008, sand Ben Diskin was born in 1982. He was 19, when it started. He also voiced Numbuh 2, and part of The Delightful Children from down the Lane..

I know the dubs of Strawberry Marshmallow and Nadia: Secret of Blue Water had real kids playing the kids. Strawberry Marshmallow was squee worthy, and the kids in Nadia did such a good job, especially Jean, that I had no idea how young they were. I assumed Jean was voiced by an adult woman.

I know the dubs of Strawberry Marshmallow and Nadia: Secret of Blue Water had real kids playing the kids. Strawberry Marshmallow was squee worthy, and the kids in Nadia did such a good job, especially Jean, that I had no idea how young they were. I assumed Jean was voiced by an adult woman.

And infamously Disney cast Dakota and Elle Fanning as the two little girls in Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro. Two roles again filled by grown adult women in the Japanese dub.