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Forum - View topicThe Battle for Union Anime Dubs
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4627 |
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I wouldn't count on Sony's backing to change this at all. Crunchyroll already did non-union and will now have regular access to the Texas dubbing scene. The Q and A for the merger made it sound like translators were expecting Crunchyroll lower rates than the ones Funimation paid, so I expect Sony will shop around for lower rates where it can.
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Dragon_Kaiser
Posts: 119 |
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It’s interesting when you think about how all of Sony’s first party games for PlayStation pretty much all of them do use union actors but can’t stretch that out into dubbing for anime with Crunchyroll
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ZeetherKID77
 Posts: 982 |
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I really hope they can fight for better wages. Less dubs happening because of this is a worry but it's more worrying that nobody is being properly paid, and it's not just a problem on the VA side either, it's a problem with the translators too. Just completely despicable all around, but sure, "fans win" am I right?
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OjaruFan2
Posts: 673 |
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Why wasn't it viewed with a lot of respect? |
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JintoLin
Posts: 44 |
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Voice actors, translators, sub timers, they're all paid piecemeal. It happened because anime started small, and started in Texas. Everyone involved needs to organize and push for market wages. There's no excuse for Sony not to pay them. (And we are talking about Sony here, not CR or Funi. Sony holds the purse strings now.) |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2672 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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I imagine that in those early days it wasn't looked at as "real acting", and honestly it's likely still looked like that to this day over in Hollywood. Just look at how animated films out of Hollywood still mostly cast big name actors for voice work, despite there being an entire industry of much more experienced voice actors, and will even recast characters with long-established voices just so that a "real actor" can now be the voice. I mean, something like Colleen O'Shaughnessey being allowed to voice Tails in the upcoming Sonic 2 movie is a shocker, because I'm sure most of the big wigs in Hollywood likely see her as "just a voice actor". I'm sure she had someone fight for her in this case, and even then I bet she still had to audition for the role, despite her having been the voice of Tails since 2014. Just as the article mentioned, SAG was still using a deal made back in 2003 when it came to voice actors until just last year, which I think tells you everything you need to know about how Hollywood looks at voice acting, in general: It's an essential job when they need it, but the talent still aren't "real actors" to SAG, when you really get down to it. |
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John Thacker
Posts: 1009 |
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SAG-AFTRA dues are not exactly cheap, with a one time Initiation Fee of $3000 plus a flat $223 a year plus 1.575% of gross earnings (up to $750,000 of earnings this year, $1 million next year, so a lower percentage on the stars who would often be able to negotiate higher than union rates.) It's not worth it for people who only rarely get work, but that's the point of course. One fundamental way that unions work is to reduce the possible pool of employees in order to raise wages (the reason why the low end pay can get so low is because of people desperate to break into the industry), and there will always be people on the outside as a result.
(Another reason why unions have some special responsibilities to be open to all comers - "Look for the Union Label" was heavily associated with anti Chinese sentiment in California; using money or education to decrease the pool of competition is fairer than using ethnic background of course.) There's always a contradiction between simultaneously claiming that going union will mean a big difference in the pay for the voice actors and that it won't mean a big difference in the expenditures of the company. (That's distinct from arguments that grievance or arbitration rules might be useful to both sides.) A more consistent argument is the claim that the profitable firms can afford it - but just because a division has a profitable parent doesn't mean that the division is profitable, and unproductive divisions do get sold, spun out, or shut down, something that the anime localization industry had long experience with. There will always be non union work, because some titles just won't be profitable on union rates, though that can be left to non union shops (or fansubbers, or sub only releases.) Unions function best when it's difficult for new firms to compete in the industry, leading to limited competition and high profits, but there's a lot of people who want to work for it. They restrict the labor supply to capture some of those profits. When an industry is highly competitive, union shops tend to lose out to the competition, and when there are few profits to be shared, unions go down with the ship. |
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FunkyDude88
 Posts: 108 |
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People went to see Jujutsu Kaisen 0 because they wanted to see Jujutsu Kaisen 0, not specific English voice actors. There were also subbed screenings for it as well.
Did Tails speak at the end of the first film? Maybe they got themselves into a corner if she voiced him there and them changing it in the sequel after she voiced the character would be awkward. |
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Erufailon4
Posts: 197 Location: Finland |
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Yes. So what? That doesn't mean the VAs shouldn't be paid properly. |
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ZeetherKID77
Posts: 982 |
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Do you think the translators for the subs were paid fairly though? Because it sure sounds like they aren't either. This isn't a dub or sub issue. |
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FireChick
 Subscriber Posts: 2483 Location: United States |
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Wow, this article was both enlightening and distressing to read at the same time. The actors are right in that changes to wages and safety standards really need to get better. Every VA deserves better in this regard. I know Sony's a corporation and likely isn't going to do anything, but changes need to be made.
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2672 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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Yes, Tails did speak in that cameo, & it was O'Shaughnessey who voiced him there, but details like that never stopped Hollywood before. Just look at how Thanos looked in his cameo at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy (where he looked just like the comic) & how radically his look changed when he started getting more focus in later Marvel films. They likely only used O'Shaughnessey in the Sonic 1 movie cameo because it was just that, a short little cameo that they could pay her peanuts for (at least in comparison to what Ben Schwartz got to voice Sonic); O'Shaughnessey has experience playing "Additional Voices" in Pixar films, for example. For Sonic 2, though, they'd have to pay O'Shaughnessey way more since Tails is now a major character, and I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually learn that she still got paid way, way less than Ben Schwartz & Idris Elba did for Sonic 2, due to her primarily being a voice actor. |
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MFrontier
Posts: 13758 |
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It sucks that people who continue to put such hard work into something (be it dubbing or translating the works for people to watch subbed) only to continue to make very little off of it because companies continue to be cheap.
It means people like Reba Buhr have to lose roles (like in Miraculous Ladybug or Ascendance of a Bookworm) because she can't afford to be paid so little and companies won't negotiate for better pay for VA's (and probably translators too). |
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Kadmos1
 Posts: 13617 Location: In Phoenix but has an 85308 ZIP |
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Article:
Republican here. How might right to work laws have been different if that say "27 mostly-Democrat-controlled U.S. states"? |
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KitKat1721
 Posts: 974 |
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Unfortunately, the pessimistic part of me still thinks hell will freeze over before a non-union studio based in Texas goes union, although things are definitely capable of change (the Netflix SAG-AFTRA agreement is a pretty recent thing after all). And while voice acting rates in Funi projects have risen recently to meet the recommended standard for non-union work (although I believe said recommended standard has risen again since this tweet since it was a year prior: https://twitter.com/marinmmillerVO/status/1463221932329820161), I know that improvement is not the case for every actor given the tiered rate system (aka actors who don't know or feel like they can advocate for higher pay/don't have an agent that gets them that automatic boost).
But my own feelings on the future aside, I couldn't help but feel apprehensive for a while about fans jumping aboard and discussing the whole union vs non-union issue like this for a while due to the one-sided nature of which actors were predominately talking about it & how easy it can be to spread misinformation about SAG-AFTRA. The former because it felt like only LA actors, either mostly working on SAG projects already + are at least fi-core if not already in the union, were the only people driving the conversation (admittedly for good reason). The latter is self-explanatory even in the article: issues like how of a huge percentage of Texas' acting gigs in general are non-union so what would that mean for local talent if Funiroll did go union (TX being a right-to-work state really only means you can't be forced to join even when working on union projects), misinformation on Taft-Hartley paperwork (how much is involved + whether companies would bother with it to that kind of level), high costs of membership & dues being different in different states, what all this means for international actors who only just started getting a foot in the door with remote recording, etc.... While everyone and their mother agrees the rates in general for dubbing need to improve, when you see the actual acting pool disagreeing online about unionization, even if a lot of it is primarily due to misinformation about said union, my instinct is usually to wait until there's something more organized and concrete to point others to (see the video game VA strike a few years back). I'm more hopeful than ever though that we are heading in that direction. All in all, it's nice to see ANN publishing an article like this for something so important! SAG-AFTRA as a whole is being pulled so thin right now dealing with COVID fallout + organizations like CODA are made up of volunteers and can't be there to answer every single question or concern 24/7. It's beneficial for companies to have actors be misinformed about unionization and not talk about it, just as its better for them to have the general public not care about it at all. So anything like this that makes those two things harder is always a good thing. |
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