Dubs are typically bad because the same handful of localisation teams get hired over and over again to do them cheaply. They don’t do casting, they don’t do effort, they have an in-house team that they re-use over and over and over again. They are just phoning in the work and aren’t really trying to elevate the performance or do it spectacularly or anything.
This is different in the cases of some dubs. Ghibli has a habit of only getting serious actors for their voice-acting roles even in English. Howl’s Moving Castle’s main characters are played by fucking Christian Bale(batman), Jean Simmons and Lauren Bacall. A-list voice acting team.
So yeah some dubs are really seriously done by people who really genuinely have talent and care. But many are also not. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with acknowledging this.
I generally prefer proper voice actors to hollywood stars. Ghibli works turn out well enough, but I suspect if they spent that same amount of money on professional VAs and allowed the team to focus on quality instead of speed and low cost, it would be much better.
Almost the entire budget of Princess Monoke’s North American release was spent on celebrity voice actors lol. I think they paid Billy Bob Thorton more money than the actual film cost to make. Stephen Spielberg picked up the tab, though. He really wanted it to get distributed outside of Japan.
Dubs are typically bad because the same handful of localisation teams get hired over and over again to do them cheaply. They don’t do casting, they don’t do effort, they have an in-house team that they re-use over and over and over again. They are just phoning in the work and aren’t really trying to elevate the performance or do it spectacularly or anything.
This is different in the cases of some dubs. Ghibli has a habit of only getting serious actors for their voice-acting roles even in English. Howl’s Moving Castle’s main characters are played by fucking Christian Bale(batman), Jean Simmons and Lauren Bacall. A-list voice acting team.
So yeah some dubs are really seriously done by people who really genuinely have talent and care. But many are also not. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with acknowledging this.
I generally prefer proper voice actors to hollywood stars. Ghibli works turn out well enough, but I suspect if they spent that same amount of money on professional VAs and allowed the team to focus on quality instead of speed and low cost, it would be much better.
Almost the entire budget of Princess Monoke’s North American release was spent on celebrity voice actors lol. I think they paid Billy Bob Thorton more money than the actual film cost to make. Stephen Spielberg picked up the tab, though. He really wanted it to get distributed outside of Japan.
And Thornton fucking sucked in that.
It’s like how Dio’s voice actor keeps getting cast over and over even though he’s got an extremely familiar voice.