It is and it isn’t. As has been cited, people who are producing NEW animated films often do the acting first and then adapt the film to fit it. This process, needless to say, doesn’t work when there’s already existing animation.
Whether the failure of dubs is the fault of the directors, the actors, the process, or some combination of all of the above, I continue to get the impression that the sum-total of the American voice work comes out inferior to the original Japanese. I probably shouldn’t attempt to armchair speculate the why’s of it, because I’m not really all that familiar with the process itself, only the results.
So I suppose that, in a nutshell, I just agree with Lantern - there’s nothing inherently wrong with dubs, it’s just that every dub I’ve heard has been inferior to the original.
Edit: Oh, and I’m one of those people who reads much, much faster than I can listen (Are there really people who can’t? I play a lot of games and read about them a lot, and a major point that always seems to crop up is people who skip the spoken dialogue because they finish reading the text long before the spoken stuff is done.), so keeping up with subtitles is almost never an issue, assuming that the subtitling job of remotely competant.
While true that voice actors were more tightly directed in the past, Disney (and pretty much all major Western studios) has always recorded dialog before animating to it.
TV mostly. Fred Tatasciore, Grey DeLisle, Tara Strong, Patrick Warburton, Frank Welker, Billy West, Maurice LaMarche, Tom Kane … all great talents who are largely overlooked by big-budget movie animation.
Voice work requires a particular talent that not all actors have. I’ve directed voice for games before and it’s amazing how a skilled voice actor can slip into a role while alone in the booth.
I once spent an agonizing two days working with a moderately-famous “name” who absolutely couldn’t get into character in the ADR booth. When every take starts going into double digits, you know you’re in trouble. We couldn’t even salvage the performance in post-production and eventually had to rerecord the entire role with a different (and less famous) actor.
Sorry. I meant “new” as in the sense of “creating an animated film” vs “taking an already existing animated film and redubbing it”. Because in one, you take the performances and can create animation to match them, and in the other, you already have any animation that you (at least mostly) can’t change, and you have to perform to it. Since the creation of new (regardless of -when- they were made.) animated films follows a different process than adding new voices to an existing film, the expertise doesn’t seem to carry over.
To me, it creates an unsettling portrait of modern Japan at the turn of the millennium. Depicted as culturally fragmented, polluted, and alienated, visions of contemporary Japanese society are shown through a fantasy world threatened by pollution within and without. Greed, consumption, chaos, and lost and recovered identities are frequent motifs throughout the work as the film struggles to rediscover and reincorporate elements of purity, self-sacrifice, endurance, and traditional Japanese values lost in modernity.
My parents watched it and didn’t get it. They were like, “Why was No Face barfing all over the place? Ew?” Whereas I thought that the use of the black garbed, white masked creature was rather clever. It possesses no sense of sense: it has no face, communicates ineffectively on its own, and must swallow others in order to obtain a voice. It becomes animated only by its voracious appetite, which suggests a modern Japan that is out of control, unable to connect with others, and animated only by the empty urge to consume
The coming of age part was also well done. At first, Chihiro is a sullen, whiny girl disconnected from her parents, her environment, and her own sense of self. She almost immediately loses her own identity upon entering the bathhouse by giving up her name, suffering from amnesia, and witnessing her body almost literally vanish before her eyes. But she successfully recovers her own vanishing self and also helps others to recover their own identities: unearthing the true form of the river god, giving No Face a role, allowing Yubaba’s baby to explore the world beyond his borders, restoring Haku to life and remembering his real name, and passing the final test in recognizing her parents amongst a mass of pigs.
Oh, and I really liked Princess Mononoke and Kiki’s Delivery Service, too.
Holy god the kids they got to do the lead voices in the dub of Ponyo were annoying. The film wasn’t as beautifully animated as his last two, either, and it dragged in places. Even the character design, especially Ponyo’s parents, seemed half-hearted. I’ll watch it again someday with subs, but it won’t be right away. That was not good.
Liam Neeson was what sucked the life out of the movie for me; a horrible casting choice for that character and a lifeless performance. I’m looking forward to getting the original with subs.
Miley Cyrus’s little sister and the youngest Jonas brother was just a horrible, horrible example of nepotism and stunt casting. Those kids had no business playing those parts.
Have to disagree on the hate for the dub of Laputa/Castle in the Sky. It remains my favorite of any of the Miyazaki films I’ve seen, and I refuse to watch animation with subtitles.
Mark Hamill’s Muska is weird and a bit over-the-top, yeah, but the character’s face is continually in a state of near-ecstatic evil. What kind of voice would you give him? The kids are both fine (Van der Beek is a bit better than Paquin in my opinion). Cloris Leachman is flat-out fantastic as Dola, and Mandy Patinkin and Andy Dick are hysterical as her sons/minions.
Since everyone is giving their ratings, I’d say my top five Ghibli films are:
Castle in the Sky
Spirited Away
Totoro
The Cat Returns
Porco Rosso
I found Ponyo boring – it is aimed at very young children. Princess Mononoke feels like half a story to me, and too serious. I just didn’t enjoy it. Howl’s Moving Castle suffers from a severe lack of story logic, though it is a fun and beautiful movie. Nausicaa is overwrought. Caligostro I remember liking, but it’s been a while.
The Cat Returns was excellent, and needs more mention. I think it is, however, one of those rare Studio Ghibli films that is not a Miyazaki. Still, it’s a very entertaining, thoughtful film.