There’s a contingent of people who are elitist about the sub/dub debate and insist on using subs for every series on the planet. I personally only think a handful of shows have dubs that are watchable so that’s the end of the spectrum I tend to identify with, but I know not everyone agrees and so won’t lay into people who disagree.
You’ve got a decent set of relatively recent stuff (post-laserdisc, at least) so I’d be hard pressed to recommend anything until you finish those and have any final opinions. Not a huge AoT fan and I loathe FLCL, but OPM and DN are both solid in my book. Haven’t seen HxH, and Parasyte was alright.
A lot of disdain from dubs comes from the early 90’s when ADV literally just got people off the street to do their voice work for them. Modern dubs are often entirely serviceable. Preference is often simply the voice that people first encounter on a particular series is the one they prefer.
I find dubs to be fundamentally awkward because the spoken rhythms of Japanese are very different from the rhythms of english, and dubs are nontheless forced to mimic them. Things like interjections in particular are super awkward when transposed into english, as there’s no actual colloquial way to translate, so it has to be literal. But I’m also generally very comfortable with subtitles.
Yeah, the days of really terrible dubs are probably mostly behind us. But it’s not ever going to be the best way to experience a foreign language work of any sort, so while I completely understand that not everyone can handle subs, they will always be my recommendation.
The one dub that I like was the Ghost in the Shell (Stand Alone Complex series) mainly because I think Batou, the Major’s, Aramaki, Togusa, & Ishikawa voices are better than the Japanese. Otherwise I tend to prefer subs because I think they convey a lot more about the story. I also think that the voice quality overall is better in a sub which really interests me since I do not speak Japanese at all.
It was interesting because when the kids were into Naruto I had them start watching the sub versions (was a sneaky way to get them to increase their reading skill, especially being able to read quickly, as a dad - laugh). They fought me tooth and nail but in the end they never wanted to go back to the dub version because they felt they got more out of the story once they experienced the sub.
Dubs in live action films are always atrocious, imho. Dubs in animation could work as well as the original. In theory.
I just don’t think anime gets budgets high enough to make proper dubs. It’s one thing when a Pixar movie gets dubbed, and famous actors in the USA are substituted by famous actors in the target country. And you get professional scriptwriters and translators to translate the script, preserving most of its tone and natural sounding bits.
But then you have anime, which is not even greatly written sometimes, and it’s so incredible culturally specific many times that a natural translation is super hard. And you have to work on a budget (I don’t care so much about the actors, who don’t seem that great I the original in most cases anyway, but about the translation and care in the production). In this cases, I feel the abstraction subs create (they tend to be less verbose and less not rely as much in interjections) helps me to better understand the original intent and emotional context. It’s still strange, and perhaps a little bit more distant, but it’s also less meddled with and it has less inconsistent elements thrown in.
My kids refuse to watch anything dubbed, and go subbed all the way (Fullmetal was the only one they watched dubbed, as that was their intro to anime). Interestingly, they said it isn’t because of some elitist/purist thing, they said that the voice community is relatively small so you quickly pick up on the same voice actor being used everywhere (Mustang from Fullmetal being their go-to example). The also had some example where some subbed show became a comedy whereas the original version was intended to be horror.
I’m a newbie to anime myself. I got the kids interested because we watched Fullmetal together, and from there they went overboard. I did watch Steins;Gate recently though - holy cow, this was excellent. Now watching Attack on Titan. And yes, doing it all subbed cause the kids make me.
Dubs vs Subs generally comes down to the voice actors and how they approach the role.
FMA:Brotherhood had great voices all around. Roy Mustang is still the fucking man in English imo.
Black Lagoon… I preferred Revy in Japanese by far, but those Engrish scenes when they go to Japan were just fucking painful (though, I kind of loved how Japanese was English and vice versa in their world, it was kind of a neat idea and way of doing it).
GitS was amazing with dubs, but again, really, really good voice actors. I could listen to the Major read me her shopping list.
It really depends on the series. Or if you’re some sort of elitist/lazy fuck (the opposite ends of the spectrum).
When it comes to live action, you pretty much have to go with subs though. Unless its some sort of cheesy kung fu movie… and even then subs might be better (thinking of Kung Fu Hustle and how well it worked with subs).
Edit: The only time I really go against subs is when they bring in Whiny Japanese Girl. Fuck I hate that voice 99% of the time.
The one dub that I like was the Ghost in the Shell (Stand Alone Complex series) mainly because I think Batou, the Major’s, Aramaki, Togusa, & Ishikawa voices are better than the Japanese.
It does make playing Supreme Commander a bit disorienting though.
Thanks for all the replies. I think what surprised me the most were how competent some of the dubs were, Death Note and Gurren Lagann were two I listened to the dubs. With Gurren Lagann I had started the an episode on Hulu with with subs and then noticed it was on Netflix and started the episode over there and it was dubbed and the actors seemed to capture the “feel” pretty well. I would have never expected that with my previous experiences in the genre.
It’s funny I always prefer subtitles with foreign language media but watching so much Anime recently the thing I’ve found the most difficult about it is that I have to pay such close attention. If I take a quick turn in Star Realms ;-) odds are they’ll start talking while I’m not looking and I miss a line of dialogue and with streaming it’s always a pain in the ass to just jump back 20 seconds or whatever. I know 1st world problems and all and what’s worse is it drives me crazy when my wife does that when we’re watching something. That being said when I’'m watching one Punch Man I don’t feel like there is any downtime I am totally focused. Whereas in Gurran there’s some parts where my attention wanders a little more.
I started to watch an anime the other day that was released first in Italy. I felt really weird reading the subtitles of a Japanese Anime with Italian voices. One gets really used to hearing one language I suppose.
I know very little (as in nothing at all) about anime, other then than seeing and liking some Studio Ghibli and an occasional Japanese movie. So knowing nothing about it I sat down to watch The 7 deadly sins over at Netflix. I was a bit surprised to find the main character to be a sex harasser who constantly groped the other main character who is a female. There is another character who constantly criticize him for it, but neither him nor the woman seems to care too much.
Is this something acceptable / common in these types of shows? I’ve never seen anything like it before.
It helps to learn some of the anime genres and the differences between types of anime:
NOTE: The list above is two pages long
I find that many anime will lean towards fan service but to varying degrees. I am not sure if that is the overall culture of Japan itself or just the anime audience in general. My guess would be that it is the anime audience since even in many anime themselves people that watch anime are portrayed as different. I think the comparison would be the same with comic books but that is becoming more acceptable these days probably due to the success of comic book movies.
There are many good anime, I watch many with my daughter (romances, slice of life, though she loves Ghost in the Shell too). We do filter those we find a bit over the top but the fan service elements seem to creep in a lot in many shows. We tend to overlook it if the story is good.
I find that anime characters are often portrayed as extremely shy and at odds with the happenings that are going on around them.
Most anime sites are helpful in describing the anime genre so read that list above and learn what you like. This thread can point you to many good shows.
Silver Spoons is a great anime if you want to try something that is quite different (it is about farming, friends, and romance). One episode is dedicated to pizza! :)
Its genre is listed as: Action, Adventure, Ecchi, Fantasy, Shounen, Supernatural.
Now, marxeil, you can match these keywords up with the page that GeeWhiz posted. Ecchi is the keyword that describes all the sexually inappropriate stuff going on in the show.
Wow, it’s got 8.52/10 user rating. This is pretty high. I should watch an episode or 2 to see.
The manga is available on Crunchyroll as well (and other manga reading sites). I often will read the manga of animes I liked but were cancelled or only did a short run of the entire story.
