Animazement - Friday - Akira Kamiya

If those fans who prefer subs over dubs got their way and dubs were eliminated, Akira Kamyia would lose a lot of his work. the Japanese voice actor makes much of his living as a dubber of American shows like the Aladdin series (he voiced the parrot) and Fraggle Rock (the acted and sang Gobo). Kamiya has been handling American and Japanese animation for three decades, so much that he has the reputation in Japan as an artist who can handle only "older" roles.

Kamiya goes back so far that he dubbed shows when the actors had to watch shows on a film projector with no cues other than those on the screen. That made it rough on the production crews when retakes were needed. Nowdays, all shows are on videotape which is digitally linked through time codes to hard drives on computers. "The system has improved, but it's become less human over the years," he said.

Despite changes in equipment, dubbing procedures remain the same. In Japan, the entire cast gathers at once and records the whole show. "The script is handed to you on the spot," Kamiya said. "There will be a rehearsal run, the final test and then the take." In a recent session of the Famous Detective Conan series where Kamiya has a role, that procedure took only 2 hours and 30 minutes to complete for a 30-minute show.

By contrast, American dubbing is a piecework affair, where each actor has separate recording sessions and those sessions are assembled into the final show (the actors rarely see each other, even if they have scenes together). The two world of voice acting meet only when there's a Walt Disney Co. show that needs to be dubbed into Japanese, said Kamiya. When he works on a Disney show, the Japanese actors have American-style separate session.

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