| Neko-Con -
Tristan MacAvery |
| "How do I take this precise language and put it into clunky old English?"
That's how Tristan MacAvery, who was the voice of Gendo Ikari in Evangelion
and formerly a voice director in ADV Films productions, described his job
in creating dubs. something must have been done right: dubbed anime continues
to outsell subtitled videos, despite the number of fans who say they like
subs. MacAvery isn't proud of everything he did in anime dubs (he' s still
embarrassed at saying "sufferin' succotash" in the Slayers movie dub) but
he enjoys explaining the artistic decisions made in translating Japanese
anime's dialog into English. |
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| There's the question of long silences in anime. MacAvery feels most
of them should be filled with words, saying "The pregnant pause definitely
needs to have a little Cesarean on it." References to Japanese history
and popular culture that are unknown in North American need to be replaced.
And none of this is made easy by the need to (more or less) fit the English
dialog to the mouth movements of the Japanese original, he noted, saying
that often the original doesn't match the animated "lip flaps." |
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| MacAvery said he once criticized dubs of shows like Speed Racer - until
he started to handle that job and realized that it wasn't easy. He pointed
to the scenes where an anime character is shown in a full face close-up,
mouth open as if awed with something. Standard dubbing practice is to have
that character's actor make a noise. "If the mouth is a big "O," you can't
add words, and if you don't make some sort of noise it looks stupid," MacAvery
said. |
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