 Crispin Freeman
is so popular as an anime dub actor that some fans nearly cried when he
announced he had to skip Anime Central in May to take on a role in a stage
play. Fans at Project: A-Kon had no reason to despair; Freeman (left center)
was on hand at the Texas convention with a group of actors, including Tiffany
Grant (left), Lisa Ortiz (right center) and Eric Johnson (right). Johnson,
one of the voices of Trunks in Dragon Ball Z, told the fans about how he
failed college when he flunked a spanish class, returned to Dallas and
decided to get an agent to back his acting career. That move paid off when
he got one of the Funimation parts for the second Dragon Ball Dub. |
 Freeman said
his time before the mike in an anime dubbing studio was made easier by
other acting experience, specifically from stage and radio play roles.
"You have to be able to adapt in theater. There are some styles that you
have to adapt to," Freeman said. Radio play experience also helps because
that teaches an actor how to play a role with the voice alone, the same
situation encountered in anime dubs. One wonders if Orson Welles and Joseph
Cotton, Freeman's acting heroes from their Mercury Theater radio days in
the 1930's, might have made good dub actors (and then you remember that
Welles had a voice role in a "transformers" movie). |
 Ortiz has played
stage roles as well as dubbed anime, and she said the hardest part about
dubs is having to perform a role by yourself without being able to play
off another actor's performance. Of course, actors dub their roles one
part at a time without other actors on hand; often they don't meet actors
who play the other roles. And Ortiz said it's odd when she has to make
up a character voice with only a script and a sketch of the character to
work from. |
 A few hours
later, Freeman presented another panel disucssion on the role of mythology
in anime storytelling. In this case, "mythology" didn't mean old Greek
myths, but the universal language of the quest for a goal, of birth, death
and pain. Freeman, who has examined this subject in preparing his anime
roles, drew upon the analysis of Joseph Campbell in looking at the struggles
that anime characters face. It's a personal subject for Freeman, who said
"I became an actor because I wanted to know `why.' I had two choices, science
and art. Art can't answer `why,' but it can answer `what.'" |
