The
dubs of the 167 TV episodes and four movies of the animated InuYasha
have finally been completed, and already Canadian actor David Kaye
misses his character, the full demon Sesshomaru. "I think the character
works well, but he doesn't say a lot," Kaye said when he met InuYasha
fans at an Ikasucon panel. "You can take one little look and it says a
lot." Sesshomaru, one of the most popular male anime characters among
English-speaking fans, has some of the qualities of the villains for
which Kaye often is cast. He prefers the bad-guy roles because they're
deeper and more fun to act, he said. Kaye has a remarkable vocal range,
but he still has to be careful not to make his character voices sound
alike - his Megatron voice in Transformers sometimes crept a bit too
close to the Sesshomaru voice, for example. But he acknowledged that
the same thing happens to all dub actors who handle multiple roles.
"Sometimes you look at a show and hear the voices, and you don't know
if the voices fit or not - live action, too."
Kaye's
performances, as with nearly all North American dub performances, came
along in the dubbing booth, working off the lines previously recorded.
He said, and we think it was a joke, that he once had to be reminded at
a convention that Moneca Stori was the dub voice of Kagome in the
series, because he rarely saw her or the other cast members at the
studio. "I don't see a lot of my peers unless I seen them in the
hallway," he noted. But when he does get together with fellow Vancouver
actors such as Scott McNeil, Kirby Morrow and the Dobson brothers for
what the trade calls "pre-lay" - the pre-recording of scripts for
animation produced in North America - it's a wonder that any work gets
done. Everyone's an extrovert and a comedian, and the actors have improvised contests to see who can do the best impressions of
people such as Patrick Stewart and Sean Connery, he said.
The
dubs of the 167 TV episodes and four movies of the animated InuYasha
have finally been completed, and already Canadian actor David Kaye
misses his character, the full demon Sesshomaru. "I think the character
works well, but he doesn't say a lot," Kaye said when he met InuYasha
fans at an Ikasucon panel. "You can take one little look and it says a
lot." Sesshomaru, one of the most popular male anime characters among
English-speaking fans, has some of the qualities of the villains for
which Kaye often is cast. He prefers the bad-guy roles because they're
deeper and more fun to act, he said. Kaye has a remarkable vocal range,
but he still has to be careful not to make his character voices sound
alike - his Megatron voice in Transformers sometimes crept a bit too
close to the Sesshomaru voice, for example. But he acknowledged that
the same thing happens to all dub actors who handle multiple roles.
"Sometimes you look at a show and hear the voices, and you don't know
if the voices fit or not - live action, too."
Kaye's
performances, as with nearly all North American dub performances, came
along in the dubbing booth, working off the lines previously recorded.
He said, and we think it was a joke, that he once had to be reminded at
a convention that Moneca Stori was the dub voice of Kagome in the
series, because he rarely saw her or the other cast members at the
studio. "I don't see a lot of my peers unless I seen them in the
hallway," he noted. But when he does get together with fellow Vancouver
actors such as Scott McNeil, Kirby Morrow and the Dobson brothers for
what the trade calls "pre-lay" - the pre-recording of scripts for
animation produced in North America - it's a wonder that any work gets
done. Everyone's an extrovert and a comedian, and the actors have improvised contests to see who can do the best impressions of
people such as Patrick Stewart and Sean Connery, he said.
