A lot of Square-Enix games are better in English than Japanese. There's just no traditional way to write western character stereotypes in Japanese (like the pirate city in FFXIV) and they end up sounding like nothing in particular. Or maybe S-E's Japanese writers are just boring?
I disagree. The English ones have no issue with completely change character personas. The way someone talks is as important as what they are actually saying.
I used to be an audio engineer at a studio that dubbed anime. It was amazing how many smart and talented folks were involved in pumping out a shitty dub.
I worked with some really, really good directors and actors, but there's a limit to what they can do. The biggest constraint is the need for perfect mouth flap syncing. The original Japanese versions aren't even very well synced, but English-speaking audiences apparently demand it. It really constrains what you can do with a performance.
Emotional explosions that are great in Japanese seem really cheesy when done in English. Since Japanese syllables almost always end in a vowel, you get these really big month flaps that are hard to work with. In really bad dubs, it's why you get lines like "Heyyy! What's the big ideaaaa!" so often.
Of course, dubs usually have a tiny budget as well. That means that there's only one actor in the studio at a time, so they never get to play off of each other.
Maybe you can answer: Why assume that vocal sounds -> mouth movement dissonance is more grating than stimulus -> reaction dissonance and character -> behavior dissonance (combined with dub-cliche)? Is there the general sentiment in production that the audience is not sophisticated enough to notice the latter, but any 12 year old can notice the former?
> All this made Japan such a poor prospect as a market for anti-depressants that the makers of Prozac all but gave up on the country.
This is false. Prozac was submitted several times for registration in Japan. The most recent one is here: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01808612 but there were other trials before.
Wasn't Neon Genesis Evangelion enough to convince anyone that depression was real, back in the 1990s?
> Word was spread about depression as kokoro no kaze - a cold of the soul.
Well, kokoro means mind and heart as much as it means soul. It's a bit harder to describe a phenomenon when you don't quite have the words. David Lynch referred to four types of illness (via the Log Lady): physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Those concepts are a little more mixed together in Japan.
Well, we watched it knowing about depression, and my personal (and for personal reasons, genetic ones unfortunately...) study of e.g. cognitive psychology and therapy made the original TV ending pretty comprehensible with effort, at least about what Anno thought important (people, not the giant robot/super-conspiracy gloss).
But wouldn't most people, including a large fraction in e.g. the US, just think Anno was weird (which as a successful creator he pretty much as to be anyway :-).
If the BBC feels it absolutely must tie depression in Japan to comic books somehow, as part of its standard Japan narrative, it at least should have gone with discussing the comic book memoir Tsure ga Utsu ni Narimashite ("My Husband Got Depression") which got a lot of attention from 2009-2011 and helped raise awareness about modern medical attitudes toward depression.
Recommended reading: "Crazy Like Us" by Ethan Watters. I'm not sure about the validity of this article, but the Watters book presents a fair amount of evidence that mental disorders are in many ways socially constructed by individual cultures. And often the construction is sped along by inventive pharmaceutical company marketing departments.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 60.0 ms ] threadtriggered
The anime club at my college was so adamant about this that they put a no-dubs rule in their constitution.
All types of content are better to be consumed in their original language when possible!
I worked with some really, really good directors and actors, but there's a limit to what they can do. The biggest constraint is the need for perfect mouth flap syncing. The original Japanese versions aren't even very well synced, but English-speaking audiences apparently demand it. It really constrains what you can do with a performance.
Emotional explosions that are great in Japanese seem really cheesy when done in English. Since Japanese syllables almost always end in a vowel, you get these really big month flaps that are hard to work with. In really bad dubs, it's why you get lines like "Heyyy! What's the big ideaaaa!" so often.
Of course, dubs usually have a tiny budget as well. That means that there's only one actor in the studio at a time, so they never get to play off of each other.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50Y7R5zP0wc
This is false. Prozac was submitted several times for registration in Japan. The most recent one is here: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01808612 but there were other trials before.
> Word was spread about depression as kokoro no kaze - a cold of the soul.
Well, kokoro means mind and heart as much as it means soul. It's a bit harder to describe a phenomenon when you don't quite have the words. David Lynch referred to four types of illness (via the Log Lady): physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Those concepts are a little more mixed together in Japan.
But wouldn't most people, including a large fraction in e.g. the US, just think Anno was weird (which as a successful creator he pretty much as to be anyway :-).