dubs

I think I mentioned last week that I started Darker Than Black.

Well, this weekend I had a veritable mini-anime fest and have now watched about two-thirds of it. That isn't to say this is a lot of anime. In the past I've watched entire series across a weekend and I'm sure many people consume anime at a much faster rate than that.

The point is that it represents a return to watching anime where recently I've been horribly flagging.

But that's not really what I wanted to talk about in this blog. What I wanted to talk about was dubs. Or rather, re-dubs.

You see, as a rule I've always maintained that I prefer watching anime in subtitled form. That is, the original Japanese version with English subtitles, rather than the re-dubbing efforts of the American studios.

This was kinda my default position. I'd always at least sample the English re-dub, but it would tend to be a fairly quick thing. Maybe I'd watch one or two episodes, or flick over to see what the American Voice Actor sounded like compared to the Japanese ones.

I should make it clear that I'm not one of those people who hates all re-dubs on principle. Indeed, I've watched several dubs and found them to be better than the original Japanese and so continued watching the re-dub, rather than the original.

The one thing that has rankled me about re-dubs was when they change stuff. There's always a balancing act of course - the words spoken have to match the lip-flaps and, generally speaking, a literal translation of the Japanese won't do this.

I don't mind tweaks like that, to fit the lip flaps, but keeping the meaning and general jist. What I've had problems with is when lines are drastically changed or even added where they weren't there originally.

Two classic examples of these were the Generator Gawl dub and the dub for Kiki's Delivery Service. In Gen Gawl, right off the bat they complete change a piece of dialogue in the first scene to explain the entire plot, when part of the point of the show is that you don't really know what's going on until late on in the series. In Kiki's they add innumerable lines to try and "explain" things that, generally, don't need explaining.

I hate both of these things mainly because they treat the audience like they're simpletons.

Anyway, back to the point: I have a dirty confession to make.

I've basically been watching the re-dub of Darker than Black, rather than the original Japanese. Now it doesn't quite get up to the level of Gen Gawl and Kiki's with buggering about with stuff, but it has its moments. I spotted one definite example of an added line of dialogue that changed the meaning of a scene.

The dirty part is that I don't really care.

Maybe part of it's because DtB is one of those shows with quite dense/fast spoken dialogue that's difficult to read and maybe part of it is that the American VA performances are actually really rather good, but really I think it comes down to a degree of laziness on my part.

I guess I shouldn't beat myself up too much. After all, it's better that I'm watching some stuff, even in re-dub form, than not watching anything at all.