[EVA] English dubbing for Rebuild 1.0

[Aaron Clark]

> ...there are a large number of people that actually like the dubbed
> versions

Commonly referred to as "ignorant masses".  These are the same sort of
people that will not go see Slumdog Millionaire just because it looks like
a Bollywood film, even though it's actually a British film set in India.
(brilliant film btw)

> Assuming all English dubs will stink and simply not caring whether they
> are good or bad, is irresponsibly guaranteeing that a low-quality dub will
> be made.

The fact remains that anime VAs receive pathetic little pay and respect
from the industry compared to what they would be making in live action or
in original English language animation.  With the exception of a few
Ghibli dubs, they really are just the bottom of the barrel.

> even say Miyazaki, says
> "just watch the dub, focus on my animation"

Sauce please.  For a man who is highly auteurish, I would not take him for
someone who would endorse dubbing, even from the angle of appreciating
visuals.

> Both the Japanese and English VA's are simply actors; shifting between the
> two does not alter Anno's script.

V, before you say something like this, you really ought to have actually
compared the two versions, because they are not the same.  There are quite
a few significant differences, some were just outright changed on purpose,
some where subtle, and some were just honest mistakes.  But saying they
are the same would be tantamount to ignorance.

> But utterly discarding the English dub like this seems downright elitist.

I usually don't say this, but I take that as a complement.

> Otherwise we wind up like the lamentable Providence Anime Convention:
> what did that have?  it was an anime convention with a 21+ age cutoff,
> designed to cut off the riff-raff of the noobies.

So... anyone under the age of 21 is automatically a n00b?  How do you
figure that?

> simply disregarding an English dub is disregarding
> many fans.

Yes.  They can come back and join the party when they have actually
watched Evangelion, as opposed to Neon Abstraction Evangjellyon.

> ADV's original voice cast was iconic and amazing.

I used to think so too, then I realized that 1) I loved Evangelion, and 2)
it had several people who (through the benefit of elapsed time) are now
veterans.  In retrospect, it wasn't all that great.  I can still watch it,
but if I had never seen Evangelion, and saw it today for the first time, I
would likely cringe.

> Compared to the near-contemporary Ghost in the Shell film dub
> ("people reading a translation off of index cards") its pretty good.

Evangelion and GitS were produced, released, dubbed, and distributed at
roughly the same time.  How is it near-contemporary?

> "expanding intelligent anime to a wider audience" is not "dumbing it
> down".

Typically in the creative medium, that's exactly how it works.  The highly
intelligent and creative works tend to fail, while the stupid, shitty
mainstream ones turn a decent profit and earn sequels.


I used to be a hardcore dubbie.  There, I said it.  But at a point, I
pulled my thumb out of my butt and started watching anime subtitled. 
Eventually, it was exclusively subtitles.  In all of my time watching
anime, being involved in my school's anime society, conventioning, and
having this same old argument with people on the internet, I have only met
one person who went from subs to dubs.  And that's because he multi-tasks,
and listens to the anime in English while he works.  Everyone else that
has tread the line between the two that I have known has ended up with
subs, because the original is pound for pound better (not to mention the
availability of fansubs), and because the English dub is an abstraction
that falls on a sliding scale between slight, and egregious.  No one will
ever be able to convince me or even entertain the notion that dubbing is
anything more than a marketing ploy to get ignorant and picky kids to buy
into the fad.  And it makes complete sense from a business standpoint. 
But what doesn't make sense, is how anyone could ever equate the original,
with the local language version.

--Aaron
EvaMonkey.com