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Comment by oDot | Hacker News Reader

Japanese anime is dubbed, compared to western animated content which isn't

I'm confused, isn't all animated content "dubbed"? It isn't like the animated characters themselves are talking.

Dubbed means the actors say the lines while watching the characters lips move. The Disney way is exactly the opposite. The animators animate while charting and studying the audio.

I wonder what kind of challenges this introduces to the production - like what are the pros and cons of each method?

I also wonder if 3d animation changes anything about this approach. I enjoy watching Japanese anime but 3d productions can be hard to watch with an English dub because it's very apparent that mouth movements don't match, whereas with more traditional 2d-style animation the mouth flaps match more easily in the mind. Video games made by Japanese studios for Japanese audiences can be particularly hard to watch with an English dub.

The Japanese way is faster and cheaper, which is important when you're on a tight schedule. Simple mouth animations are easier to draw. They also have the benefit of looking less jarring when dubbed multiple languages, which is important as a lot of Anime is just as popular outside Japan as within.

There is a middle ground, seen in 2D western animation made on a lower budget than your typical Disney fare. Artists will create a mouth chart which includes drawings for a wide range of English phonemes. They are then used as a guide for drawing. There are software tools that assist in this process, making it a lot easier to do in a short amount of time. This is probably how South Park manages to do real accurate lip syncing while working on a 6 day production cycle.

That's just how Japanese people talk. Look at Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.

At least at the time, the situation you find so weird was common enough to be satirized, based on dubs of live-action movies.

I think they mean “western” animation typically records the voices first and then animates to them, where anime records the voices after the animation is complete. But I’m not familiar with either production practice, so this is just a guess.

I think this article about the wildly different scripts to the English and Japanese version of Batman Ninja goes a long way towards explaining:

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/why-batman-ninja-in-englis...

>"My first exposure to the anime process was working with [Hayao] Miyazaki on Spirited Away," Chu said. "It was just very interesting watching him do the story. Like, he kind of thinks up the story, and then you don't really write it, you start sort of thumb-nailing out like, what key visual moments might be, and then you start storyboarding and then you start animating.

>"And I was like, 'OK, but what are you animated to?' He's like, 'Oh, we just make the mouths move.' And then I was like, 'But is there dialogue?" And he's like, 'No, no. We add the dialogue at the end.' And you're like, 'Oh, that's really weird.' And people always complain about, 'Oh, I'm going to watch the original Japanese version with English sub, not the English dub version,' but the truth is the Japanese version is dubbed as well."

> 'Oh, I'm going to watch the original Japanese version with English sub, not the English dub version,' but the truth is the Japanese version is dubbed as well."

At least personally, the voice acting seems just so different. My preference is not related to the differences there may be between dubbed or not.

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