[1148] Shitstorm
└ posted on Thursday, 23 January 2020, by Novil
- Larisa: It’s become almost impossible to attract attention with good quality as an independent artist. Only a good ol’ shitstorm still guarantees clicks nowadays.
- Larisa: However, Twitter and Reddit are so overrun by total nutcases that you have to do something that really stands out! Politics, for example, just doesn’t cut it anymore!
- Larisa: It must be something that comes right out of the blue and reveals an uncomfortable truth! Something that really rustles the jimmies of your target group!
- Larisa: Something like this!
- Sign: Dubs > Subs – Get that into your filthy heads, otaku!
- Sandra: Do you want to get us killed?!
- Larisa: In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act!
- Sign: Also: “Almost all Japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otaku!” – Hayao Miyazaki
Is that an actual Miyazaki quote?
Larisa’s not -entirely- wrong.
I’ll explain. One of the most important things about any media or art form is the viewer extending a willing suspension of disbelief. Immersion is one of the keys to making this willing suspension of disbelief happen. Ideally, one would be able to understand the media as presented. This is, as noted, not always the case.
That brings us to the debate of subs vs. dubs. A well-produced dubbing should be seamless, translating all original meanings in a way the viewer can understand without having to take themselves out of the scene to read lines of text. The problems come when a dub is either poorly produced, or poorly voice-acted.
When a dubbing is subpar, any immersion gained from not having to read is lost. The viewer will, consciously or not, detach themselves from the media and that willing suspension of disbelief will shatter. If one has the choice between a subpar dub and a sub, at least the sub will allow the person to stay in that world, in the realm of the characters.
In short: Dubs should be better than subs. However, due to a number of reasons, they often aren’t.
@ Jay:
I completely agree.
dis sum gourmet quality bait
for the mr chang thinking this is some text for ants for that last panel :
also : “Almost all japanese animation is produced with hardly any basis taken from observing real people. It’s produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans. And that’s why the industry is full of otakus!”
-Hayao Miyasaki
@ Jay:
I prefer subtitles since I prefer to hear the original voices. In any media. I’d hate to watch Avengers dubbed in German as much as I’d hate to watch an anime dubbed in English. You might say it ruins my immersion 😛
Syaoran wrote:
Yep, it’s a real quote, he said it back in 2014 I believe. Just Google for “miyazaki industry otaku” (without quotes) and you’ll find articles about it. I think he backed off of it a bit afterward, but not much.
@ Jay:
You’ve got it exactly right. For example my mother has serious problems with subs because she can’t read the text quickly enough. Back when I first showed her Laputa: Castle in the Sky the dub was so bad that it was an entirely different, horribly bad movie. She actually asked me to switch to subs because she couldn’t stand it. (I think there’s been a new, better, dub made since then.) When dubs are done that badly, so that everyone can tell it’s horribly bad, it’s easy to see why people start preferring subs. For me personally, I read so quickly that subs have never been an issue, and I frequently forget I’m reading them, increasing my immersion. That’s probably why I’ve always preferred them.
The real truth is:
No subs or dubs. Even if you don’t understand the language.
I remember watching Kikis Delivery Service for the first time in the cinema. Japanese original, with me barely able to understand a single word.
It was one of my most beautiful cinema experiences. Despite not being able to understand the dialog, I was absolutly able to follow the movies storyline and to understand how the characters felt.
I later repeated that experiment with animated series like Blood+ and others.
If a series or movie is well done, you can follow it without being able to understand the dialog and it improves the experience considerably.
@Jay
There are very few dubs good enough to support this argument, though. (The original Tenchi Muyo and Ranma 1/2 come to mind.) Apart from the quality of the translation itself, North American voice direction usually undermines the characterization, often turning characters into caricatures (“Pluto Deadly Scream!”), and the process of isolating each voice actor and their specific lines in a sound booth with no interaction between the actors makes this much worse.
@Manabi, I agree. I’ve also picked up enough Japanese over the years to let that supplement the subtitles as I’m watching, which enriches my experience. (Same for Korean dramas, which I also enjoy.)
I think many of the same considerations apply to audiobooks, actually. There’s (usually) no translation involved, but the whole experience hangs on the narrator’s interpretation and delivery. Even when the narrator is very good, I find myself flinching at readings that mangle the meaning of a sentence by stressing the wrong words. And sometimes the accent or voice delivered by the narrator is so annoying that I can’t listen at all. I will probably always prefer reading, but audiobooks have been a lifesaver for my mother in law, so I’m very glad they exist.
TL;DR: I prefer subs, but the existence of dubs doesn’t bother me, as long as I don’t have to listen to them. 😉
An interesting set of comments so far. 🙂
I pretty much agree, dubs done well are better than subs, but dubs done well are such an incredibly rare thing. The only ones that come to mind are the Studio Ghibli films.
In my case, a lot of the reason i generally hate dubs is the culture weirdness of having a Japanese setting with heavy American accents dubbed poorly on top. Being from the UK, the accents are incredibly jarring.
Took me a few weeks when i first started watching anime, but eventually you hear the japanese voices, read the text and your brain merges the two so you barely notice there are subtitles anymore. A handy skill!
Jay wrote:
And that’s ehy the old saying is still true.
Sub rules, dub drools!!
Can’t really blame Miyazaki-sensei, though.
I don’t want to have to read my movie. Maybe they get dubbing wrong sometimes but at least I don’t miss out on the action while I try and read the screen.
Dubs can be good, but they are so far and few between… The Studio Ghibli Disney English dubs are horrible… With the Disney thinking of let’s get someone famous rather than someone who has proper voice acting talent. The voices either sound wrong or tend to be voiced really flat or overacted and cringeworthy. Sometimes the translation from the original Japanese also lets the dub down.
The original Streamline version of My Neighbour Totoro is a fantastic dub with the voices sounding quite close to the vocalisation of the original Japanese version. The Disney dub is terrible, especially with Mai….
As mentioned abive Techni Muyo is a superb dub, again compare it to the Japanese version.
Still I rather watch a Subtitle then listen to a dub…
Larisa just says that because she hasn’t seen Russian dubs. …oddly enough.
Larisa’s success* isn’t because she specifically said dubs are better than subs; it’s because she said that either dubs OR subs are inherently superior. Both types, when done well, have equal merit, with even the best performances of both having their pros and cons, and which is superior is dependent on the individual viewer.
*I am assuming based on the last panel that provoking an angry mob was Larisa’s intention.
Dubs are best suited to those who wish to enjoy the series for its themes and storytelling style. In visual media, the coreography, artwork, animation, and score all carry equal weight to the dialogue. If the dialogue is in the viewer’s language, it enhances the appreciation of the -themes- alone. The downside is, of course, that no translation is perfect, and thus, there will inevitably be SOMETHING lost in the process.
-Example: it is very hard to make Japanese honorifics, let alone affectionate Japanese terms such as “senpai” or “onee-chan”, sound natural in English, and wordplay in one language almost NEVER works in any other language.
Subs are best suited to those who understand the work’s original language, at least in part. Because no translation is perfect, being able to hear the original dialogue allows for better understanding of its nuances, while having the subtitles to hasten their interpretation. The downside is, of course, that this requires the viewer to learn at least something of the original language.
-Example: if you don’t understand the difference in various people addressing a character as “Tomo-chan”, “Tomo-kun”, or “Tomo-bou”, you gain no benefit from hearing those addresses compared to having all of them address the character as “Tomo”.
All other flaws in either dubbing or subbing are consequent of the dub or sub being poorly handled. A best-quality dub accurately maintains tone, emotion, and force in dialogue, while reading from a script that maintains the original meaning as best as is possible in translation, and anything lost in those subjects are the fault of actors/directors/translstors and not the dub itself. A best-quality sub has its subtitles placed where they do not obstruct anything, as that specific scene calls for, and failure to do so is the fault of the subtitler and not the subtitles themselves; if you have to pull your attention away from the scene to read subtitles, you’re watching on too large a screen.
As for me, I watch EVERYTHING with subtitles, regardless of language, due to growing up in a household with far too much ambient noise to make out what a character says softly even in English. I partake in plenty of Japanese works with voice acting in both English and Japanese, and have subtitles on regardless.
Meh whatever media I could get my hands as long as I can understand it, preference though…I’d like to hear the original Japanese audio so subs it is for me.
Egomane wrote:
That’s a cool story.
I probably couldn’t bear that because of my inherent curiosity 😉 It would be hard for me not to immediately try to find out what they actually said in a certain scene.
I need some times to find what this strip is about.
We can say it’s another example of limits of religious tolerance in America., as Luna experienced no so far ago 😛
http://www.sandraandwoo.com/2016/02/04/0758-poor-choice-of-words/
A frustration with many Ghibli dubs is they add voices when there is no sound in the original. It is a quiet scene to just focus on the visuals but we can’t have that. Then they dub-title instead of making a real subtitle script and there are words on the screen when no one is talking!
I’d say watching Godzilla dubs vs subs is a huge world of difference. Especially in Shin Godzilla where reducing a cast of over 50 speaking lines to like a dozen people really changes things. Then you got the variations of dubs/subs as seen in Evangelion…
Subs are often as bad or worse though. I mean the word engrish was invented to describe the horrible translation of Japanese to English. And since most companies see the outside world as an undesirable market little effort goes into translation.
@ Hawk:
It’s something of a skill that has to be developed. I remember when I was very little I felt the same, I hated subtitles because you missed out on what was going on while reading the dialog. Over time though my hearing has become…well, bad. As a result I use closed captioning to understand what people are saying.
At this point, I don’t even notice that I’m reading the subtitles, it literally feels/seems like I am hearing what the people are saying despite having no speakers on the TV because I’m reading them faster than the characters are speaking, so my brain sees the subtitles, then filters that dialog into the scene as the characters talking.
I am not sure I actually want to join this conversation, but:
1. Subs are fine even when done half-professionally, but dubs must be a masterpiece or they’re subpar; irony.
2. If your dub doesn’t use the original honorifics, you’re doing it wrong. Reason being, you can call someone Tanaka-san in English, and Tanaka will most-likely understand exactly what you mean by that.
So will anyone who has absorbed the culture vicariously through repetition of this strategy; honorifics, ideally, reflect social standing, and rarely does Anime tell tales reliant on the use of honorifics that don’t reflect their importance through the characters’ behavior, throughout the story.
“Not getting it” is just something that neophytes do, and there’s no reason to rip the rug out from under their cultural learning process by removing or replacing honorifics.
3. Miyazaki-san would be hard pressed to ask someone with 20/100 vision to see things as he does without some kind of corrective equipment, and 1 out of 4 people has some kind of vision problem, so really, I doubt it’s just that people don’t want to look at real people.
Everyone’s conception of the world, and their habits re: looking at it, is influenced by their natural clarity of sight of it in the first place. They’re not used to looking at real people, by and large, so can you really blame them?
I think a good sub translates what is said, while a good dub should translate the story and make it understandable in the context of the language that it was translated into. There is nothing worse than a loud chaaaaaaan in english or german.
I love this!
Of note is the fact that part of the reason people believe dubs are so bad so often compared to subs, is that a typical english speaker cannot readily recognize bad japanese voice acting.
While certainly not all of them are this way, there’s probably a comparable amount of cringe in many of those subbed shows, you just don’t generally recognize it.
Lost opportunity: Naruto should perform the Naruto run in this comic.
Well, she is slightly insane, guess she finally decided to have it become official ;p
The English subtitles for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon were well done, making for an entertaining story with many bits of humour (e.g. “When will this end? They take it, they put it back, they take it again. My home is turning into a warehouse.”).
I tried watching the dubbed version instead and it was horrible. The voices didn’t fit the characters, the pronunciation wasn’t clear, the intonation didn’t fit the scenes,.and the dialogue wasn’t nearly as good. It would be nice if someone were to produce a good dub, but in the meantime I’ll stick with the subtitles.
Dubs have been good for several years now. But if you want to keep pretending that you’re an expert on an entire culture because you watched a few cartoons, that’s your business.
One of my problems is that, having gotten accustomed to dubs being universally terrible 20+ years ago, even the ones that are well done now automatically trigger a response from me assuming they must be bad. If I carefully assess it, I can say it’s objectively good, but my brain won’t allow me to accept that in the moment, so I can’t actually sit back and enjoy it.
There are good dubs on a few shows. The Disney funded retelling of the Miyazaki films are mostly well done.
But I prefer subs. Dubbing still requires a form of acting, and if you don’t have the right tone set for the action, it just falls flat. The voice IS the acting in animation, and taking that away from the original IMO is unfair to the film. I’m glad most studios offer both.
@ TachyonCode:
There are far more important factors to watching an anime than understanding minor linguistic differences in how characters address each other, and honorifics simply do not translate well into other languages. Calling someone a neophyte because they want to enjoy a work without learning another language is incredibly pretentious.
r/unpopularopinion
The truth is the DUB, at least english one, is genuinly bad. In most of the animes. examples are Dragon Ball, Digimon and way more than this. It not only sounds like crap, but they also change and censor things that are ridicule to change. From deep emotional scene they can do some bs lovely candy scene. That’s why I chose SUB, because I get things like they are meant to be. There are exceptions, but there are only a few. Period.
Causing arguments instead of being capable isn’t a advertising model that lasts, OR works in your favor. Thankfully, SaW has enough talent on it that making such a ‘strip is only commentary, not attention whoring.
As for controversial opinions, too bad Larissa’s not causing a crowd run by stealing the girl’s gym team’s underwear ala’ Happosai.
Panty And Stocking With Garterbelt
One of the best dubs to ever exist
Manabi wrote:
I) That’s what was so piercingly delightful about “What’s up, Tiger Lily”- an English dub of a foreign movie in which the dub was obviously quite unrelated to the actual dialog.
B) it also bears a relationship of the charm of MST3K.
Why is Sandra running, and not Larisa by herself, since she’s the one that held up the sign?
While not anime; in the older, SNES, final fantasy games the original woosly translations were really good cultural translations. They were not perfect, but they were memorable and did a good job translating the intent of the kanji. However they were seen as overly goofy so later translations of the games were more literal and lacking of subtext. These retranslations are comparably boring, and lacking depth, but they kept the serious tones better. The best fan translations later mixed these two translation sets together and made a best of both worlds translation for games like final fantasy four and six
@ Jay:
If immersion was key, DreamWorks would not be as successful as they are. Can you imagine Shrek without Eddie Murphy? Or Antz without Sylvester Stallone? Well, if English isn’t your first language, a dub for those exists. Except you can SEE it’s a Sylvester Stallone ant, but it just doesn’t sound like Sylvester Stallone.
Thing is, if you exclude that overrated Miyazaki (I mean, he animates nice, but his works, especially the writing and storytelling, and most definitely the audio, are nothing to write home about), anime has a TON of star power. Voice actors like Satomi Arai or Tomokazu Sugita, for example, are instantly recognizable. Watching a dub of an anime in which they voice act is like watching the Bollywood rendition of Terminator. All you can think is “This skinny Indian guy doesn’t look nor sound like Schwarzenegger”.
Also, as someone who learned English from watching Leslie Nielsen’s Police Squad, I can attest that watching anything in the original language is way better. And the more you do it, the better it gets.
TachyonCode wrote:
I don’t see how that’s ironic. First, as I explain above, dubs take away from the work even if perfect. Second, unless done in an oversized font that covers the whole screen, a sub being bad is no worse than the sub not being there at all. Which means you still have the quality of the original work. A dub removes the audio of the original work, and therefore must provide something of equal value instead.
Dog3y3 wrote:
And there’s this. Beyond the star power, you can’t just replace professional voice actors with “whomever was around the studio while we were recording” and expect an equal result. And yet that’s what you get with most dubs.
Heck, that’s why abridged series actually tend to be better than official dubs most of the time. The people who make them, at least the more notable ones like Team Four Star or Little Kuriboh, are simply more talented voice actors, with a much better vocal range, and a gift for impersonation.
Heck, I remember watching Meduka Meguca, thinking how Chii’s crying is more convincing than Aoi Yuuki’s.
Jay wrote:
If you watch enough subs, you stay immersed when watching them, with zero penalty to suspension of disbelief. The only reason to watch a dub is if the dub in some way enhances the experience. There are very few dubbed shows where that’s the case.
Here’s what it amounts to: Cab you understand the language of the original version?
Yes>> Go with subs. You understand it, and have closed captions to follow along and make sure you understand everything
No>> Go with dub. Even if part of the original meaning is gone, you are able to understand the dialogues and what is presented to you. Original meanings are going to be lost in the sub too(unless the dub is really bad quality, then go ahead and get Og with subs)
It really depends , at least for me, is the situation where i’m watching a foreign language movie.
At home its subs, with me in control of being able to rewind, if I didn’t read it quickly enough.
A theater I have to go with Dubbing as im not in control of playback if it going too fast to read.
@ foducool:
Having watched a lot of Miyazaki films over the years I can believe he actually said this. His work involves painstaking attention to detail and shows that he does observe human beings.
@ Egomane:
Kiki’s showed me how dubs can be misleading.
In the original movie, Kiki asks to borrow a broom from a street sweeper, and he says “no”. (Clear in Japanese, and in the sub). In the Disney dub, he says “yes”, which completely loses the character development aspect of Kiki. (In a later dub, it reverted to “no”, IIRC)
Be afraid. Be very afraid. But I’m with Larissa, not because I hate subs per-se, but because of my vision; I have to focus on the text so much, I miss what’s happening in the scene. Also, they tend to move on faster than I can absorb.
@ Kenju:
I get it, I do. I just don’t watch even movies of any type let along subbed/dubbed anime. I don’t see myself changing so, I’m a dubber 🙂
@ Egomane:
That is one of the reasons Lucy ball was so popular in Japan.
Her comedy was easily translated due to its reliance on her physical actions.
many times, the Japanese would ‘forget’ to turn on subtitles or sound when one of her shows was airing.
Makes sense Larisa will believe it. In Russia, it’s all dubs – a leftover from a totalitarian government that didn’t want its people to overhear anything subversive.