Subs over Dubs: Which Anime turned you into a 'Purist'?

[LadyRhian]

I am in my 40's, so a lot of the stuff I first saw was things like Speed Racer, Battle of the Planets/G-Force, Star Blazers and the like. I remember not knowing that they were Anime as such, but that I liked the style they were animated in (they were ALL dubbed at the time). As for my first subbed anime, I think it was Yu Yu Hakusho, which I watched in a fan subbed version from a company that sold them on purple VHS tapes (and I borrowed them from a comic shop owner who also sold AD&D stuff, magic cards and baseball cards). I also remember looking at "Marmalade Boy", which sort of made me uncomfortable (Heroine's parents go on vacation, meet another couple, exchange spouses and end up getting divorced and married to the other couple's spouses and they all move into one house along with the other couple's son, who ends up being the heroine's love interest. I was literally saying, "WTF did I just see/hear?!"). I still prefer subs over dubs, but I'll watch either.

Incidentally, if you ever catch the first Weiss Kreuz on DVD, watch the extras with the dubs by the voice actors goofing off. There's a wedding, narrated by Cartman from South Park that will make you fall over laughing.

 

[tangoprime]

I don't think I'll ever be an anime "purist." It's mostly because I find it very distracting to try and read what they're saying while trying to pay attention to what's going on behind it. It's also a little bit because, due to the fact that I neither speak nor understand Japanese, I basically completely ignore the voices in any subed episode I do watch, which I think is a little bit insulting to the original actors' work.

Same here. When I'm watching subbed, I end up watching the subtitles instead of the show, and at that point, why don't I just read a book? Same thing even tends to happen when watching a movie/show with subtitles even in english (native language), instead of watching the show, I tend to watch the subtitles.

Plus, with anime, there are a lot of damn good english voice actors, for example Crispin Freeman and Steve Blum. I've always liked their work in giving the character better characterization than I get from the original japanese. I'm also bothered by period pieces taking place in countries other than japan, and hearing all the characters speak japanese. Best example I can think of being (the phenomenal) original Area 88. Set in late 1970's/early 1980's France, and then the middle east, only 2 japanese characters in the show, but everyone speaking japanese was really jarring.

 

[tangoprime]

Not that it made me a purist or anything, but the first time I realized the power of dubbing was when I watched the subbed Cowboy Bebop for the first time and realized that Spike was an entirely different character: Dubbed Spike is an Cowboy, Subbed Spike is an Samurai.

Exactly, stuff like this. Steve Blum especially- the characters are just a lot different just based on the characterization they create with the voice, and I tend to like the dubbed ones better. Another example I always point to is Alucard in Hellsing. Crispin Freeman's Alucard is just WAY more fun then the gravelly-voiced monster than is the japanese voiced Alucard.

 

[Diddy_Mao]

I've always been more likely to prefer to watch anything in the original language with subtitles rather than a dub, this goes for any film/show regardless of the style. If nothing else it's usually a closer translation of the script since they don't have to worry about adapting the dialogue to fit the timing of the scene.

To me there's also just too many factors that can contribute to a shitty dub to bother with it.

There's an increased risk of terrible voice acting. I know it's gotten better over the years, but at the height of my anime viewing, the term "Funimation Bad" had developed into a catch all term for bland, terrible voice acting.

Localization bias is also a big problem. Some translators are of the opinion that it's not enough to translate the story but that they have to localize the script as well. At best this usually shows up in intentional dialect differences, usually in the form of a Southern accent used when the character being translated is meant to have a regional dialect outside of the norm for the series. At worst it's just a lot of out of place pop culture references that are obviously not intended to be in the original script.

 

[Binkan]

I did watch DBZ and Naruto in English when i was a kid but the first anime to get into the genre was Strawberry something I think, it was about an all girls school and something like that and Im even suprised that I continued watching anime after that since it would most likely turn away any sane person to ever wanting to watch anime ever again...

As for dubs I have only seen DBZ in English and had Pokemon,Sailor Moon, Digimon and some others in Swedish which wasn't so bad since they were animes for children. I have tried dubs but they always sound so different and sometimes it's just awful VAs.

 

[GalanDun]

All of them make me go directly to English versions. Death Note in Japan had people who couldn't act doing the voices and Dragon Ball Z has cliched backing music and awful voice acting. Also, a lot of them are just a whole lot better in English, because they translate it better than the subtitles do (IE, lots of the cleverness in the writing of Naruto is lost in the subs) Although if I have an option (And if for some reason they didn't edit all the Japanese text to English) I will watch it dubbed with subtitles. I initially turned the subtitles off when I was watching Naruto uncut, but then turned them back on when the show wasn't translating the gratuitous Japanese that I can barely read.
As for movies, I like Death Note dubbed in English, because it uses the English VAs from the anime. There are some dubs that are truly awful, but for those I just read the manga. It's either dubs with subs or officially translated manga for me.