Is my comic book blasphemous/sacrilegious?

[patrick457]

Oh good youve gotten over your recent case of writers block .
Its kind of strange because I read their names and looked at the pictures and so on and yes it all looks very French but for some reason I always still think of characters like that as Japanese. It is not just these characters but almost all anime characters, even the anime Alps no Shojo Heidi which is supposed to be Switzerland?? Im still not fully convinced she is Swiss I think it is because of the style of drawing I can never get entirely past that and the characters always end up being part Japanese in my mind. Language probably plays a part too since if I actually saw or heard them speak English or anything but Japanese I might be more convinced of their intended nationality.

I can relate to that. It’s just a bit too odd to hear a supposed ‘foreigner’ speaking in Japanese in some anime.

 

[Lost_Wanderer]

I can relate to that. It’s just a bit too odd to hear a supposed ‘foreigner’ speaking in Japanese in some anime.

I hear ya. I sure wish those animation companies could hire more foreign voice actors.

 

[The_Otaku]

I think it’s really adorable, in the anime, when they have the japanese voice actresses speak their japanese character’s lines in english (like in english class, for example). This is actually pretty realistic, as it wouldn’t perfect and the accent would be heavy.

In the case of foreigners speaking their own language, I agree they need to hire voice actors who are fluent in that language to do the voice overs. When a foreigner has the same accent when speaking english for example, that a japanese person would, it doesn’t sound convincing. Better to hire someone who can speak perfect english and is fluent in japanese, so you don’t have to hire two different people.

Another thing that adds a load of confusion is when you have non-asian characters talking in their native tongue, but for the sake of the japanese viewers, they’re hearing the character speak in japanese, and the only way we know they’re speaking something else is because other characters point it out. We’re to assume they’re speaking in their language and only people who can understand it are talking back in that language, but we’re hearing it all in japanese.

It gets complicated even when you have subtitles, since the person the english speaking person is talking to just sits there looking at them like they don’t understand, yet we’re hearing them speak the same language. What really confuses it is when the character is bilingual and talks in english, then in russian, then in japanese, then in english again. Because we’re hearing it all in japanese, you’re not sure when the listener understands or what language they’re speaking at that moment (unless the japanese had the sense to put subtitles in different colors or something so you know there’s a different language being spoken).

It would make it a whole lot easier if they just hired actors to speak only in foreign languages during dialogue like that. That way, we english speakers aren’t hearing japanese when that’s not what they’re speaking, and the japanese get the subtitles so they can follow the conversations when they’re in english or another language. There would always need to be subtitles, but that’s fine. That would make it realistic and would simplify things. But the japanese companies are usually on a tight budget and try to get japanese actors to do all the work. It just isn’t convincing cause it’s broken english most of the time and sounds silly. I have seen some good attempts, though.

 

[Lost_Wanderer]

I’ve always suspected that money was the problem. I guess this could be one obstacle for a manga to become an anime.

Take the case of Air Gear and Negima. Both of their anime versions have stopped but their manga is still ongoing. If one were to read the manga versions though, they’d find that there are parts with lengthy conversations where foreign characters are seen speaking somewhat perfectly in English (which rather surprised me cuz I once thought that manga authors weren’t fluent in it). I guess I can see why they’d have difficulty continuing the anime if such scenes were to animated and voiced since hiring foreign voice actors is really pricy.

 

[patrick457]

I’ve always suspected that money was the problem. I guess this could be one obstacle for a manga to become an anime.

Take the case of Air Gear and Negima. Both of their anime versions have stopped but their manga is still ongoing. If one were to read the manga versions though, they’d find that there are parts with lengthy conversations where foreign characters are seen speaking somewhat perfectly in English (which rather surprised me cuz I once thought that manga authors weren’t fluent in it). I guess I can see why they’d have difficulty continuing the anime if such scenes were to animated and voiced since hiring foreign voice actors is really pricy.

Yes, a lot of mangaka are not really fluent in English (in fact, many Japanese are). Perhaps they write some sentence in ‘Engrish’ which would later be corrected.

Case in point: When the final chapter of Death Note came out in Weekly Jump the final words of the series were the mangled “This story of DEATH NOTE is end,” which were later corrected to “Thus concludes the story of DEATH NOTE” when the chapter is released in manga form.

 

[vee8]

It would make it a whole lot easier if they just hired actors to speak only in foreign languages during dialogue like that.

It would make sense but I guess money is tight and they cant afford it. It reminds me of another reason why I have a hard time watching a lot of anime and that is the characters Japanese voices have no variety. There is the hero voice, the heroin voice, the bad guy voice and so on so even if its a completely different series the voices seem to follow the same tone for each character. Does that make sense? I complained about this to a friend one day asking why do they always sound the same and he told me that there arent that many voice actors so usually its the same people working on many projects. I dont know how right he is but it sounds plausible.

 

[The_Otaku]

It would make sense but I guess money is tight and they cant afford it. It reminds me of another reason why I have a hard time watching a lot of anime and that is the characters Japanese voices have no variety. There is the hero voice, the heroin voice, the bad guy voice and so on so even if its a completely different series the voices seem to follow the same tone for each character. Does that make sense? I complained about this to a friend one day asking why do they always sound the same and he told me that there arent that many voice actors so usually its the same people working on many projects. I dont know how right he is but it sounds plausible.

When I used to talk about this I used the analogy of multi-stringed instruments versus instruments that only have three strings or less. The more strings you have, the more chords to play, and the more chords the different notes and so on.

The analogy was that american voice actors have multi-stringed voices. They’re capable of producing noises, pitches, tones, and so forth that the japanese voice actors with their single or tri-stringed voices cannot. The strings, in this analogy, represent the vocal cords. It’s just the way God made us. The asian people in general sound the same, as you say, because their vocal cords either aren’t capable or trained or adapted enough to produce a wide range of different voices or sounds. They tend to be high pitched or monotone, which can hurt the essence of the character they play. To america’s credit, we’re a diverse country so we have a wide variety of actors to choose from that would provide us with exactly the voice we want, as it pertains to the character. Even if we weren’t diverse and were mainly just white people (can’t say that’s the case anymore…) caucasians in general have diverse and unique voices. You get this sometimes with the asian actors and singers, and these are also the ones who tend to get the actings roles, since they’re highly sought after and capable of producing voices which are typically not possible or expected from an asian person. The same goes for the japanese modeling industry. Alot of these big star models or singers have more european features than asian, or they’re an exotic mix of european and japanese by birth, being born of a japanese mother and an italian father, for example.