Sub or Dub? The quintessential question that has plagued the anime community for decades now. It was a widespread and nearly undisputed fact that the English dub of anime always got the mood of the scene and the vibe of the characters completely wrong. Well, I’m here to say that in today’s modern age, English dubbed anime can be just as good as the original Japanese.
First, you have the most iconic example, the English dubbing of Ghost Stories; a story that is technically about school students solving it’s namesake of “ghost stories.” However, the Japanese dub sold so bad that the English crew had been given free reign to do whatever suited their fancy. And it was absolutely hilarious! The absolute unrestrained chaos of the dub makes for a fun surprise for each and every episode.
Speaking of hilarious, another great English dub is of the comedy anime, The Disastrous Life of Saiki K. It’s a delightful show that can be watched in either dub, as both deliver the lines with great comedic timing and emotion. It’s almost never failed to get a laugh out of me, in either language, with both delivering the main character’s deadpan humor perfectly and capturing the general chaos of the show as a whole extremely well.
Moving away from the comedy genre and into action, the English dub of a more recent anime; Dandadan, has a phenomenal English dub. The action scenes always carries the suitable amount of tension and delivering a heart racing experience in either language. The localization team also did a great job with translating over jokes in Japanese to be understood by English audiences. Not to mention the cover of Hunting Soul, a song original to the anime. Done by Marc Hudson, who is the lead singer of DragonForce in real life, captures the vibe of the original song extremely well with little to no discrepancy.
Continuing with shonen series, my longtime favorite anime Dr. Stone has a wonderful dub with great casting. Each character sounds exactly how you would expect them to talk if they could all speak fluent English. All of the cast members capture the same exited, chaotic, passion for science and its possibilities as the original dub, with the added bonus of maybe understanding all of the science terms a bit better. With it’s final Cour on the way, it will be a great finished series to watch in either language.
We have come a long way in the way of English dubbing, but one fundamentally great older dub would have to be for the Pokémon anime. Even the iconic phrase “gotta catch them all” is from the English dub’s opening. there are a lot of moments like this, an iconic line from an anime that was never in the actual Japanese dub at all. another example of this would be Naruto’s “Believe it!”, which was an attempt at localizing “dattebayo”, which has no exact English translation.
Anime dubs may have been mostly bad in the past, but as we move into the future, it’s time to accept that the english dub is nothing to be scorned. You can watch newer dubs and get almost the same experience you would from sub, just with less speedreading.
