Majin Buu wrote:Exactly. Natural is when it sounds like the actor isn't trying to act and is just speaking/emoting normally, even when the voice in question isn't a normal voice.
Forced is when the performance sounds off because the actor is noticeably trying too hard to get the desired effect across.
This sums up my whole overall point pretty much perfectly.
Let me clarify a few things here about what I was talking about earlier:
Are there some (
some) members of the Japanese cast who put on a "cartoon-ish" affectation in their voice for certain characters? Absolutely. Pilaf is my usual go-to example, but Fat Majin Buu is indeed another one. Is it however a majority or even a lot of them who put their voices into an over-the-top cartoon-ish mode? No way. Absolutely not: we're talking about a handful of noteworthy examples there (that certainly stick out all the more so due to how rare it is among the majority of the Japanese cast). What the overwhelming majority of the Japanese cast members do, more often than not, is simply adjust their vocal register slightly, but otherwise speak in a normal, organic manner.
Nozawa's Goku voice for example is EXTREMELY close to just her regular everyday speaking voice: she just pitches it slightly higher. That's basically it. She isn't "transforming" her voice all that radically: she simply adjusts her pitch slightly, but otherwise just speaks naturally and organically into the microphone, allowing her to actually, y'know,
act instead of putting such a ridiculous amount of effort into "maintaining" some kind of absurd vocal gymnastics she'd otherwise be needlessly putting herself through.
Schemmel can claim he's doing the same thing (using his normal voice but pitched higher) all day long all he likes, but the thing is that's only actually true SOME of the time. When Goku is in a normal, casual speaking scene, Schemmel has only gotten to a point where he's "naturalized" his speaking style for it STUPIDLY recently (relative to his whole history with the character). We're talking from around maybe Kai and onward. Anytime prior to Kai (be it Z, video games, whatever) his "casual speaking" Goku voice was a MUCH more "forced" affectation, along the lines of "this is me doing my over-the-top-macho-superhero-manly voice".
From around Kai onward, he's dropped that level of forced affectation for casual speaking scenes... but ONLY then. The thing is, Goku is a martial arts character in a martial arts show: so he spends a LOT of his screentime fighting and otherwise speaking in a heightened emotional state. For fight scenes, or any scene where Goku is enraged or otherwise in emotional turmoil of some kind... schemmel defaults back to his "this is my over-the-top-cartoon-superhero" voice, and it renders almost completely moot the otherwise largely serviceable performance he's more recently managed only in the more low key "casual" scenes.
Awhile back someone asked me to basically dissect a scene of Schemmel's acting in Kai to illustrate what I was talking about, and it ended up being the scene where Goku goes SSJ for the first time against Freeza. This is in KAI mind you, the one where Schemmel has "evolved into a phenomenal Goku" according to most dub fans. In the original, Nozawa plays this scene VERY low key for the most part right up until the very end. She chokes back sobs, her breathing is heavy... but she isn't going batshit over the top making absurd noises to show how ENRAGED she is. That's precisely however what SCHEMMEL is doing: I cued up the Kai clip with ZERO expectations. I made sure to take on the mindset that I was going in with absolutely none of whatever baggage I have from the old Z sub, thinking I was in for something that was radically different.
What I heard was Schemmel basically sounding like he was tweaking on meth the whole time: it caused me to genuinely, involuntarily laugh out loud. This is supposed to be for one of Goku's most pivotal emotional scenes and a massive turning point in the whole DB series... and with Nozawa, you're totally invested in the moment because she sounds genuinely in emotional anguish over Goku's dead friend. With Schemmel though,unless he's doing a scene of Goku just hanging out around his friends casually at a Capsule Corp barbecue or something along those lines (and even that's only a relatively recent development for him), the guy is seemingly fundamentally incapable of playing Goku without putting his voice through an absurd ringer of weird, ridiculous noises and vocal spasms.
He doesn't sound like he's in any kind of genuine emotional stress during that SSJ transformation scene, or any other such scene that required any kind of emotion that's even remotely heightened beyond "casually hanging out with friends": he sounds like he's completely spazzing out on a caffeine bender, and its fundamentally laugh-out-loud ridiculous and IMPOSSIBLE to get invested in ANY such scene that he's in because of it. And in a martial arts fighting show, that's a LOT of scenes. To say nothing of his actual "fighting" noises, which are similarly silly and stupid-sounding to listen to, even to this very day. And in a show like DB/Z, you're going to have to hear Schemmel's ridiculous "fighting" noises an awful, awful LOT of the time.
Nozawa may be a woman who plays Goku with a high vocal register: but she's absolutely and totally capable of totally natural, un-forced line delivery in it. Even during fight scenes, she isn't "GRRRRRRRUNTING AND STRAINING" like she's having digestive issues... she knows how to smoothly and organically deliver a "martial arts kiai" which no, isn't just spastically yelling and grunting randomly.
In other words: sometimes "less is more", rather than constantly always going balls-out over the top in every scene: that's what I meant earlier by "emotional subtlety". It doesn't mean that these characters are portrayed as densely layered straight out of Tennessee Williams play: it means that by going with a more smooth, naturalistic acting-style, there's actually room within the performance to convey more subtle emotional cues - which thus, allows the character to come across as more three dimensional, and thus as more humanly relatable and easy to connect with - rather than constantly hamfistedly blaring out everything at an 11 or more, which is just obnoxious and irritating and tarnishes the whole thing into straight up unwatchability.
When I say that the FUNimation (and Ocean) voices are doing "over-the-top cartoon character voices" I'm not saying that simply because they're altering their voices, nor am I saying that any voice actor who alters their voice to ANY degree (even simple pitch adjustment) is inherently guilty of doing a ridiculous cartoon affectation. That's obviously not true and would be absurd to suggest. I'm saying it rather because of the
degree to which the FUNimation actors (and many of the Ocean actors) alter their voices. There's a HUGE difference between "modulating one's tone and pitch slightly to sound like a different person when speaking" and "putting one's voice through some forced transformation that makes it so they have to always STRAIN very hard to maintain it".
The number of the Japanese VAs in DB who do the latter are EXCEEDINGLY few and far between: and even the ones that do it are generally MUCH better at it and more capable at maintaining the voice without STRAINING so hard and thus sacrificing tremendous degrees of naturalism in their delivery. 95% of them though simply just slightly adjust their pitch or modulate their tone somewhat: but otherwise, they're simply just speaking organically and smoothly into the mic in a slight variation or spin of what's otherwise just their normal speaking voice, be it Furukawa's Piccolo, Horikawa's Vegeta, Nozawa's Goku, Furuya's Yamucha, Tanaka's Kuririn, Nakao's Freeza, Yanami's Kaio, etc.
Schemmel can claim that that's what he's doing with his Goku all he likes: but that's maybe only actually true in practice like, at best, maybe 25/30% of the time on average, and only from Kai onward.
And that's all just in how the actors SOUND in the roles vocally, without even getting into the - all kinds of wrong and cringe-worthy - ways in which they even just emote: Schemmel of course being notable for how he often plays up his Goku performance in a very overtly "superhero"-like delivery in most scenes (generally of the non-"hanging out with my friends" variety), as if he's basically Superman or Captain America in a dogi, which is fundamentally at odds with Goku's (and really, the entire story's) basic-most nature and conception, and is as much a dramatic creative revision that undermines the character as any script rewrite.
And finally... the whole thing about "why do you want these characters to sound like human beings when they're not TECHNICALLY ACTUALLY supposed to be human?" is about the most absurdly pedantic, obtusely over-literal interpretation of what I was trying to get across: made all the more worse by how many times Ireland kept repeatedly hammering on that point.
What I
clearly and obviously meant by "these characters need to sound like believable human beings" was that they should come across as emotionally relatable. Dragon Ball may be an over the top silly and absurd martial arts fairy tale starring an assortment of aliens and demons that's culled largely from old Chinese myths (and some campy sci fi B movies mixed in for good measure)... but while much of it is indeed very overtly comedic, a lot of it is also very much dramatic and expects the viewer to take it at least SOMEWHAT seriously in those more dramatically intense moments.
Particularly in such dramatic moments, when characters react to things, you should be able to connect with it on an emotional level if the story is going to have any real weight or impact on the viewer. The more hamfisted and overly-on-the-nose-silly the reaction, the more of an invisible wall of separation there is between the viewer and the story being told that disconnects their emotional investment from it.
A great example is Chaozu's death against Nappa: in that scene in the original Japanese Z, Hirotaka Suzuoki plays that scene almost disturbingly grounded and real. He puts genuine anguish and gravitas into the moment, so that you're able on some level to get a sense of Tenshinhan's pain in a way that rings as dramatically honest. Yeah, if my lifelong best friend killed themselves right in front of me... that sounds like a rough approximation (more or less) of how I, or someone else in general, might sound in that horrible moment.
I'm certainly not saying its Oscar-caliber or rivaling Olivier, or anything of that sort at all: just that its a genuinely sincere, organic acting performance of a character in emotional pain over the sudden and violent loss of a friend, rather than a forced affectation of a caricature doing his "Rrrrrrrr, LOOK HOW SERIOUS I AM!!" voice. When that scene happens in Japanese, you actually
feel something in no small part because of the earnestness and rawness of Suzuoki's performance. This is incredibly basic drama 101 stuff: if you want the audience to feel the dramatic weight of something, convey emotions that they can connect to something tangibly real or sincere.
Contrast that to ANY English version of that Tenshinhan scene where it falls completely and utterly hollow, because the actor playing Tenshinhan there (take your pick among all the English iterations) just isn't invested in the scene at all. They're not acting it as if they just saw someone they care about get killed like how Suzuoki plays it (which yeah, is pretty heavy for a kids' mystical Kung Fu cartoon: but that's the sort of "extra effort" that helps put DB in its Japanese form a step above your average such material): they're still acting in their "this-is-my-cartoon-character" voice.
They thus don't sound anything like anything that vaguely resembles the baseline human emotional reaction one might have in such a horrible moment: they still sound like a stereotypical kids cartoon superhero character, just saying "Oh no! Chaozu!" or whatever, while making absurd, ridiculous, and cringe-worthy "HHHHHGGGGGH!!!! ARAAAAAAWWWWWAAAAAAAHHH!!!!" noises in an attempt to convey "I'm upset" in a way that isn't at all how ANYONE actually conveys being upset: it ends up sounding like they just have a nasty bout of indigestion.
And once again, no: I'm not asking for Gary Oldman-caliber acting chops here or anything remotely close to that level. Not in the least bit. I'm asking for "Basic Fundamentals of Properly Conveying Drama 101" here: something that any average, generic TV-level actor can provide. I'm asking for the English VAs to stop playing these roles like they're knowingly and self-awarely in a bad kids' superhero cartoon, and instead play their roles like they're acting in a (silly and high concept, but still dramatically earnest) martial arts movie: because that's how the Japanese cast has
always played these roles for the past 30+ years now. If they can do it, there's NOTHING stopping anyone else from doing likewise.
Central characters like Goku and Vegeta being alien were-apes from outer space has absolutely ZERO bearing on anything that I'm talking about with regards to fundamental basics of emotionally sincere and earnest acting and emoting: they still feel and express human emotions such as happiness, anger, sadness, boredom, puzzlement, etc. the same as any human character does. Countless actors have portrayed alien or otherwise non-human characters across a dizzying array of film and TV media and have managed to do so with NO problems whatsoever delivering a competent, emotionally believable and relatable performance. Parsing what I've been saying here in such a thuddingly hyper-literal way ("..but they're not supposed to be humans!") is ludicrous pedantry of the highest possible order.
Also, this problem with basic acting and emoting is one that goes across ALL characters anyway, including most of the humans: so even if one wants to make the (absurdly idiotic) argument that Goku, Vegeta, Freeza, etc. are all aliens and thus there's something specific about their extraterrestrial natures that justifies their being played acting-wise as strained and forced Saturday Morning Cartoon Superhero Caricatures with unnaturally stilted and growly delivery (despite that having NEVER been the case in the original): that excuse STILL doesn't fly with characters like Kuririn, Tenshinhan, Yamucha, Muten Roshi, etc. who all share that same exact issue despite being 100% Earth-born humans. So even on its own migraine-inducingly stupid terms, this argument STILL falls apart under its own logic.
Two of the relatively FEW original FUNimation cast members that this problem
doesn't and has
never affected are Chuck Huber and Meredith McCoy's 17 and 18, easily and unquestionably two of the best, most naturalistic performances across the entire dub. Not a high bar to clear by any means, but they both have managed to their credit. More performances along the same lines as THOSE across the core cast would've gone a LONG way toward salvaging the FUNi dub and making it at least halfway tolerable and listenable at a baremost minimum.
