penguintruth wrote:Most English voices for cartoon characters try to be outlandish and are only memorable for their outlandishness where most of the great Japanese peformances I've heard are memorable for their geniuneness and emotional believability.
Well, that would be because most English language cartoons
are outlandish and comedic, so there's not much need for a great emotional performance. But you still get a great comedic performance (sometimes, depends on the show), as well as memorable voices that suit the characters. I can't remember ever seeing an English language cartoon and thinking "Wow, that voice really doesn't fit that character". Or a couple hours after seeing it thinking "What did that character sound like again? I've forgotten." Which happens a lot with Japanese voice acting, the latter one especially.
Japanese animation was a much broader spectrum of subject matter, so there's more opportunity for great emotional performances, but in my experience it hasn't meant that there actually are a lot a great emotional performances. I wouldn't say a performance has to be particularly emotional to be memorable anyway, which is often something I hear on this subject. People praise Japanese voice acting because of it's seriousness and emotion, but it's that exact thing that puts me off sometimes. It seems so overdramatic and emotionally wrought at times, but that's mostly the script I think, because Japanese dialogue tends to be quite dry and expository, without much character. But anyway, I'm getting off the point.
The memorable performances, both Japanese and English, are the ones that do everything right. A great, fitting voice for the character and great performance of the script, whatever it calls for (drama, comedy, whatever). Nozawa does that for Goku, whereas (since I'm getting back on topic) Schemmel doesn't. I don't think he's terrible. He does an okay voice and an okay performance, but that's it.
