8000 Saiyan wrote:huzaifa_ahmed wrote:TheBlackPaladin wrote:Japan doesn't care about matching lip movements. Or rather, they don't care as much as we--and a lot of other international audiences--do. If you'll notice, the lip flaps often aren't super-precise in the original Japanese version. As it was explained to me by a dubbing director, the reason for this is because Japan, for many, many decades now, has been used to importing shows from other countries...so they're used to the lip movements not matching. As such, in Japan, there's just this general cultural belief that that's how animation works...the lip movements don't match 100%, and they don't mind it. For that matter, the only que the actors get as to when to start speaking (outside of the animation) is to watch the timecode at the bottom of the screen and guestimate the delivery time. Since they don't care as much about lip flaps as other countries, they don't feel the necessity for a queing system like the three ADR beeps or the rhythmo-band. As long as it loosely fits the lip flaps...ish...they're OK with it.
For other countries who do care about lip-syncing, though, recording in groups is not usually practical, which is why you don't see a ton of group recordings for dubs outside of dubs with a rhythmo-band involved.
I do believe you've posted something similar before, & I appreciate your rather heavy reworking of something that you had already previously typed out. IIRC the dub director was Tony Oliver too. Solid resume of work btw, as good as Wendee Lee IMO. Good stuff. That being said, the existence of loop groups for live-action (which is even more precise than animation), leads me to believe that it is a budgetary thing, or at least that budget is a factor. Especially when one considers that FUNimation especially, doesn't pay for outsourcing to studios, & actor pay is lower than LA even.
I know that Steve Blum has mentioned that in the early 90's, the studio that he worked in the mailroom of, dubbed their anime ensemble (in a treehouse no less). Also, Battle of the Planets IIRC was dubbed ensemble as well.
I wonder if doing ensembles in anime dubs could allow for better products...or am I just exaggerating?
They stopped recording dubs ensemble because the expectations for the quality and script faithfulness of dubs gradually rose, and unless there's a rhythmo-band involved, ensemble-recording makes putting on high-quality performances that match the lip flaps very, very difficult. The thing about dubs is, it wasn't until...not super-recently, but relatively recently from a historical perspective, that those involved with dubs started to understand what constituted a quality dub.
When we first started out with dubs, the expectations were low to non-existent, and there was a lot of experimenting as they went along. Dubbing companies didn't get story explanations or character explanations ahead of time, the translations they got were often borderline-unusable (see my sig for an example) and it took a few decades to dawn on dub producers that a script could be "adapted" rather than going with the literal translation and not caring about the lip flaps. As Barbara Goodson said, back when she started dubbing work in the 80's, they didn't even know it was called "anime" back then, and that producers simply called it, "This stuff we got from Japan." This wasn't just an American thing either. The French dub of
Saint Seiya cast a female voice actress to play Andromeda Shun based on the character's feminine appearance...but a few episodes later, when they got translations referring to Shun as "him," the realized the character was a guy and awkwardly dismissed the voice actress playing him, and the character switched to a male voice actor from there on out without explanation.
It wasn't just dub producers who didn't expect much of the dub, either...it used to be that, quite often, the original animation companies themselves would not monitor dubs at all. The whole idea that people actually cared about the artistic integrity of the shows was, for several decades, not something they even considered. Keep in mind, in many cases, the anime is simply viewed as a series of high-profile commercials to help sell merchandise (which is definitely the case with
Dragon Ball). Since profits, not artistic integrity, was the main objective of most Japanese animation companies, they simply gave their projects to whoever presented the most lucrative business deal. Quite often, they wouldn't even watch the dubs,
as this great article from ANN noted. Without high-speed internet, dubbing studios just couldn't ask all the questions they wanted to or send in things like casting choices or dub scripts for approval, and the original Japanese animation companies just flat-out couldn't watch the dubs. Roland Parliament, the director of the DiC
Sailor Moon dub, wrote a book on the dub's production and said that the top priority of the producers was to get the episodes out as fast as possible. They did the best they could, but there just wasn't much talk of "getting the characters and the story right." The industry expectations then were simply, "Hear these Japanese voices? Replace them with English ones. We trust you. Go." There weren't a ton of complaints among fans either, because there wasn't an internet where people could post fansubs or talk about all the changes that had been made to a dub. Most people back then saw a dub without any clue of what had been censored or changed.
The expectations are higher now, though. Like,
way higher. Acting quality, matching the lip flaps, writing faithful scripts, keeping the original music, casting choices that are approved by the original Japanese company...the dubbing industry today is a very, very different animal from what it was even in the 90's. So ensemble dub recordings are not the best thing to do if you want high-quality performances that match the lip flaps, because--with the exception of a rhythmo-band--there is no easy way to que individual actors in an ensemble when to start speaking. Each actor would have a different set of beeps, so there'd be a lot of instances of actors accidentally cutting other actors off, or reading the time codes wrong. It's just not an easy thing to do...without a rhythmo-band.
Loop groups are a whole separate discussion. The only "ensemble recordings" they do are instances where they don't need to match lip movements and generalize what they're saying based on the mood that the crowd on screen appears to be in. When they need to dub over actual individuals that appear on screen with moving lips, they still bring actors up one at a time, and they are still qued in with beeps.
