Dubbing

Dubbing, I fucking hate it. It ruins a film completely. I count it as being even worse than having a grandparent in your living room watching a film with you, asking you every two minutes if ‘that one there’ is the baddy, if it’s on video or television and, worst of all, what’s going on/what’s going to happen later on. That’s a walk in the park compared to a dubbed film, although if both are mixed together in my presence somebody will die….

The primary reason why foreign films get dubbed is because the distribution companies believe that the general populace are either; A) Too stupid to read or B) Don’t want to look at the funny writing at the bottom of the screen for most of the film. So, they get some voice talent in to jabber on top of the original dialogue, trimming and shortening sentences due to grammatical or spatial differences between the original language and the replacement. What you tend to up with after the cutting, chopping and squeezing of the dubbing is at least one of several problems.

Emotional Impact

First up is the lack of emotion transferred across languages. Part of an actor’s ability to act is the way their voice is projected. Big tough warrior=deep gruff voice. Somebody close to the protagonist dies, cue sad, soul wrenching, emotional stylies. Somebody gets a nasty shock, that typically means: yelping/screaming, high pitched tonal accentuation to their voice etc. This is what you lose in the cross over. The voice actor wasn’t there in the scene, they don’t have to physically get involved in the action on screen, they just watch it on the screen in the audio booth. So, try as they might, they just can’t get the emotional depth into their voices. Another is what I stated above, cutting and chopping. Say if in Russian an entire sentence of information or emotion can be expressed with a few words, somehow the voice actors have to cram the English equivalent in, which means speeding up their speech to fill the small gap, yet again losing the emotional impact. Check out any of the dubbed Jet Li films (Twin Warriors being a great example) and you’ll see what I mean.

Choice of Voice

This never, ever works. You ever watched the Simpsons in German? I plead you, go have a scout around on-line, it’s hilarious because the voices are so wrong for the parts. The same can be said for dubbed movies. The casting crew can never seem to get it right, the voices are too deep, too masculine/feminine/Americanised (yet again the soft spoken voice actor they normally use for Jet Li) etc. it’s rarely correct. Sometimes they grab famous actors to do the dubs (most of the major Studio Ghibli stuff, Steamboy et. al.) which really doesn’t improve things, because it still doesn’t work.
Miramax

Miramax, my long time enemy. Not only do they cut and paste films around to suit the American palate more (which in effect renders the point of the film useless) but they can’t abide the idea of subtitles. Do any of you remember Shaolin Soccer? The Stephen Chow film about kung fu football masters. The original film is somewhere near the 2 ½ hour mark. The Weinstein’s cut this down to about 1 ½ hours and got some talent to speak over the original. Fair enough they did get Stephen Chow to do his own English speaking voice-over, but they completely recked that film. Despite Miramax being one of the biggest importers of foreign films to the American market, they can’t let them be. When hero was released several years ago (a film that the Weinstein’s paid well over the amount they should since they thought it would be ‘the next crouching tiger’) it was ‘Presented by Quentin Tarantino’. What that essentially meant was that taratino asked them not to cut the film down, add voice overs, or do a single thing to change it from the original. As such it was subtitled, and was the full version. Which I thought was brilliant. The film would have been terrible if changed in any way. Although admittedly it made very little money in the box office, but rarely films do when released on the 26th of Dec, it’s a dead day for film releases.

Lip Synch

Is it just me that finds it disconcerting to see the actors on screen speaking out of synch with the voice artist? It’s damned off-putting.

Conclusion

The argument for dubbing is, of course, that it makes foreign films much more accessible to the general public, generating more revenue and making it easier to disperse it across the cinemas. But really that’s somewhat anathema to the film. Most foreign films don’t interest the populace because they can’t get over the cultural differences, un-Holly Wood plots or ideologies. If you really enjoy a foreign film then it’s because you want to see it exactly the same way the director wanted you to see it, voices and all.