Anime in North America
I don’t like North American dubbed anime. I think it’s horrible. I stick with my fansubs that I have over the Internet. The problem with bringing anime to North America is the impression that it’s for children. That misconception is the reason why some horrible changes are made to perfectly fine anime.
Let’s start with some minor things. These are things like translation and voices. Voices are a minor thing because realistically, you can’t get the same guy to do both Japanese and English voices when you prepare to dub it for North American release. However, I am slightly annoyed by the change of voices, since I get so used to their Japanese counterparts. Also, some translations are horrible, since they feel the need to English-ize everything that they say even stuff that really should remain Japanese for context and the like. Along with translation, companies seem to have a thing for changing names to their western counterparts. This practice has been declining since people are starting to realize that anything that’s Japanese is cool.
The major problems relate to the kiddy view of anime. Recently, it’s been announced that Naruto is licensed. Since the corporations view the target audience of anime as children and youth, they tend to strip out qualities that older viewers may appreciate like music and replace it with less than acceptable pop substitutions. Then there’s the whole censorship thing. What? Did you think that an anime about ninjas or samurai was supposed to be blood-less? Did you expect that an anime about war would be without people committing atrocities? Often times, the North American anime has a dumbed down plot so the kids can understand. The problem is that the target audience in Japan wasn’t ‘kids’.
I say keep on downloading anime, movies, and music. If we’re lucky, we’ll run these corporations down to the ground and we’ll finally get some marketing-free entertainment.