When i was growing up, your preference for subbed or dubbed anime was an identity, a lifestyle choice, something you wore emblazoned on a button pinned to your backpack. Because back then, subbed anime was hard to find.
Back then, the only ways to get subbed anime both took lots of time and effort. You could save up with allowance or part time jobs to buy three episodes per VHS tape at Sam Goody. Or you could download it, over days or weeks, on Kazaa. Or you waited until Otakon rolled around and everybody crowded into the video rooms to actually watch the anime we couldn’t get. Can you remember a time when the video rooms were as packed as panels are today?
If you weren’t picky, however, dubs were easy. You could just turn on Toonami. We pretty much all started out on dubs. Moving on to subs was an expression of your anime devotion.
Today, subs vs. dubs isn’t the black-and-white debate it once was. Just about every anime DVD comes with a choice, so you don’t have to invest in one or the other. And dubs are far higher quality than they once were, featuring stellar English performances.
I usually watch my anime subbed, since that’s typically what legal streaming sites offer. But when I’m browsing my own anime library, here are the ones I always watch dubbed:
This just might be everyone’s favorite dub. We recommend it to our friends who are looking to get them into anime because they can watch it in English just like that Miyazaki film they tentatively tried. I love Wendee Lee as husky Faye Valentine, and Melissa Fahn’s bright, loopy wordplay as Ed. Even background characters show high quality performances in Bebop.
Spice and Wolf
Brina Palencia is sly and seductive as the wolf goddess Holo and J. Michael Tatum as an understated and businesslike Kraft Lawrence is her perfect foil. Lawrence and Holo have a complicated relationship that is more than platonic, and the nuances of their verbal banter were made more clear to me when I watched it dubbed the second time around.
Excel Saga
Jessica Calvello famously voice-acted herself hoarse after mimicking Excel’s over-the-top enthusiasm halfway through the series. While no performance is worth an injury, Calvello’s is spectacular, channeling Excel’s turned-up-to-eleven eagerness with laser accuracy. Most of the other voice acting in this show is so-so, but Calvello makes it worth a listen.
Rurouni Kenshin
When is a dub that I think is good not really a good dub? When it’s a nostalgia pick. This dub is always going to sound good to me because of my memories of watching it with my friends in middle school. Rewatching now, I still think Richard Hayworth makes a great Kenshin; sometimes goofy, sometimes with an edge of something deadly.
Nerima Daikon Brothers
Longtime readers know that this wacky musical comedy is inexplicably my favorite. I love having the opportunity to turn it on dubbed and sing along. More than any of the voice actors’ performances, I love how director Chris Ayres’ adaptation of the songs into English maintain both meaning and rhyme. I’m fortunate to have had the chance to tell him so!
Now tell me: what’s YOUR favorite anime dub?
Top photo by naniwear, who has it for sale in her Etsy store.
17 Comments.
I think Shinesmen will always have a special place in my heart for the best dub. It’s an entirely different OAV than the sub really, but still both are amazing. Because of how hard it was to even find dubs when I first started watching anime, there are only a few I’ve even seen that way. Cowboy Bebop is one though, and you’re right, it’s fantastic. It probably is the actual best dubbed anime.
I don’t think it’s possible to make a list like this and NOT include Cowboy Bebop. I still really need to watch Shinesmen!
Shinesmen is a one-shot, but a hilarious one-shot all the same.
Black Lagoon, FLCL, and GITS:SAC top the list for me. I was also pleased by how well Princess Jellyfish made it into English, although a couple of the gags had to be reworked from the inside out to be coherent (“Oh, boy!”).
I think here needs to be a special mention category for shows which the dub strays significantly from the story of the original (for the best).
For example Ghost Stories, the plot of this show was pretty bad but it was sold as part of a license bundle with a good show and thus ADV had to do something with it, and honestly the Rift Track like Dub is the best thing about the show now.
I’m not sure if other shows like this exist but I bet they do.
Crayon Shin-chan. FUNimation was given carte blanche to do whatever they wanted with the English audio. It shows.
I always suggest people to watch the dub of Golden Boy over the sub because some of the humor would be lost with the vocal inflections for native English speakers. That and it’s fun to pick out who did what voice in Evangelion if you have watched the ADV dub of that too. Not quality, but fun none the less.
Ah Golden Boy, the original Swimming Anime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QickU67A8j4
The first time I watch the bike vs motorcycle episode, I laughed so hard during the race I thought I was going to die. Just the insanity of Kintaro throwing himself down the hill on his bike and riding the power line.
Side note: the animation itself in this sequence is great, which makes the gag all the more hilarious. Today, they’d do something like this by just repeating the same three frames over and over.
Ranma 1/2. Ted Cole as Tatewaki Kuno is absolutely brilliant. It was memorable enough that when he plays other characters, my mind inserts Kuno phrases into the dialogue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KB6FZq4IFCQ
The first dub to come to mind is the one for Howl’s Moving Castle, because I really liked Christian Bale’s voice. But I’ll have to try one or two more of these five dubs sometime. I generally watched subbed, because even if the Japanese voice acting is cheesy, chances are higher that I won’t notice. With English, my cheesiness radar is ridiculously overactive. I think, much of the time, it’s more my fault than the voice actors’. Miyazaki films usually escape this, of course.
For me Cowboy Bebop is definitely #1 on such a list. The english VAs are the characters. Such a great job! It’s also how I first saw the series, but I don’t believe that that’s the reason I prefer the dub at all.
Other ones I’d say are Samurai Champloo, Black Lagoon, Inu Yahsha (watched it forever on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim,) and GITS:SAC and maybe the movie Princess Mononoke/Mononoke Hime since I watched it the first 20 times with the dub since I saw it on cable and made sure to catch it every chance possible.
I was really, really impressed with the Black Lagoon dub. I agree with you too that the Spice and Wolf dub was pretty great, Holo especially.
Thanks, now I’ve got the Nerima Daikon Brothers themes in my head.
This is not a bad problem to have!
Some of my favorite dubs, though, are just ones with straight up good acting. I LOVE dubs and actually prefer them over subs even though I watch TONS more of the latter. Unfortunately, a dub hasn’t WOWed me in a while. Princess Jellyfish and Welcome to the NHK, both of which I watched in the last year or so, were probably the last ones.
[…] at Otaku Journalist, Lauren looks at “The 5 Anime I Always Watched Dubbed.” Me? It’s Black Lagoon all the way. Lauren is also having a 50% off sale on her ebook […]
Wow I call myself a fan of dubbed anime, yet I haven’t seen any of the shows you recommended! A few of my personal favorite dubs are Madoka Magica, Fullmetal Alchemist, Fairy Tail, and Ouran High School Host Club.