willing to clap as hard as you can
25 Dec 2008 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaigouI've realized the best definition for my reaction to american cartoonage: emotionally unsatisfying.
It's kind of like watching Romeo and Juliet, or Hamlet, or even Porgy and Bess... as put on by fourth-graders. Or worse: adults with all the maturity of fourth-graders -- that is to say, none.
It's a character about to commit suicide at the side of his dead beloved:
I still will stay with thee;
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again: here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh.
...who follows that with a smirk.
If -- for even the remotest second -- you, as the audience, believed, truly believed that this character was a living person moments away from killing himself -- you would be absolutely on the edge of your seat, the tragedy that much more compounded knowing that Romeo is ignorant of the fact that Juliet only appears to be dead. You might even be one of those in the audience fighting to hold back the cries of wanting to warn the character, somehow, to stop the forward momentum that will lead to eventual ruin.
To be self-aware of playing a role, to crack the fourth wall, is all but saying out loud: hahahah, JUST KIDDING! That smirk is no less than a betrayal of your willingness to believe.
Or think of the classic Peter Pan, when Tinkerbell's light is fading. When Peter exhorts the kids in the audience to clap really hard, because it's a child's belief in fairies that keeps fairies alive -- perhaps you, like my sister and me, were of an age to be swept away in the story. Perhaps you, too, clapped your hearts out. (The production we saw, the light got brighter and then dimmed for a moment; my sister was on the verge of tears in fear she'd not clapped nor believed hard enough and Tinkerbell wasn't going to make it.) Of course, we children believed, caught up in the play, and clapped, and Tinkerbell makes it and all ends well.
But what if Peter had then told the audience -- with a laugh, no less -- "oh, just kidding!" We'd feel like fools. Our belief makes us vulnerable, and I think that's the root of why an audience's yearning will turn so instantly to hate when an author or character ridicules or cheapens our belief.
That's what I hate about american cartoons. They constantly dance around moments like that, moments when with just one step the audience may not only believe the character has come to life, but the audience also yearns for the best outcome -- and then the story backs off with a laugh.
American cartoons are an embarrassed fourth-grader, wiping his mouth after faking a kiss on the dead Juliet's lips.
It's not so apparent in dubs, to be honest, because at least in the animation itself, we can see the character is absolutely distraught, or terrified, or overcome. Even when the voice-acting hangs back, the animators didn't, so we get at least some sense. But then I listen to the original voice-acting track: the pathos, the anguish, the tears, the fury, the panic, the despair, is all there.
Sometimes it seems almost... silly, to me, on a self-conscious level, as though it's my turn to be the fourth-grader snickering in the aisles while Romeo breathes his last onstage. I mean, some of the anime out there is as overdone and badly-written and plot-holed as any low-rent American television program... but there's never any doubt in my mind that the voice-actors are giving it everything they can, even when the storyline is idiotic, the characters stereotypical, the happy ending unquestionable if unbelievable. Japanese voice-actors don't just take the art of delivery seriously; sometimes they seem to take it to a level of melodrama such that I can't help but squirm.
Y'know what it makes me think of? Oddly, the movie The Favour, the Watch and the Very Big Fish where a lowly photographer gets roped into doing a favor for a friend... which turns out to be doing voice tracks for porn movies. (Yes, it really is as hysterical as it sounds.) The thing is, at first Bob Hoskins (no, really) and Natasha Richardson are all, "hi, nice to meet you," formal handshakes, all business, they settle in by their mikes, and the porno starts.
Richardson's character is immediately "on," sitting there in her conservative plaid skirt and nice-girl blouse and crying out like she's in the middle of absolute ecstasy. Hoskin's a bit taken aback, then starts to get into it. Richardson gives him a grin and gets louder, so he does, and next thing you know, they both sound like it's the best damn sex they're both ever having -- and all self-consciousness is utterly gone. They're totally into it. (You never even see any of the movie, just the two of them in a soundbooth looking so business-professional and yet making these sounds like they're going gang-busters. It really is a hysterical, and somewhat surreal, scene.)
What makes the scene so pricelessly funny is the element of forgetting who-they-are, to be so in the moment. It's because they're not laughing at their own joke -- that is, the actors (not the characters) are not laughing, and are not thereby reminding you that these are actors who are simply playing roles. And in turn, the characters playing the additional layer of roles (that of porn-movie sounds) don't stop to remind you that they're aware they're still characters (who in turn are still actors). The more the characters get lost in the role, the farther they get away from being aware that it's a joke and thus the more the audience can enjoy the joke. I think it works the same way for drama.
Oh, it's one thing to have a character crack a joke when uncomfortable at a high-emotion scene -- that's often very much in-character, for some people. But the production values around that moment, I think, must reflect that this discomfort is the character's, and not the entirety. I'm trying to think of a good example. Hrm. Well, one instance is morbid humor. Like, say, ER, or M*A*S*H: a patient or nurse or whomever will say something dramatic, and Hawkeye promptly cracks a joke.
The difference is that the rest of the production does not reflect this humor. The music doesn't suddenly get cheerful, let alone sink into the childish pattern of shave-and-a-haircut-six-bits. The other characters don't laugh along with the person, or if they do, it's a kind of saddened laughter from knowing that Hawkeye's humor is his attempt to push away or pretend ignorance of a painful moment. As a drama teacher I once knew liked to say, the truth about comedy is that sometimes laughing is the only alternative to crying. But the difference between comedy and drama is that in comedy the other actors must make pretense of "not getting the joke" (a la the straight man) but in drama, they see the humor but know it to be a mask for deeper pain.
The problem is when a character cracks that joke at an intense moment and the rest of the production -- the animated (or filmic) reactions, the music score, the sound effects -- turn suddenly bright and cheerful. It's like having Romeo smirk at the audience. It's no longer one character's discomfort with the moment, but the entire story being uneasy with the high emotion.
When I squirm at a high-intense emotion, it's almost always when I'm not totally invested in the characters. I'm not drawn into the story. I'm still quite aware it's a story and I'm an observer. If the characters are getting all emotional about something that "doesn't really matter" (from the point-of-view of the less-invested bystander, namely, me), then yeah, I'm going to cringe a little.
But if I'm invested in the characters or story?
Oh, hell, then I'm completely blown away. I'm fifteen and watching Cyrano die onstage and tearing the tissue in my hands into shreds at the realization that he's loved all these years and she's never known, that she only realizes it now as he breathes his last and slides gracefully into death. I'm ten with my hands over my mouth because if I drop them then I'll commit the sin of yelling in the theater that Juliet's not dead, can't Romeo see that?
In that moment, I'm seven years old again, clapping not only because I believe, but because I'm not ashamed to let everyone know just how much, because the story has consumed me to the point that I no longer exist-as-me to be self-conscious, because the story is all that matters.
And so, I clap desperately, with everything I've got, believing just as hard as I can.
There are moments, time and again, in Avatar where I keep waiting for the show to take that leap into the deep end. For the characters (and their voices) to really lay it on the line, to stop going for the cheap jokes, and to show me what's really at stake. Oh, granted, there's an element of that, in the main character's building guilt/frustration over being "the avatar" and yet unable to prevent, or even heal, the damage done in his absence. Yet for several reasons, the depth of this emotion is shallow, the story too flattened.
First, the moment often feels truncated. The script is too fast to jump in with another character cheering him up -- and while that's okay (and in-character for some roles), it's not okay when this is tailed by a third character joking or a light-and-cute stupid-animal-trick moment or a shift in music/illustration to more cheerful/hopeful. Even if it's not the fourth-grader smirking at the audience, it's not real improvement to instead have the immature high schooler who dances towards being serious and then backpedals once it looks like s/he's being taken, well, seriously. Oh, you didn't really believe that, did you? Just joking!
Part of me wonders if this might be alleviated if the actors' skills were more up to par. I know the American voice production system has this whole 'thing' about using voice actors as near to the character's ages as possible, but frankly, not every ten-year-old is a Jodie Foster waiting to be discovered. The ability to emote, to carry a scene, to really be a powerhouse voice-wise (because in voice acting, face it, the voice must be the powerhouse because you don't have anything else you're providing, acting-wise) -- these phenomenal skills of acting are not born and they sure as hell require practice and skill and a dose of talent.
Raw talent won't even get you a cup of coffee, and at the age of ten, raw talent is about all you're gonna have. To boot, having raw talent, inadequate direction, lousy production values, and little actual experience gets you... not much.
Someday I'm going to figure out what the American voice acting system has against mature women playing adolescent boys -- then you get the timbre of a boy's voice, and the emotional acting chops of someone with a lot more personal world-experience to pull on. Frankly, you can have a well-delivered performance from any age if you're willing to put in the work (as director, as co-voices, and the voice actor him/herself at the center), but if a performance lacks that emotional depth and sincerity, even the best voice-acting is still going to come across like the smirking fourth-grader.
That sincerity is a lot of what's missing in the dubs I've seen, along with American-created animation. There's always this note in just enough of the voice-actor deliveries that it will eventually undermine even the rare one or two who are sincere. It's a note of, "oh, I don't have to take this seriously, it's just a cartoon." You can have three voice actors at the main juncture of a storyline working their best to be sincere, but over the series' progression, if enough of the background characters undermine this with a noted lack of sincerity (or just plain phoning in their lines), eventually it's going to undermine the entire thing.
Or maybe it's just that the push-pull of sincerity-insincerity eventually distances me from the story, enough that I start to feel embarrassed on behalf of those few voice actors still trying hard to treat it like a serious, worthwhile effort. That's not a common experience, sadly (and I say sadly because at least then I'd get some few scenes with sincerity and effort even if it eventually gets shot to hell) -- more often, it's just the entire production, from sound quality to the script itself, has this "oh, it's just for kids, so we don't have to, y'know, put that much effort into it."
Then again, I also believe that if you're raised on trite crap, you'll become an adult who thinks trite crap is just fine. If you've never been exposed to a delicious blueberry pie or chocolate cake made with skill and fine ingredients, then you probably would think a Twinkie is as good as a dessert really ever needs to be. What you've always gotten was "oh, it's just for ___, so it isn't worth that much effort."
That's why I think kids should be exposed to good stories, to hard stories, to sincere and complex and well-made stories, as soon as possible; eight, nine, ten years old is about the perfect place to start. It's not just hooking a kid on the good stuff. It's showing a kid -- the current and potential life-long audience member -- that s/he is worth the effort.
For the audience to be willing to believe in the story, first, the story must believe in the audience.
The Cowboy Bebop dub is excellent among its class (of American dubs), comparatively. It's also an intriguing instance, in that Spike is taken (by American audiences) to be a character so laid-back he's almost flat-affect. In the original dub, he emotes a great deal more; his range is much greater.
Or consider Fullmetal Alchemist, where dub-Edward gets frantic, gets noisy, and his version of being upset is to be, well, less-noisy. The actor does an adequate job, and I'd probably have thought it okay if I'd not seen the original -- but where the American version is quiet, the Japanese voice actor is anguished. There is raw, powerful, unrepentant and unhidden agony in the Japanese version. Listen to the voice track alone -- without visuals -- and you can tell, even without knowing the language, that this character is tormented, despairing. Nothing is held back.
Avatar is doubly crippled. First, voice-wise, the main characters are not mature actors bringing experience (both work-wise and personal-wise) to the roles, but younger voice actors struggling to make flesh what is supposed to be an epic story. Second, the animation itself is relatively laid-back, emotion-wise, as well. I end up feeling like nobody actually gives a damn enough for the stakes to really matter.
Usually, by the third or fourth episode of a new series, I expect to be relating to a new character enough that personal jeopardy will already have me by the throat. By the eighth episode? A character can die in a brutal and unexpected fashion and I may be struck dumb, anguished along with the surviving characters, even in tears. It can be done. It has been done. It's been done repeatedly, for that matter.
By the seventh episode, far enough in that the story begins to really throw its weight around, knowing I'm crossing my fingers and hoping against hope that this time Juliet wakes up in time for Romeo -- no, in episode 7, Avatar hangs back, dials it down, doesn't trust that I will be anguished along with the characters. Romeo does not cry out, in despair, in heart-rending grief:
I still will stay with thee;
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again: here, here will I remain
Instead, he says:
Well, I guess this is the end for me, hunh.
When Kitara's brother is taken away by the spirit-monster, she yells for him, and then... stops. We've already had the "we're family" bits here and there, and while she and her brother quibble like any good siblings, a good story requires jeopardy. Personal, involved, anguished jeopardy. Yes, we know it's a children's story (effectively) and that things will end happily, eventually, or at least this particular early segment will. But the character doesn't know that.
That's what I mean by winking at the audience, the fourth-grader's smirk. Kitara's reaction is not desperate nor panicked -- that is, her voice is not raw with desperate fear on her brother's behalf -- it's not gutsy and vulnerable and forgetting what it looks/sounds like in the panic of seeing her brother carried off. Yeah, I may not get along with my sister the majority of the time but if some big hulking beast carried her off, it'd take six people to hold me down from going after her: because she's my sister, and because I care.
But if the character doesn't care enough to go into total emotional goes-to-eleven at what (we're supposed to presume, I would think) is one of her most valued things in life (that is, her brother and her relationship with him, underneath the daily quibbling) -- if she doesn't go bonkers at the thought of this loss... then who's to blame me for not caring all that much, either? If the relationship and the person is that important, the character must show this, by action and (on the voice actor's part) the voice. In this case, the voice being so flat-affect just underlined, finally, how much of the overall voice-acting hits continually flat registers.
Before anyone gets on my case, I would call nearly all of the personal jeopardy scenes to have that same flat-affect element. While I might be able to argue that panic on behalf of the avatar would be slightly less, due to less interaction and a staunch belief that the avatar can save himself one way or another (being, after all, THE avatar) -- that's a rational reaction. But... love is not rational. Its delivery should not be, either.
We know our siblings, especially older siblings, all our life. To lose a parent is painful; for the orphaned character to lose a sibling is to repeat this pain on an almost exponential level. Either the character falls apart when her brother's stolen away -- or she falls apart when he comes back to her (a reunion she'll never experience with her mother). Therefore, failing any high emotion for his loss, I expected at least high emotion upon his recovery... not just from Kitara, but from her brother as well, as a fellow-orphan and as a sibling.
What did I get? Another freaking joke.
I wasn't sure which character I wanted to smack more... or if maybe I wanted to smack myself instead, for hoping like some idiot that this time the series wouldn't pull its punches and the story would shoot past the self-conscious fourth-grader and go deep into the emotional heart. It didn't. It scooted close and then danced away at the last minute, with a laugh.
Once again the story said, just kidding! Once again, the story said it didn't believe in itself, and it certainly didn't believe in me.
It's not a significant negative (usually) that kids have a smaller range than adults when it comes to emotional power & expression. It's just a quality of being a kid, and in most roles, this isn't an issue. And in most stories, the adults can carry the emotional depth via vocal power where a child-actor is going to use expression (which is easier to method-act and/or mimic) rather voice. I think of all the really emotional moments involving child actors, and most of them are silent, or predominantly silent -- the child's expression, body language, carry the weight. Thing is, you don't got that 'out' when doing a voice-over -- so why must the American system be so insistent on boys-play-boys and girls-play-girls and adults play adults?
It's not even like they're hung up totally on that, as evidenced by the number of times I've heard Old Woman Voice and Old Man Voice done by someone younger than my step-daughter -- and I'm not nearly old enough yet for her voice to be anywhere within forty decades of a worthwhile Old Woman Voice. Yeah, so Dustin Hoffman could carry off playing a hundred-year-old man in Little Big Man (and a fifteen-year-old boy in the same movie), but he was also in his thirties or thereabouts, and it wasn't easy getting that old-man-voice, either. Wynona Ryder took a whack at it in Edward Scissorhands and was a miserable failure, though adequate by cartoon-standards for Old Woman Voice.
Regardless, this flatness comes across to me as the characters phoning in their roles, and not really 'caring' enough to really go to the farthest edge of the emotional weight. Yeah, so maybe I'm spoiled for having seen the Royal Shakespeare Company doing Cyrano de Bergerac and the delivery from a bunch of high schoolers will never move me to tears... but I think that's backwards. It shouldn't be that we declare the RSC to be the anomaly and you just can't get the good stuff for everything -- I think it should be that the high schoolers get told: reach, strive, aim to achieve these standards.
By that mindset, then, yes, I think I'm in the right to say that the grade-school version leaves me emotionally unsatisfied... and frustrated because I know it could be more.
For the sake of argument, let's ignore that child-actors are among the most expensive you can possibly hire outside Big Names. (The rules concerning children under 16 doing work, the number of hours limit per day, the allowances for school time, the requirement of having a specific guardian/adult-stand-in present to "supervise" and make sure the kid is not overworked, these legal requirements do add up, and are often the reason in movies that it's someone over 18 playing a high schooler.) So let's say that all things being equal, there's some overwhelming reason to hire child-voices with smaller range and experience over higher-pitched (relatively) adult voices that can sound young-ish but still have emotional depth.
You can make up for a lot of flaws in a band's presentation, I know, with a good soundman. You can do the same with sound production for pretty much anything, and these aren't fancy expensive outrageous-equipment uses, either. Like, say, putting a slight echo on a voice actor's delivery. It's not that hard. It's a setting that's pretty much standard on most sound production boards.
So why is it that when characters walk into a CAVERNOUS SPACE, their voices DO NOT ECHO? Voices in smaller spaces are not deadened, and voices from a character at a distance are not faded as though heard from, well, a distance. There's not a lot of actual range (not just emotional) but 'range' in the classic (music) sense -- from very soft to very loud. I'd like to hear some yelling please, and not just stage-whispered-like yelling, but head-back, full-throated, screams.
It is possible for someone to scream in a sound production booth and for the producer to then calibrate this sound so we get the impact of the range without the attendant volume. That said, the quality of the sound differs. I mean, if you bang on a piano with all your force and produce a thunderous crash, you can turn down the volume on the stereo and still know that was a thunderous crash. If you place your hands gently but firmly on the keys and get just a, well, a played chord, it doesn't matter how much you turn up the sound. It's still not a crash, it's just a firmly-played chord.
The foley guys are asleep on American cartoons, as well. (Or maybe I should ask, are there any foley guys on American cartoons?) We can at least get the benefit, in dubbed anime, of the ambient noises frequently being recorded on a separate track from the voices, which means those parts come (along with the soundtrack) as part of a separate bundle. That's not true of sound production done whole-cloth in American studios, from what I'm hearing.
Footfalls are inconsistent -- some scenes you hear them, some you don't, and they don't echo or sound soft or thump like a boot on a wooden boat deck or clang like hard-soled shoes on metal plates. Plates and cups set down on wood don't thunk, a scroll placed back in its wooden slot barely clicks as wood taps down on wood. Ambient sounds -- bird calls, crashing waves, the roaring wind -- are almost non-existant, or so soft in the background they might as well be non-existent. Characters don't slurp or suck or spit or swallow, but eat and drink silently. And even more, the non-verbal sounds are significantly less in number, like huffs and snorts and whimpers and grunts and the softly-inarticulate forms of "hunh" and "feh" and "hmph".
The sound quality, overall, is just... flat. It doesn't vary. It doesn't reflect the changes in the story's current setting or mood or tension. It's consistent, and it's flat.
When I was growing up, we'd go visit my mother's parents every summer, and my grandfather would put on recordings of old radio shows to amuse me and my sister. Our favorite, admittedly, was The Lone Ranger, but it was a bit closer to our childhood-age than something like The Green Lantern or The Shadow. We still listened to those others, though we didn't catch all the nuances. What we did catch was that sound was an integral element of creating the visual in our heads.
The voice had to carry half the message, with the actual dialogue doing the rest -- or alterately, the dialogue didn't & couldn't do all the work; the voice filled in the nuances left unstated by the dialogue. Ambient sounds had to do the same -- the dialogue may say, "Tonto, be sure to ask the Sheriff..." -- but the ambient sound was of a rattle of bridle and bit, the snap of leather as the saddle's pulled tight, the clip-clop of horse hooves and a grunt from Tonto as he pulls himself into the saddle. There was no dialogue to tell you what those sounds were, but those sounds acted as clues: something is happening right now.
In another episode of Avatar, an old man is captured and chained up. When he falls off the back of his captor's beast... the chains don't clatter when he hits the ground. When he's picked up and returned to his seat atop the beast, the chains don't clink or clatter then, either. Metal will clunk on metal. Oh, sure, you could argue this character walks very softly, or that character is so neatly tied up the metal doesn't even clink. I think that's just arguing your way around having to do a thorough job on the sound production, on the foley-work. It's a cheap move, it's a cop-out. It's robbing the audience of the potential richness in the sound-works.
Someone on my LJ commented on an earlier post that Japan and Canada seem to be the two major forces when it comes to vocal-only entertainment -- Japan has its drama-cds, and Canada has its radio shows. Y'know, I think the American voice acting companies could learn a lot if they sat down and did a few series not as animation but as radio shows or drama-cds. One thing they'd learn, I'd hope, is that there is a very fine balance between soundtrack (music), ambient sound (foley/effects), and speaking (dialogue).
In the old radio shows, what music you'll hear is often rather far in the distance. If you think of it as layer, the vocals are closest to the mike. The sound effects are a short distance away, about as far as from the hands (holding the cup or setting down the scroll) to as far as the feet (stepping, stomping, jumping, scuffing, and so on). The music is about double the distance of the closest foley effect, until the foley effects come to a halt and the dialogue is delivered and THEN the music will swell to the foreground.
That's a very simplistic way of mixing it, but it's a method that worked for hundreds of radio shows throughout the golden age of radio, from the 30s through the 60s or so -- and continuing later, in countries other than the US (those that kept to radio and didn't have televisions spreading quite so far or so fast as the US). The important thing, regardless of whether the music stays in the distance and then cranks suddenly to eleven, is that the music is layered beneath the dialogue and the foley.
Watching American cartoons, it's more like the sountrack and the foleytrack compete with each other. Music takes over the role of the foley artist, so even if someone were working hard to make the footfalls distinct, we bloody well couldn't hear them anyway over the music. That, I think, is a cheap shot. Here, have some canned music, instead of auditory clues for what's going on off-screen -- even if partially off-screen. That is, we see the character moving across the screen, and we hear clomp-clomp-clomp of hard-soled pattens on wooden boat deck, and it's an additional clue filling in the richness of the character's movement and his location and environment. Music replaces that, competes with it, drowns it out, even.
Maybe most folks watching don't hear that, or don't realize they're not hearing it, because if you've always seen stories of the calibre of Porgy and Bess or 'Night Mother done by your local high school troupe, then maybe you don't realize just how powerful these stories could be if done right. Maybe because I've been lucky enough to see/hear stories done right, that I find myself chafing at sitting through yet another high school, smirk-behind-the-hands, production.
I'm not saying high school style productions, like Avatar, aren't earnest, mind you. They're quite earnest. Nearly every line is delivered with such finality, such diligent and ardent emphatic delivery, that it just highlights all the more (for me) how insincere the lines often are. The anchorman's delivery, as we call it in this house, is to find the Important Words in a line and emphasize those -- a diligent and emphatic delivery-style if ever these was one:
The DOGS are in the YARD!
Except that this is fundamentally insincere in terms of characterization, because we just don't freaking talk like that. What makes it especially noticeable is the one or two times there's a voice actor who shows signs of a non-anchorman delivery -- it makes the anchormen around him/her just that much more apparent.
Part of the anchorman delivery, I think, is that it's a way of speaking that only marginally takes into account that it's part of an actual dialogue. It's delivering the line as its own separate unit, rather than reacting to some other line. Like, say, the previous line was a simple, "I don't see the dogs!" Maybe, then, you'd anchorman it, and go with the pattern above: DOGS and YARD. But what if the previous line's delivery is more of a "I don't see the dogs!" Change that nuance, and the responding line just sounds... idiotic. Its emphasis isn't answering the emphasis of the triggering line. There's no actual dialogue going on here, so much as two monologues.
I was first annoyed at this style of delivery but unable to put my finger on it, back when I first started watching anime. It was CP who said, "wow, that's like anchorman-speech: pick the important noun in the sentence and emphasize it strongly, so listeners know it's the subject." And, after listening (curiously, it was the Inuyasha dub, I think), CP's comment was that Miroku was the only character who sounded like he was having an actual conversation with the other characters.
American sound production -- more often than not, from what I understand -- does its recording with the voice actors isolated, with only themselves watching the screen and reciting their lines along with the lip-flaps. If the lip-flap matters the most, then you'd probably want the voice-actor isolated rather than reacting to others and and possibly getting off-beat against what's on-screen. The problem is that this is a very difficult way to try and emote, because you're trying to build on the previous line delivered by someone else... that you can't even hear. You're reacting against what you think is being delivered, not the actual delivery, so if you're not that good in the first place (or don't have a huge range anyway), then you're double hampered.
That's why Kirby Morrow (as Miroku) stood out so much -- for the ability, despite that distance and isolation -- to still sound like he was in dialogue with someone else. It's also why I think kids -- who in lacking experience and/or range, could do well to have someone to "play off of" as they record scenes -- are especially undermined by this system of recording.
Put it all together, and it comes down to this: the story may be decent. The acting is adequate. The sound quality is mediocre at best and nil at worst. A combination of barely-good-enough put together, undermined by bad sound production and inconsistent foley work and non-subtle soundtrack over-emphasis, and... well, I just can't say whether the story can hold up under all the things that don't even come close to hitting a mark.
If I'm bored enough, I may keep watching. I've already starting skipping forward by five, ten, even thirty second intervals at least once or twice per episode, and that may shield me from the worst such that I can imagine what I'm missing is really good, enough to offset the barely-okay that I do see. Who knows, enough boredom and I may get pretty far in the story.
It's going to take a lot more effort on the story's part, if the story wants me to actually give a damn. Why should I? Even the story itself -- in ambient sound, in production, in vocal range -- doesn't seem to care. It sure doesn't take itself seriously, and if I honestly thought the smirking fourth-grader was all that and a bag of chips, I'd have season tickets to the local school drama departments.
But I don't, and I don't. And at this point, there's no indication the story's going to turn around and start delivering. I may hang with it out of boredom, and I may even enjoy it on a purely eh-whatever level, but if it hasn't captured my heart by now, I don't hold out much hope it ever will. The story doesn't care enough, and thus, neither do I.
It's kind of like watching Romeo and Juliet, or Hamlet, or even Porgy and Bess... as put on by fourth-graders. Or worse: adults with all the maturity of fourth-graders -- that is to say, none.
It's a character about to commit suicide at the side of his dead beloved:
I still will stay with thee;
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again: here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh.
...who follows that with a smirk.
If -- for even the remotest second -- you, as the audience, believed, truly believed that this character was a living person moments away from killing himself -- you would be absolutely on the edge of your seat, the tragedy that much more compounded knowing that Romeo is ignorant of the fact that Juliet only appears to be dead. You might even be one of those in the audience fighting to hold back the cries of wanting to warn the character, somehow, to stop the forward momentum that will lead to eventual ruin.
To be self-aware of playing a role, to crack the fourth wall, is all but saying out loud: hahahah, JUST KIDDING! That smirk is no less than a betrayal of your willingness to believe.
Or think of the classic Peter Pan, when Tinkerbell's light is fading. When Peter exhorts the kids in the audience to clap really hard, because it's a child's belief in fairies that keeps fairies alive -- perhaps you, like my sister and me, were of an age to be swept away in the story. Perhaps you, too, clapped your hearts out. (The production we saw, the light got brighter and then dimmed for a moment; my sister was on the verge of tears in fear she'd not clapped nor believed hard enough and Tinkerbell wasn't going to make it.) Of course, we children believed, caught up in the play, and clapped, and Tinkerbell makes it and all ends well.
But what if Peter had then told the audience -- with a laugh, no less -- "oh, just kidding!" We'd feel like fools. Our belief makes us vulnerable, and I think that's the root of why an audience's yearning will turn so instantly to hate when an author or character ridicules or cheapens our belief.
That's what I hate about american cartoons. They constantly dance around moments like that, moments when with just one step the audience may not only believe the character has come to life, but the audience also yearns for the best outcome -- and then the story backs off with a laugh.
American cartoons are an embarrassed fourth-grader, wiping his mouth after faking a kiss on the dead Juliet's lips.
It's not so apparent in dubs, to be honest, because at least in the animation itself, we can see the character is absolutely distraught, or terrified, or overcome. Even when the voice-acting hangs back, the animators didn't, so we get at least some sense. But then I listen to the original voice-acting track: the pathos, the anguish, the tears, the fury, the panic, the despair, is all there.
Sometimes it seems almost... silly, to me, on a self-conscious level, as though it's my turn to be the fourth-grader snickering in the aisles while Romeo breathes his last onstage. I mean, some of the anime out there is as overdone and badly-written and plot-holed as any low-rent American television program... but there's never any doubt in my mind that the voice-actors are giving it everything they can, even when the storyline is idiotic, the characters stereotypical, the happy ending unquestionable if unbelievable. Japanese voice-actors don't just take the art of delivery seriously; sometimes they seem to take it to a level of melodrama such that I can't help but squirm.
Y'know what it makes me think of? Oddly, the movie The Favour, the Watch and the Very Big Fish where a lowly photographer gets roped into doing a favor for a friend... which turns out to be doing voice tracks for porn movies. (Yes, it really is as hysterical as it sounds.) The thing is, at first Bob Hoskins (no, really) and Natasha Richardson are all, "hi, nice to meet you," formal handshakes, all business, they settle in by their mikes, and the porno starts.
Richardson's character is immediately "on," sitting there in her conservative plaid skirt and nice-girl blouse and crying out like she's in the middle of absolute ecstasy. Hoskin's a bit taken aback, then starts to get into it. Richardson gives him a grin and gets louder, so he does, and next thing you know, they both sound like it's the best damn sex they're both ever having -- and all self-consciousness is utterly gone. They're totally into it. (You never even see any of the movie, just the two of them in a soundbooth looking so business-professional and yet making these sounds like they're going gang-busters. It really is a hysterical, and somewhat surreal, scene.)
What makes the scene so pricelessly funny is the element of forgetting who-they-are, to be so in the moment. It's because they're not laughing at their own joke -- that is, the actors (not the characters) are not laughing, and are not thereby reminding you that these are actors who are simply playing roles. And in turn, the characters playing the additional layer of roles (that of porn-movie sounds) don't stop to remind you that they're aware they're still characters (who in turn are still actors). The more the characters get lost in the role, the farther they get away from being aware that it's a joke and thus the more the audience can enjoy the joke. I think it works the same way for drama.
Oh, it's one thing to have a character crack a joke when uncomfortable at a high-emotion scene -- that's often very much in-character, for some people. But the production values around that moment, I think, must reflect that this discomfort is the character's, and not the entirety. I'm trying to think of a good example. Hrm. Well, one instance is morbid humor. Like, say, ER, or M*A*S*H: a patient or nurse or whomever will say something dramatic, and Hawkeye promptly cracks a joke.
The difference is that the rest of the production does not reflect this humor. The music doesn't suddenly get cheerful, let alone sink into the childish pattern of shave-and-a-haircut-six-bits. The other characters don't laugh along with the person, or if they do, it's a kind of saddened laughter from knowing that Hawkeye's humor is his attempt to push away or pretend ignorance of a painful moment. As a drama teacher I once knew liked to say, the truth about comedy is that sometimes laughing is the only alternative to crying. But the difference between comedy and drama is that in comedy the other actors must make pretense of "not getting the joke" (a la the straight man) but in drama, they see the humor but know it to be a mask for deeper pain.
The problem is when a character cracks that joke at an intense moment and the rest of the production -- the animated (or filmic) reactions, the music score, the sound effects -- turn suddenly bright and cheerful. It's like having Romeo smirk at the audience. It's no longer one character's discomfort with the moment, but the entire story being uneasy with the high emotion.
When I squirm at a high-intense emotion, it's almost always when I'm not totally invested in the characters. I'm not drawn into the story. I'm still quite aware it's a story and I'm an observer. If the characters are getting all emotional about something that "doesn't really matter" (from the point-of-view of the less-invested bystander, namely, me), then yeah, I'm going to cringe a little.
But if I'm invested in the characters or story?
Oh, hell, then I'm completely blown away. I'm fifteen and watching Cyrano die onstage and tearing the tissue in my hands into shreds at the realization that he's loved all these years and she's never known, that she only realizes it now as he breathes his last and slides gracefully into death. I'm ten with my hands over my mouth because if I drop them then I'll commit the sin of yelling in the theater that Juliet's not dead, can't Romeo see that?
In that moment, I'm seven years old again, clapping not only because I believe, but because I'm not ashamed to let everyone know just how much, because the story has consumed me to the point that I no longer exist-as-me to be self-conscious, because the story is all that matters.
And so, I clap desperately, with everything I've got, believing just as hard as I can.
There are moments, time and again, in Avatar where I keep waiting for the show to take that leap into the deep end. For the characters (and their voices) to really lay it on the line, to stop going for the cheap jokes, and to show me what's really at stake. Oh, granted, there's an element of that, in the main character's building guilt/frustration over being "the avatar" and yet unable to prevent, or even heal, the damage done in his absence. Yet for several reasons, the depth of this emotion is shallow, the story too flattened.
First, the moment often feels truncated. The script is too fast to jump in with another character cheering him up -- and while that's okay (and in-character for some roles), it's not okay when this is tailed by a third character joking or a light-and-cute stupid-animal-trick moment or a shift in music/illustration to more cheerful/hopeful. Even if it's not the fourth-grader smirking at the audience, it's not real improvement to instead have the immature high schooler who dances towards being serious and then backpedals once it looks like s/he's being taken, well, seriously. Oh, you didn't really believe that, did you? Just joking!
Part of me wonders if this might be alleviated if the actors' skills were more up to par. I know the American voice production system has this whole 'thing' about using voice actors as near to the character's ages as possible, but frankly, not every ten-year-old is a Jodie Foster waiting to be discovered. The ability to emote, to carry a scene, to really be a powerhouse voice-wise (because in voice acting, face it, the voice must be the powerhouse because you don't have anything else you're providing, acting-wise) -- these phenomenal skills of acting are not born and they sure as hell require practice and skill and a dose of talent.
Raw talent won't even get you a cup of coffee, and at the age of ten, raw talent is about all you're gonna have. To boot, having raw talent, inadequate direction, lousy production values, and little actual experience gets you... not much.
Someday I'm going to figure out what the American voice acting system has against mature women playing adolescent boys -- then you get the timbre of a boy's voice, and the emotional acting chops of someone with a lot more personal world-experience to pull on. Frankly, you can have a well-delivered performance from any age if you're willing to put in the work (as director, as co-voices, and the voice actor him/herself at the center), but if a performance lacks that emotional depth and sincerity, even the best voice-acting is still going to come across like the smirking fourth-grader.
That sincerity is a lot of what's missing in the dubs I've seen, along with American-created animation. There's always this note in just enough of the voice-actor deliveries that it will eventually undermine even the rare one or two who are sincere. It's a note of, "oh, I don't have to take this seriously, it's just a cartoon." You can have three voice actors at the main juncture of a storyline working their best to be sincere, but over the series' progression, if enough of the background characters undermine this with a noted lack of sincerity (or just plain phoning in their lines), eventually it's going to undermine the entire thing.
Or maybe it's just that the push-pull of sincerity-insincerity eventually distances me from the story, enough that I start to feel embarrassed on behalf of those few voice actors still trying hard to treat it like a serious, worthwhile effort. That's not a common experience, sadly (and I say sadly because at least then I'd get some few scenes with sincerity and effort even if it eventually gets shot to hell) -- more often, it's just the entire production, from sound quality to the script itself, has this "oh, it's just for kids, so we don't have to, y'know, put that much effort into it."
Then again, I also believe that if you're raised on trite crap, you'll become an adult who thinks trite crap is just fine. If you've never been exposed to a delicious blueberry pie or chocolate cake made with skill and fine ingredients, then you probably would think a Twinkie is as good as a dessert really ever needs to be. What you've always gotten was "oh, it's just for ___, so it isn't worth that much effort."
That's why I think kids should be exposed to good stories, to hard stories, to sincere and complex and well-made stories, as soon as possible; eight, nine, ten years old is about the perfect place to start. It's not just hooking a kid on the good stuff. It's showing a kid -- the current and potential life-long audience member -- that s/he is worth the effort.
For the audience to be willing to believe in the story, first, the story must believe in the audience.
The Cowboy Bebop dub is excellent among its class (of American dubs), comparatively. It's also an intriguing instance, in that Spike is taken (by American audiences) to be a character so laid-back he's almost flat-affect. In the original dub, he emotes a great deal more; his range is much greater.
Or consider Fullmetal Alchemist, where dub-Edward gets frantic, gets noisy, and his version of being upset is to be, well, less-noisy. The actor does an adequate job, and I'd probably have thought it okay if I'd not seen the original -- but where the American version is quiet, the Japanese voice actor is anguished. There is raw, powerful, unrepentant and unhidden agony in the Japanese version. Listen to the voice track alone -- without visuals -- and you can tell, even without knowing the language, that this character is tormented, despairing. Nothing is held back.
Avatar is doubly crippled. First, voice-wise, the main characters are not mature actors bringing experience (both work-wise and personal-wise) to the roles, but younger voice actors struggling to make flesh what is supposed to be an epic story. Second, the animation itself is relatively laid-back, emotion-wise, as well. I end up feeling like nobody actually gives a damn enough for the stakes to really matter.
Usually, by the third or fourth episode of a new series, I expect to be relating to a new character enough that personal jeopardy will already have me by the throat. By the eighth episode? A character can die in a brutal and unexpected fashion and I may be struck dumb, anguished along with the surviving characters, even in tears. It can be done. It has been done. It's been done repeatedly, for that matter.
By the seventh episode, far enough in that the story begins to really throw its weight around, knowing I'm crossing my fingers and hoping against hope that this time Juliet wakes up in time for Romeo -- no, in episode 7, Avatar hangs back, dials it down, doesn't trust that I will be anguished along with the characters. Romeo does not cry out, in despair, in heart-rending grief:
I still will stay with thee;
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again: here, here will I remain
Instead, he says:
Well, I guess this is the end for me, hunh.
When Kitara's brother is taken away by the spirit-monster, she yells for him, and then... stops. We've already had the "we're family" bits here and there, and while she and her brother quibble like any good siblings, a good story requires jeopardy. Personal, involved, anguished jeopardy. Yes, we know it's a children's story (effectively) and that things will end happily, eventually, or at least this particular early segment will. But the character doesn't know that.
That's what I mean by winking at the audience, the fourth-grader's smirk. Kitara's reaction is not desperate nor panicked -- that is, her voice is not raw with desperate fear on her brother's behalf -- it's not gutsy and vulnerable and forgetting what it looks/sounds like in the panic of seeing her brother carried off. Yeah, I may not get along with my sister the majority of the time but if some big hulking beast carried her off, it'd take six people to hold me down from going after her: because she's my sister, and because I care.
But if the character doesn't care enough to go into total emotional goes-to-eleven at what (we're supposed to presume, I would think) is one of her most valued things in life (that is, her brother and her relationship with him, underneath the daily quibbling) -- if she doesn't go bonkers at the thought of this loss... then who's to blame me for not caring all that much, either? If the relationship and the person is that important, the character must show this, by action and (on the voice actor's part) the voice. In this case, the voice being so flat-affect just underlined, finally, how much of the overall voice-acting hits continually flat registers.
Before anyone gets on my case, I would call nearly all of the personal jeopardy scenes to have that same flat-affect element. While I might be able to argue that panic on behalf of the avatar would be slightly less, due to less interaction and a staunch belief that the avatar can save himself one way or another (being, after all, THE avatar) -- that's a rational reaction. But... love is not rational. Its delivery should not be, either.
We know our siblings, especially older siblings, all our life. To lose a parent is painful; for the orphaned character to lose a sibling is to repeat this pain on an almost exponential level. Either the character falls apart when her brother's stolen away -- or she falls apart when he comes back to her (a reunion she'll never experience with her mother). Therefore, failing any high emotion for his loss, I expected at least high emotion upon his recovery... not just from Kitara, but from her brother as well, as a fellow-orphan and as a sibling.
What did I get? Another freaking joke.
I wasn't sure which character I wanted to smack more... or if maybe I wanted to smack myself instead, for hoping like some idiot that this time the series wouldn't pull its punches and the story would shoot past the self-conscious fourth-grader and go deep into the emotional heart. It didn't. It scooted close and then danced away at the last minute, with a laugh.
Once again the story said, just kidding! Once again, the story said it didn't believe in itself, and it certainly didn't believe in me.
It's not a significant negative (usually) that kids have a smaller range than adults when it comes to emotional power & expression. It's just a quality of being a kid, and in most roles, this isn't an issue. And in most stories, the adults can carry the emotional depth via vocal power where a child-actor is going to use expression (which is easier to method-act and/or mimic) rather voice. I think of all the really emotional moments involving child actors, and most of them are silent, or predominantly silent -- the child's expression, body language, carry the weight. Thing is, you don't got that 'out' when doing a voice-over -- so why must the American system be so insistent on boys-play-boys and girls-play-girls and adults play adults?
It's not even like they're hung up totally on that, as evidenced by the number of times I've heard Old Woman Voice and Old Man Voice done by someone younger than my step-daughter -- and I'm not nearly old enough yet for her voice to be anywhere within forty decades of a worthwhile Old Woman Voice. Yeah, so Dustin Hoffman could carry off playing a hundred-year-old man in Little Big Man (and a fifteen-year-old boy in the same movie), but he was also in his thirties or thereabouts, and it wasn't easy getting that old-man-voice, either. Wynona Ryder took a whack at it in Edward Scissorhands and was a miserable failure, though adequate by cartoon-standards for Old Woman Voice.
Regardless, this flatness comes across to me as the characters phoning in their roles, and not really 'caring' enough to really go to the farthest edge of the emotional weight. Yeah, so maybe I'm spoiled for having seen the Royal Shakespeare Company doing Cyrano de Bergerac and the delivery from a bunch of high schoolers will never move me to tears... but I think that's backwards. It shouldn't be that we declare the RSC to be the anomaly and you just can't get the good stuff for everything -- I think it should be that the high schoolers get told: reach, strive, aim to achieve these standards.
By that mindset, then, yes, I think I'm in the right to say that the grade-school version leaves me emotionally unsatisfied... and frustrated because I know it could be more.
For the sake of argument, let's ignore that child-actors are among the most expensive you can possibly hire outside Big Names. (The rules concerning children under 16 doing work, the number of hours limit per day, the allowances for school time, the requirement of having a specific guardian/adult-stand-in present to "supervise" and make sure the kid is not overworked, these legal requirements do add up, and are often the reason in movies that it's someone over 18 playing a high schooler.) So let's say that all things being equal, there's some overwhelming reason to hire child-voices with smaller range and experience over higher-pitched (relatively) adult voices that can sound young-ish but still have emotional depth.
You can make up for a lot of flaws in a band's presentation, I know, with a good soundman. You can do the same with sound production for pretty much anything, and these aren't fancy expensive outrageous-equipment uses, either. Like, say, putting a slight echo on a voice actor's delivery. It's not that hard. It's a setting that's pretty much standard on most sound production boards.
So why is it that when characters walk into a CAVERNOUS SPACE, their voices DO NOT ECHO? Voices in smaller spaces are not deadened, and voices from a character at a distance are not faded as though heard from, well, a distance. There's not a lot of actual range (not just emotional) but 'range' in the classic (music) sense -- from very soft to very loud. I'd like to hear some yelling please, and not just stage-whispered-like yelling, but head-back, full-throated, screams.
It is possible for someone to scream in a sound production booth and for the producer to then calibrate this sound so we get the impact of the range without the attendant volume. That said, the quality of the sound differs. I mean, if you bang on a piano with all your force and produce a thunderous crash, you can turn down the volume on the stereo and still know that was a thunderous crash. If you place your hands gently but firmly on the keys and get just a, well, a played chord, it doesn't matter how much you turn up the sound. It's still not a crash, it's just a firmly-played chord.
The foley guys are asleep on American cartoons, as well. (Or maybe I should ask, are there any foley guys on American cartoons?) We can at least get the benefit, in dubbed anime, of the ambient noises frequently being recorded on a separate track from the voices, which means those parts come (along with the soundtrack) as part of a separate bundle. That's not true of sound production done whole-cloth in American studios, from what I'm hearing.
Footfalls are inconsistent -- some scenes you hear them, some you don't, and they don't echo or sound soft or thump like a boot on a wooden boat deck or clang like hard-soled shoes on metal plates. Plates and cups set down on wood don't thunk, a scroll placed back in its wooden slot barely clicks as wood taps down on wood. Ambient sounds -- bird calls, crashing waves, the roaring wind -- are almost non-existant, or so soft in the background they might as well be non-existent. Characters don't slurp or suck or spit or swallow, but eat and drink silently. And even more, the non-verbal sounds are significantly less in number, like huffs and snorts and whimpers and grunts and the softly-inarticulate forms of "hunh" and "feh" and "hmph".
The sound quality, overall, is just... flat. It doesn't vary. It doesn't reflect the changes in the story's current setting or mood or tension. It's consistent, and it's flat.
When I was growing up, we'd go visit my mother's parents every summer, and my grandfather would put on recordings of old radio shows to amuse me and my sister. Our favorite, admittedly, was The Lone Ranger, but it was a bit closer to our childhood-age than something like The Green Lantern or The Shadow. We still listened to those others, though we didn't catch all the nuances. What we did catch was that sound was an integral element of creating the visual in our heads.
The voice had to carry half the message, with the actual dialogue doing the rest -- or alterately, the dialogue didn't & couldn't do all the work; the voice filled in the nuances left unstated by the dialogue. Ambient sounds had to do the same -- the dialogue may say, "Tonto, be sure to ask the Sheriff..." -- but the ambient sound was of a rattle of bridle and bit, the snap of leather as the saddle's pulled tight, the clip-clop of horse hooves and a grunt from Tonto as he pulls himself into the saddle. There was no dialogue to tell you what those sounds were, but those sounds acted as clues: something is happening right now.
In another episode of Avatar, an old man is captured and chained up. When he falls off the back of his captor's beast... the chains don't clatter when he hits the ground. When he's picked up and returned to his seat atop the beast, the chains don't clink or clatter then, either. Metal will clunk on metal. Oh, sure, you could argue this character walks very softly, or that character is so neatly tied up the metal doesn't even clink. I think that's just arguing your way around having to do a thorough job on the sound production, on the foley-work. It's a cheap move, it's a cop-out. It's robbing the audience of the potential richness in the sound-works.
Someone on my LJ commented on an earlier post that Japan and Canada seem to be the two major forces when it comes to vocal-only entertainment -- Japan has its drama-cds, and Canada has its radio shows. Y'know, I think the American voice acting companies could learn a lot if they sat down and did a few series not as animation but as radio shows or drama-cds. One thing they'd learn, I'd hope, is that there is a very fine balance between soundtrack (music), ambient sound (foley/effects), and speaking (dialogue).
In the old radio shows, what music you'll hear is often rather far in the distance. If you think of it as layer, the vocals are closest to the mike. The sound effects are a short distance away, about as far as from the hands (holding the cup or setting down the scroll) to as far as the feet (stepping, stomping, jumping, scuffing, and so on). The music is about double the distance of the closest foley effect, until the foley effects come to a halt and the dialogue is delivered and THEN the music will swell to the foreground.
That's a very simplistic way of mixing it, but it's a method that worked for hundreds of radio shows throughout the golden age of radio, from the 30s through the 60s or so -- and continuing later, in countries other than the US (those that kept to radio and didn't have televisions spreading quite so far or so fast as the US). The important thing, regardless of whether the music stays in the distance and then cranks suddenly to eleven, is that the music is layered beneath the dialogue and the foley.
Watching American cartoons, it's more like the sountrack and the foleytrack compete with each other. Music takes over the role of the foley artist, so even if someone were working hard to make the footfalls distinct, we bloody well couldn't hear them anyway over the music. That, I think, is a cheap shot. Here, have some canned music, instead of auditory clues for what's going on off-screen -- even if partially off-screen. That is, we see the character moving across the screen, and we hear clomp-clomp-clomp of hard-soled pattens on wooden boat deck, and it's an additional clue filling in the richness of the character's movement and his location and environment. Music replaces that, competes with it, drowns it out, even.
Maybe most folks watching don't hear that, or don't realize they're not hearing it, because if you've always seen stories of the calibre of Porgy and Bess or 'Night Mother done by your local high school troupe, then maybe you don't realize just how powerful these stories could be if done right. Maybe because I've been lucky enough to see/hear stories done right, that I find myself chafing at sitting through yet another high school, smirk-behind-the-hands, production.
I'm not saying high school style productions, like Avatar, aren't earnest, mind you. They're quite earnest. Nearly every line is delivered with such finality, such diligent and ardent emphatic delivery, that it just highlights all the more (for me) how insincere the lines often are. The anchorman's delivery, as we call it in this house, is to find the Important Words in a line and emphasize those -- a diligent and emphatic delivery-style if ever these was one:
The DOGS are in the YARD!
Except that this is fundamentally insincere in terms of characterization, because we just don't freaking talk like that. What makes it especially noticeable is the one or two times there's a voice actor who shows signs of a non-anchorman delivery -- it makes the anchormen around him/her just that much more apparent.
Part of the anchorman delivery, I think, is that it's a way of speaking that only marginally takes into account that it's part of an actual dialogue. It's delivering the line as its own separate unit, rather than reacting to some other line. Like, say, the previous line was a simple, "I don't see the dogs!" Maybe, then, you'd anchorman it, and go with the pattern above: DOGS and YARD. But what if the previous line's delivery is more of a "I don't see the dogs!" Change that nuance, and the responding line just sounds... idiotic. Its emphasis isn't answering the emphasis of the triggering line. There's no actual dialogue going on here, so much as two monologues.
I was first annoyed at this style of delivery but unable to put my finger on it, back when I first started watching anime. It was CP who said, "wow, that's like anchorman-speech: pick the important noun in the sentence and emphasize it strongly, so listeners know it's the subject." And, after listening (curiously, it was the Inuyasha dub, I think), CP's comment was that Miroku was the only character who sounded like he was having an actual conversation with the other characters.
American sound production -- more often than not, from what I understand -- does its recording with the voice actors isolated, with only themselves watching the screen and reciting their lines along with the lip-flaps. If the lip-flap matters the most, then you'd probably want the voice-actor isolated rather than reacting to others and and possibly getting off-beat against what's on-screen. The problem is that this is a very difficult way to try and emote, because you're trying to build on the previous line delivered by someone else... that you can't even hear. You're reacting against what you think is being delivered, not the actual delivery, so if you're not that good in the first place (or don't have a huge range anyway), then you're double hampered.
That's why Kirby Morrow (as Miroku) stood out so much -- for the ability, despite that distance and isolation -- to still sound like he was in dialogue with someone else. It's also why I think kids -- who in lacking experience and/or range, could do well to have someone to "play off of" as they record scenes -- are especially undermined by this system of recording.
Put it all together, and it comes down to this: the story may be decent. The acting is adequate. The sound quality is mediocre at best and nil at worst. A combination of barely-good-enough put together, undermined by bad sound production and inconsistent foley work and non-subtle soundtrack over-emphasis, and... well, I just can't say whether the story can hold up under all the things that don't even come close to hitting a mark.
If I'm bored enough, I may keep watching. I've already starting skipping forward by five, ten, even thirty second intervals at least once or twice per episode, and that may shield me from the worst such that I can imagine what I'm missing is really good, enough to offset the barely-okay that I do see. Who knows, enough boredom and I may get pretty far in the story.
It's going to take a lot more effort on the story's part, if the story wants me to actually give a damn. Why should I? Even the story itself -- in ambient sound, in production, in vocal range -- doesn't seem to care. It sure doesn't take itself seriously, and if I honestly thought the smirking fourth-grader was all that and a bag of chips, I'd have season tickets to the local school drama departments.
But I don't, and I don't. And at this point, there's no indication the story's going to turn around and start delivering. I may hang with it out of boredom, and I may even enjoy it on a purely eh-whatever level, but if it hasn't captured my heart by now, I don't hold out much hope it ever will. The story doesn't care enough, and thus, neither do I.
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Date: 26 Dec 2008 05:30 am (UTC)But, yeah, Avatar doesn't quite push buttons in the way that it should. In this way, you can read the climactic ending of the entire series as a complete emotional cop-out, although I personally find it well-suited to Aang as a character.
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Date: 26 Dec 2008 05:43 am (UTC)Then again, I wouldn't expect a voice actor to complain about the quality of the acting -- that's his line of work, and it does no one any good (realistically-speaking) to criticize potential employers no matter what your private thoughts may be. Nor would he be likely to blame the sound production, if it's true that Avatar is no better or worse than any other American production (and from what I've seen, it's standard in terms of foleywork). His safest bet is to lay it on the shoulders of the scriptwriters.
I don't blame him for that. I think it's true that scriptwriters for American shows don't push the envelope of emotions. I just think there's more to it than just that, in terms of what needs improvement.
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Date: 26 Dec 2008 05:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 26 Dec 2008 05:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 26 Dec 2008 06:23 am (UTC)Anyway, happy watching!
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Date: 26 Dec 2008 06:39 am (UTC)In related news, I was just so not surprised to discover the creators of this series went to school with my sister. I wonder if one of them was the crazy underclassman illustration major who lived in the attic her senior year. Hrm.
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Date: 26 Dec 2008 06:50 am (UTC)Tho you didn't make this connection exactly, this was the problem I had with the choice of Aaron Dismuke for Alphonse in the FMA dub. Okay, so he's a kid actor, of the right age to be Alphonse. Great. Got anything else to recommend him? Like, say, actual acting ability? No? Well... okay then.
I share your frustration over America's refusal to have mature women play young boy roles. So you're basically forced to choose between a flat, timid, stunted child-actor voice, or the voice of a forty year old smoker in the mouth of a teenaged boy. (Not that America has always had much luck trying out women in these roles -- I'm recalling the tangle they made with Dilandeau's voice acting in Escaflowne.)
On a slight tangent to this, do you know what's going on with Scimitar Smile? A lot of the graphics are still out of commission.
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Date: 26 Dec 2008 07:09 am (UTC)Hrm, uh, no idea with SSm, but I'll check it out in a few days -- got to live through the in-laws visiting, first. Probably be Sunday & I'll have a few uninterrupted hours to poke at it. That okay?
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Date: 3 Jan 2009 04:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 3 Jan 2009 05:05 am (UTC)Looks like you just became MY NEXT PROJECT.
Will tackle that once I get this journal at least not looking quite so... wonky. I rearrange to make a wacky browser user happy *cough* and what do I get? WACKINESS. Drop me an email w/your address again (because my address book sucks and I can't recall if I gathered yours up as part of the rebuild) and I'll keep you posted.
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Date: 3 Jan 2009 08:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 26 Dec 2008 10:39 am (UTC)Oddly enough, I swear there's better voices for toddlers' shows than older kids anymore. I have a niece and nephew under age four, so I get to hear this stuff. I'm singing the songs, I'm not cringing at anything but the actual content... so why are preschoolers somehow more worthy of not getting the smirk than older kids?
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Date: 26 Dec 2008 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 26 Dec 2008 05:47 pm (UTC)I do also think Disney has much to answer for, given how much they've enshrined the Witty Sidekick character as the commentator and meta-ist of animation. I think a lot of US animation tries to emulate that by cracking jokes at loaded moments and it just doesn't work.
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Date: 26 Dec 2008 05:51 pm (UTC)