The Eternal Anime Argument

Author’s Note: From what I can tell in my research, ADR and Dubbing are technically two separate things. “ADR” stands for “Automated/Additional Dialogue Replacement” and refers to replacing dialogue that was recorded by the camera (due to anything from technical issues, modifying a voice to match a character/situation, or replacing swear words for television broadcast, along with many other reasons), and you can really annoy film students by mixing them up, though almost all people in charge of the dubs are referred to as ADR Directors. It seems to be a bit of a “backwards, and in heels” situation, considering the amount of work the people who direct anime dubs have had to do, as compared to re-recording one or two lines of dialogue because a helicopter flew by on filming day.

I will be using the terms interchangeably. Apologies to persnickety film students.

Also Please Note: I am American, and thus coming at it from that Point Of View! I know there are other English-speaking countries that get our dubs, but have not had the same history of arguments about localization, broadcast, etc. I also am NOT A PROFESSIONAL in this field. If you are a dub actor/director and I got something wrong, please, let me know!

Ask the majority of fans of anime whether they prefer dubs or subtitles when watching, and almost every single person will have a very firm opinion that is spitting distance from a very stern and pointed argument. Even in Japan, subs versus dubs are a touchy subject amongst animation fans (though it’s for American cartoons like “King of the Hill”).

Lupin III with headphones, regretting his life choices

Lupin III, having been around for over half a century, has seen numerous groups of voice actors in an array of languages, ranging from Italian to Portuguese to Tagalog, though English is one of the few languages where the actors behind each character changed before they retired (or, in some cases, died). At one point in the early 2000s, two different groups of actors were voicing the Lupin III gang!

The First English Dub — and Many More To Follow

The first folks to take up the Lupin III crew in English were an uncredited group working for Frontier Enterprises, who dubbed Mystery of Mamo for showing on Japan Airlines (and for Los Angeles theaters, thanks to distribution by Toho) back in 1979. This version of Mamo is the most literal English translation, pulling directly from the Japanese script in a way that, in my personal opinion, can come off as rather flat, since translating casualness and slang — which is how Lupin and his gang usually talk — can be somewhat difficult.

And there’s where localization comes into play!

“Localization” or “localizing” is a term used in anime, manga, and translation in general — not just to English! — where screenwriters (who are sometimes also translators, but not always!) modify the script to suit the country/language the dub and subtitles will be broadcast in. For example, in Operation Return the Treasure (which has not been dubbed, but it’s my favorite, so it’s getting used as an example…gentle nudge to the people in charge of dubbing, eh?), Lupin uses the cliche “the darkest place is under a candlestick” which means the same thing as “can’t see the forest for the trees,” a cliche we use more commonly over here: getting so overwhelmed by the details you miss the big picture. The subtitles use the more literal translation, and you have to check the liner notes to learn what that means.

Localization has been an enormous argument in anime subtitling and dubbing pretty much since anime started getting broadcast regularly on American television. Even if you aren’t too experienced with anime, you might have heard about the Jelly Donut Incident, where 4Kids dubbed an episode of Pokemon to have the characters saying they were eating jelly donuts instead of what they were actually eating: a Japanese rice ball dish called onigiri. In 1997, before a lot of people were online, and for a show marketed at a younger audience, this made some degree of sense, no matter how silly it may seem now. Most kids in America didn’t know what onigiri was and they couldn’t just look it up on their phones the way we can now.

Brock from Pokemon: "These donuts are great! Jelly-filled are my favorite." Image from knowyourmeme.com — There IS a possibility putting jelly in onigiri wouldn’t taste completely terrible?

Though almost every single kid who watched Pokemon back in the 1990s questioned what donuts looked like THAT.

Lost In Translation

There are cultural and lingual differences that get completely lost when moving from Japanese to English, with the above being a great example of a cultural one. As for lingual, Japanese has about half the phonemes — that’s the sound a letter or combination of letters makes when you say it — that English does, so it means wordplay and especially puns are more common. However, translating a pun when the words the pun translates to don’t sound the same at all in the translated language simply doesn’t work.

Professor Agasa and his love of wordplay — Spoilers: The solution is a pun. The solution is *always* a pun. But the puns only work in Japanese.

In some cases, you lose the inside joke of an entire character! In English, we know him as Pycal — one of Lupin III’s few recurring villains. This is, as far as I personally know, the official name that TMS gave him in English. In Japanese, his name is パイカル/Paikaru, and is a play on the Japanese word for Baijiu, a type of sorghum liquor widely available in China. Which explains Lupin’s comment in the preview for the next episode in Part 1, which he says in both Japanese and in the English dub: “His name is Pycal. Heh. Sounds like something I could get drunk off of.” However, the subtitles went in a different direction, because of the translation of Pycal’s name:

Pycal's GIANT HAND — This makes absolutely ZERO sense, and was extremely confusing until I learned about Pycal’s name.

Translation and localization have changed a lot thanks to the internet, as well! 20 years ago, which was when Funimation and Geneon were just getting started with their Lupin III dubs, you couldn’t look up who Heiji Zenigata — ancestor of Interpol Inspector Koichi Zenigata — was without going to the library or wasting a fair amount of time trying to find a specialty website, so there was absolutely no way of learning he was a police detective known for his coin-throwing ability.

You could, however, throw in a Jackie Chan joke, because he was in a LOT of movies in the early 2000s, which is when this movie came out on DVD:

Next article: Tabbie’s long rant about lack of dub captioning on modern blu-rays. This is the official Funimation dub captioning, a screenshot from the DVD.

And things like the Red Thread of Fate — an Asian legend that’s similar to the idea of soulmates, where a cord connects two people who are destined to be together — while known to every fan fiction author in existence at this moment in time, wasn’t something you’d have any idea about back when the dub for Tokyo Crisis came out, so the subtitles changed it:

The dub completely ignored it, going with “This is just like you, Lupin! Hanging by a thread 'cause there's no way out!”

Part 2 is the strongest example of the sort of localization that often gets objected to by a lot of anime fans, particularly the first 26 episodes, which were punched up at the request of Cartoon Network:

Actual Quote from the English Dub: “The guy’s possessed. He could probably bench press Shaq.”

(Note for current and future audiences: Shaquille O'Neal is 7'1" tall and was champion of the National Basketball Association 3 times in the early ‘00s, when this was dubbed. He is currently, as of this posting, a sports analyst.)

However, though I do think some of those pop culture references were dated within seconds of being recorded, Lupin III as a series and especially Parts 2 and 3 (I suspect due to their weekly broadcast when they first aired) are full of pop culture references that American audiences simply would not get. They were referencing Japanese pop culture that, by the time we got it, was not only a quarter-century old, but about media that we were completely unfamiliar with. References were made to things ranging from local celebrities to commercial jingles.

Not that the dub was much better, on some occasions…

Screenshot from Part 2 "Knock knock." — “Knock knock…” “Who’s there?” “Land shark!”

This joke was referencing a thing that was 28 years old when this episode aired on Cartoon Network, in a time before you could look things up on YouTube. I still think it is fantastic, but I also watched a lot of Saturday Night Live reruns as a kid.

Punching Up & Improvising

“Punching up a script” is an entire block of the writers’ room, and it’s something that’s done in a lot of visual media. It can be extremely beneficial: changing the tone when you need a lighter moment by adding something that’s said off-screen, adding a bit of narration that may help the audience understand what’s going on, or other uses. It also can and has been overused, specifically in anime, by turning moments meant to be silent and thoughtful into strangely out-of-context humor or unnecessary narration. Hayao Miyazaki’s films, in particular, have strong examples of this that the director himself objected to upon seeing the English dub version.

Improvising is another overlooked aspect of dub work, and according to my research, something that was done heavily by the original Japanese voice actors, particularly Yasuo Yamada. Lupin’s tone, expressions, and personality are heavily his work. Improvising is another form of punch-up, and it’s a fun place for me to bring up that, at least for a lot of Lupin III, the cartoon was post-dubbed: the voice actors in Japan record the audio AFTER the cartoon has been animated. This is reasonably unusual for dub work on cartoons, and pretty unheard of (outside of for anime) in the United States. Most animated works get their voice acting recorded in the storyboarding phase.

It’s also a good place to bring up Part 2 again, where things like different voices for characters were done simply because the actors could. If you catch the voice actors at a convention, they’ll sometimes run panels on outtakes from the shows they’ve worked on, which seems absolutely ridiculous but is also a great way of showing off their skills as dub actors: all of the mouth movements match.

Video composition by Brand Name Pending on YouTube. Shared with permission.
Audio by Richard Epcar and Tony Oliver. If either of you would like to provide Lupin Central with an outtake reel without convention noise, email us!!

Mouth Flaps and Other Wonky Things That Go Along With Dubbing

Something that’s pretty exclusive to anime (and other moving mediums where audio has to be overlaid) is timing. Mouth movements not matching the dialogue has long been a joke about anime and foreign films in general — and it’s one the dub actors and directors are well aware of, and very much try to prevent. There is a technical position specific to this called Spotting, where you figure out which dialogue needs to be cut/replaced/reworded, though typically this job is part of what the director does.

These sort of changes are especially noticeable in newer specials and series, where the animation is cleaner, and when Japanese words and English words don’t use the same number of syllables, which is often. A good example is in “Fujiko’s Gift,” from Part 5, where Goemon is asking about his chopsticks. It’s a bit silly that a disposable pair of chopsticks would be his favorite pair — but it matched the mouth movements (and it also gave him reason to be angrier, even if the concept is a bit silly), and so it’s what they used instead of what he said in Japanese: his last pair.

But What About Subtitling?

I can’t do a subs vs. dubs article without talking about subtitling, too! Thanks to the lack of having to match mouth movements, it involves a heckuva lot less time in a sound booth, but involves just as much skill, for reasons very similar to dub scripting — right down to the timing!

This is one of the places where personal interpretation runs strong: Japanese is a very tonal language, and the same word can mean many different things depending on the context and way it’s expressed. This happens in English, too, thanks to stuff like sarcasm, and it’s one of those things that very definitely can get lost in translation.

Fan Translation Vs. Official Translation

There are quite a few Lupin specials that have not made it to official DVD/Blu-ray release. There are also a fair few that made it to home media release much later than the fan subtitled versions (we’re talking years). Because of the pacing between TV release in Japan and home media release in the United States, anime fans often get a fan subtitled version first. Fortunately for us, this has become less common for television series, many of which now air on streaming services with official subtitles the same time they are released in Japan. Unfortunately for us, movies and television specials haven’t quite caught up (though it’s looking like the upcoming Lupin III Vs. Cat’s Eye release will be worldwide, with subtitles [and possibly dubs, if other Amazon Prime releases are anything to go by], in 2023).

On the left, the fan translation, and on the right, the official blu-ray translation. In Japanese, Jigen says the words “mo chotto kawaii” here, which…can actually be translated to either of these sets of subtitles. Both versions are correct. It is all dependent on how the person listening and translating reads the scene.

Localization: Not Just For Dubbing

Some subtitles are much more localized! For example, the subtitles for Part 6, Episode 0, Jigen expresses to Fujiko, “天地がひっくり返っても” which means “even if heaven and earth switch places.” According to Ian Fagen, who did the subtitle translation for Part 6 (check out more about his work in an earlier article on Lupin Central, as well as on other shows through HiDive! He’ll be doing the subs for the upcoming Lupin Zero as well!), this is a more neutral version of what he used for the subtitles:

Arguably one of the greatest episodes of Lupin III ever

The dub team used “You could upend the earth and that would still never happen.” which is much closer to the original Japanese sentiment, but also not a common English phrase — at least, it’s not an idiom I’m personally familiar with at all? But the scriptwriting team for the dub is different than the person (or people) working on the subtitles, which is why you get different variations on the same dialogue!

In another example of localization, Seven Days Rhapsody (currently only available as a fan subtitled version…hello, again, official distribution companies, I want to give you my money, especially if you dub this one) has a couple jokes that are extremely specific to the language (and a few cultural differences) that got skipped in the fan-done subtitles:

Heart-eyed Lupin, here, is saying “パイオツ(Paiotsu)” which is an upside-down version of “オッパイ(Oppai),” which means “boobs” in Japanese. It’s an entire joke that gets missed in the English translation, though Lupin being a boob guy isn’t news to anyone who watches this series. Him doing it to Goemon is new, and that also gets discussed here — in another joke, another bit of Japanese that translates to English but if it was done exactly literally, instead of localized, it would make absolutely no sense.

He says “いつからそっちの趣味になったんだ” here, the literal translation of which has several layers but does eventually translate to the subtitles.

So, We’ve Discussed A Lot Here…What’s Actually Better?

I highly suspect the argument between subtitling and dubbing will last as long as both exist, and until we get an automatic translation tool installed in our brains, that’s going to hopefully be for a good long while. Both involve immense amounts of skills which I’ve gone over in this article, and no doubt stuff I’ve missed, and both are high-quality ways to enjoy the immense amount of Lupin III (and anime in general) available.

Personally? I’m going to ruffle a few feathers and just be honest: I’m a fan of both, especially when I have a friend helping me translate the Japanese so I can get the full experience to compare it to the subtitles. We have a very talented and immensely skilled group of people doing scripting, subtitling, and dubbing for this series, in both America and in Japan (and in Italy, Germany, and Brazil too — I’d put in a not-so-wild guess that worldwide, every language has an amazing Lupin III team). Both are excellent ways of experiencing the series, no matter which dub or subtitles you end up watching.

I think the most important part is to enjoy what works best for you, and don’t knock on others because they may watch anime a different way! Lupin III should always be a delight, no matter what language you watch it in!

Huge thanks to Ian, Ethan, Leo, and Saute, who helped me with some of the details of original Japanese audio, references, and a few other specifics from this article!!