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(Editor’s Note: Tristan MacAvery’s panel presentation, “The Director’s Cut,” premiered at Neko-Con R, November 1999. Jokingly described as a “defending your
life panel,” MacAvery described the process of taking a subtitled show and turning it into a dubbed show. His goal is to show the “Sub Only” fans that there may be a
few good dubs out there after all – or, at least, reasons why dubs are made the way they are. He agreed to put some of his comments up on my web page, and he
didn’t even demand that I be his slave for life. Ain’t he a great guy? Enjoy!  --L.H.)

 If there’s one thing I’ve learned about animé over the years, it’s that animé fans can be rabid—er, can cling tenaciously to a viewpoint. If someone doesn’t like a
particular show, series, artist, or version of something, you can pretty well forget trying to convince him of its relative merits. If you don’t believe me, try defending
Pokémon to someone with a T-shirt reading “I Eat Pikachus for Breakfast.”
 This seems to go double in the sub-versus-dub battle. Naturally, as a voice actor, I tend to see a lot of merits in dubbing animé – like, getting work and being paid. It
got even worse when I was tapped by A. D. Vision (Houston TX) to write and direct animé; instead of just my voice, I now have whole scripts and shows to defend
to the howling mobs who insist that the subtitled version is “more pure” or “more accurate” than the dubs.
 The peace-maker in me decided that I should take up the gauntlet (or perhaps it was just the appeal of having a 2-hour block of time with me as the star – I always
was in love with the sound of my own voice). I created a panel called “The Director’s Cut,” in which I made some observations about what goes through a director’s
mind – well, okay, what went through my mind – when putting voices on animé.
 The panel itself includes sequences from both the subtitled and dubbed versions of three of my films: Princess Minerva, Dark Warrior, and Ushio & Tora. Alas, I
can’t show you those clips here; bandwidth problems aside, I suspect that actually putting movie clips on a web site would probably cut across the oversensitive belly
of the copyright laws. So what I’d like to do here is just touch briefly on a few points that I raise in my talk. If you want the rest, then come find me at one of the
various cons throughout the year – I’ll probably be presenting the full-scale version of this beast!

Why Mess With Perfection?
 One question that arises from many subtitle-fans is, why bother to dub at all? The Japanese version is the original, and subtitling is the least intrusive (or perhaps least
invasive) method of enjoying the original and still having some idea of what the heck is going on. Some have told me that they even used their subtitled tapes to help
them learn Japanese.
 Boy, have I got news for you guys.
 The first point, of course, is that even subtitles are an interpretation of the original spoken Japanese. It is not a literal translation; if it were, the written grammar,
syntax, and word choice would be very strange indeed to American eyes. One of my favorite transliterations is “His head went white.” Actually, the man turned pale,
and that’s the phrase that Americans would understand. So even when writing subtitled scripts, there is some change from the literal Japanese into English – or even
into American, which could almost be considered its own language.
 This point can be stretched up to, and sometimes beyond, the breaking point. I’ve done some fan-subbing (may I refer you to www.odysseyanime.com), and
changing lines may have to do with anything from timing to making a joke relate better to a non-Japanese audience. More on this a bit later, when I talk about
changing lines.
 The next point is that reading a movie takes away from your ability to pay attention to what else is going on in the scene. One of the major points of appreciation in
animé is the art itself – the detailing, the color, the structure. How can you pay attention to that when you’re having to read the plot as you go along? Much easier to
hear the dialog in your own language and let your eyes graze upon the scenery.
 The final point, however, is something that I was unaware of when I first got into animé: It’s already been dubbed. In the U.S., animation is secondary to the acting;
the voice actors perform their roles, and the animators create expressions, mouth movements, and so forth around the spoken words. In Japan, the animation comes
first, and Japanese seiyuu (voice actors) dub in their lines – often, with all the actors together, huddled around a few microphones. This may explain why the voices
and mouth movements don’t match up with great precision in many instances.
 In a sense, then, there’s no “original” to injure by dubbing. This, I confess, is a bargain basement shot. After all, when it came over the Pacific, the show did have an
original form. My only point in bringing this up is to show that, in a way, the true “original” work is the manga (printed comics), and that from that point, everyone who
touches it has some input – and, no doubt, some changes. The important point is: Are the changes good ones?

The Sacred Word
 The most common complaint I hear about dubs is that they don’t say the very same thing that the subtitled version says, or that the Japanese version says. Reasons
for this range from the slime to the ridiculous, but there are indeed reasons. Good directors use only the best reasons, and as few of them as they can; I can’t speak
for all those other guys out there.  ?
 The primary consideration for any English-language director is the mouth movements, technically known in the studios as “lip flaps.” As I’ve already observed, the
Japanese don’t seem to concern themselves overmuch with this part of the dubbing process, perhaps feeling that the focus is indeed on the artwork and on a certain
level of poetry in their own language. Fans of the genre in this country seem to be more picky in their praise; they want the characters to at least look like they’re
saying lines written for the animation.
 The differences between any two languages, and particularly between Japanese and English, make such match-ups difficult. Those who have studied the language
realize that the Japanese can sum up a complex thought in a very few syllables, as well as turn the simplest phrase into a string of syllables a mile long. (Side note: This
is what makes haiku such a fascinating art form.) It’s not easy for us to say, “We must run and hide before Godzilla attacks the city” when you’ve only got three
mouth flaps to do it in. Generally, that line boils down to something like, “We’d better split!”
 Another point to this same consideration is the appearance of the character’s mouth at the end of a sentence. In Ushio & Tora, seiyuu Jessica Calvello had the task
of ending a sentence with an open-mouthed sound, since her character’s mouth was wide open for a full second before the scene shifted to the next sentence. I wrote
and directed the show, but I was equally stumped; ideally, we needed to end the sentence with a word which ended with an open vowel sound—and there just ain’t
that many in our language. In the end, Jessica ended her line, “Ushio has my [study] notes!” with a faintly disgusted little mouth sound which, although sounding less
than totally normal, matched the open mouth that we were forced to work with. (She came up with that one herself, bless her pea-pickin’ heart.)
 Sometimes, therefore, a line has to be rewritten to fit some mechanical problem in the show, like matching mouth flaps. In this instance, the flow of a line may not
sound much like normal English, but it’s the best that can be done. In the same show, Randy “Ushio” Sparks had to cover up three open-mouthed jaw moments,
saying nothing but someone’s name. The end result sounds like, “ah-ah-Asuko!” Frankly, it’s terrible – but that’s not Randy’s fault, and I guess it’s not really my fault
either. We quite literally had no other idea what to put into that moment that would in any way match the way the mouth looked on that line.
 Another consideration is whether or not a joke will work in America, when it would be riotously funny in Japan. In the third episode of Those Who Hunt Elves, the
four heroes are arrested under suspicion of being part of a gang of terrorists. While being questioned, Jyunpei (the big fighter of the group) makes the comment that he
wants his bowl of pork ramen. The reference is to a character famous in Japan, a police detective (whose name I cannot now remember) who is the “good cop” in
the good-cop-bad-cop routine; this man offers his suspect a bowl of pork ramen, begins waxing nostalgic on the suspect’s home and family, finally breaking him
down through sheer sentimentality.
 In the U.S., only a very few people might have gotten that joke. The line has to be filled, but with what? It’s a cardinal sin to change the actual plot of any animé
story; if you do so, you’ll hear from the fans in an uprising that would make Custer’s Last Stand look like a toddler’s party at Chuck E. Cheese’s. My solution to the
problem was to make another sort of good-cop-bad-cop reference. The final line comes out as, “If you’re going to play good-cop-bad-copy, I’d rather talk to Scully
than Mulder.”
 This line takes a chance, since it’s a modern cultural reference which might fade with time, but it’ll hold its own for now. Also, since the constable in this strange
world would obviously have no idea who Jyunpei is talking about, the joke facilitates the constable’s increasing rage – so it works. But, as you can see, it’s not a
literal interpretation of the original line. This is one of the forms of compromise that a director may choose to use.

Now, There’s Your Comedy
 Sometimes, changing a line is totally within the writer/director’s wicked little mind. I plead guilty to quite a number of charges of this sort, and I’m not a bit sorry
about any of them; there are just times when you can’t resist putting in a good joke. I wrote scripts for the first two episodes of the Original Dirty Pair series, and
there are places where replacing lines seemed like the way to liven up a script that was, to be completely honest, about as funny as watching a mountain erode.
 In the first episode, Kei and Yuri are trying to stop a prison riot and rescue the warden. The warden, now safe from the prisoners, has broken away from our
heroines, and he plans to use the prison’s safeguards to kill the whole bunch of them. Kei and Yuri find themselves pinned down by gunfire; they stand on opposite
sides of an archway, as bullets are being fired down the hall toward the mouth of the arch. On the count of three, they will pivot into the archway and go down firing.
One…two…three—they pivot, but the archway is sealed off by a huge metal door. In the original version, the lines look like this:

 Yuri: Does this mean that we are safe?
 Warden: (over loudspeaker) I will kill you all!
 Kei: That voice…

 Kei recognizes that the warden has escaped and has gone to the central control systems to activate the lethal protocols of the prison’s security computers. But the
dialog is flatter than central Kansas. After all, Kei and Yuri are pals, buds, fast and furious with the one-liners and smart-ass remarks, right? (Well, they were in my
version, anyway!) So let’s do this instead:

 (The door slams shut)
 Yuri: Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
 Warden: (over loudspeaker) I will kill you all!
 Kei: A bad thing.

 It matches the mouth movements, it doesn’t change the plot, and best of all, it makes the scene much funnier by reinforcing the wise-tushy comments that make the
Dirty Pair so much fun to watch. This is when changing the script a bit actually improves the work.
 This process can be a dangerous one, however. There is a saying that if you put too much possum into your sauerkraut, your sauerkraut will taste of possum. This
little homespun wisdom might have been at the root of the nearly universal panning of Slayers: The Motion Picture, written and directed by Matt Greenfield. For
reasons known only to himself, Greenfield elected to riddle the script with references and catch phrases from everything from The Honeymooners to every Warner
Brothers cartoon character then in existence.  A little would have gone a long way, but the nearly ubiquitous comment from fans is that it went so far overboard that
the entire show was almost unwatchable.
 I had a voice role in this show, the part of the demonic frog Joyrock. The show sticks in my mind for several reasons, but the most embarrassing was that I had to
say, complete with Sylvester the cat lisp, “Sufferin’ succotash!” It was not what I would expect an animé demon to utter, and I’m apparently not alone in that opinion.

Inviting the Gaijin Over for Saké
 Perhaps the biggest reason for these changes is also the most controversial: Trying to make animé accessible to more of the mainstream, rather than just the
dedicated otaku. Changing the jokes into something more recognizable to Americans, as well as changing the language, is part and parcel of getting “ordinary” folk to
watch this amazing art form.
 It’s about this time that I begin to get bombarded with anything from tomatoes to Jigglypuffs. “It’s OUR stuff!” they cry. “We don’t WANT to have it mainstreamed!
The stuff that’s in the mainstream SUCKS, like Pokémon and Dragonball Z! Don’t you DARE do that to End of Evangelion!!!”
 First things first. There are people who happen to like Pokémon, and there are reasons to like it. It does exactly what it set out to do: Simple stories, for kids 4-8,
with moral homilies and slapstick humor. It succeeded in its mission, and it should be applauded.
 Next: “Going mainstream” doesn’t necessarily mean that the work becomes tainted by marketing, fast-food chains, and Hollywood. That can certainly happen, and
when it does, we should all take up arms and do battle against Disney. But gaining popularity doesn’t have to equate with selling out.
 Finally: You couldn’t possibly do that to End of Evangelion. No amount of fiddling, coaxing, cajoling, or outright butchery could transform that mystical beast from its
Kafka-esque form into something that could be shown on The Family Channel. Don’t worry – NERV is quite safe.
 You may not like it, folks, but the “mainstream” is what governs the economy of the world. It would be wonderful if animé could be brought over to this country
without charge, dubbed and distributed at cost, and held to a higher standard than any other imported product from trucks to Pocky. But the truth is that it all takes
money, and there simply aren’t enough fans out there to support the whole industry. If every single fan each bought one copy of every single animé product that was
produced, there might be enough to keep things going – but we all know that none of us has that kind of money, not to mention that kind of widely-varied tastes. Fist
of the North Star sitting next to Sailor Moon – not on any animé shelf I’ve ever seen!
 What is needed is a true dedication to the art. My writing and directing has been made with all the love I have for this most intriguing art form, and I have been
extremely gratified to have so many of you tell me that it does indeed show. My goal has always been to keep faith with the genius of the original work, at the same
time adding my appropriate two cents to the mixture in hope of creating something that can be universally appreciated. I never treated this work as a job, or as a
means to make a buck, or as merely a product to be manipulated and exploited to the fullest. I put my heart in it, because that’s what a good fan does.
 So do dubs still suck? Yeah, some of them really do. Let’s face it – can’t all of them be gems. I wrote and directed Panzer Dragoon – ask me if I know what “stink
out loud” means. (Man, you should have seen the idiot thing before I got hold of it – it’s even worse!!!) But when you get something good, and you put your heart
into it, it still shines. It’s a variation, a facet, another incarnation of the same original version that you know and love.
 From the director’s chair, I’ll be the first to tell you: Be critical of the work! But open yourself to the possibility. There are those of us who love this stuff as much as
you do, and we had a hand in creating a new version of it – a dubbed version. We hope you’ll like it.
 And who knows? You might.