Quote:
Originally Posted by skyline
I don't usually go for dubs, certainly not if it's going to be a long airing anime and I've to wait an extra year or two for the dubbed version to come out, but I prefer comedy centered animes (like k-on) dubbed, reading subtitles makes you miss visual cues, you either read it too fast and wonder what's going on until the animation has caught up or you miss it completely, either way spoiling the joke.
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Depends on the kind of comedy and the quality of the dub. I'll take subbed Tenchi any day of the week, since it's so heavy on drama, but I don't mind a more straight up comedy if it's dubbed, so long as the voice acting isn't terrible. I'd still generally take sub though, since translated jokes lose even more than translated drama, and since comedy is based so much on culture and mannerisms, culture and mannerisms that the dubbed actors probably don't understand, it's usually just not worth the time and attention saved reading subtitles.
The only animes that I can think of off the top of my head that I'd rather watch dubbed are Hellsing and Berserk. Hellsing because so many of the characters are British and German that it just seems wrong to listen to them in Japanese. Not to mention that I think the dub actors actually sell the campy aspects of the show even than the sub actors do.
And Berserk just because there's a demon in one episode whose Japanese voice actor just completely ruins the episode he's in and I'd just as soon watch it dubbed all the way through. I don't know why, but the Japanese insist on using deep voiced Japanese guys to play demons, using no kind of effects to alter the voice to make it sound any different than just some Japanese guy who drinks too much whiskey. And they even had him act out the roars the demon made. He just sort of sounded like he was garbling spit. If you're going to have something roar then for god's sake use a sound effect, you dip****s!
There's definitely a fanboy tendency to overrate the quality of Japanese voice acting though. Most Japanese performances might be better than their Western counterparts, but these generally aren't Emmy-worthy performances. You're still getting people who may or may not be any better than generic TV actors.