[Lynk Former]

AMERICANS ? especially young Americans ? love Japanese animation, and as anime becomes increasingly popular on television, nothing is more vital to the viewer's enjoyment than the quality of the English-language dub. A good one will enrich the story and bring the characters to life, but a badly dubbed show can be as grating as a concert performed off-key.

Preparing American versions of anime series poses vexing problems for the small, highly specialized industry of writers, producers and actors in the United States who seek to bridge the language and culture gaps. For one thing, Westerners might have trouble understanding a too-literal adaptation, but if the English version strays too far from the original, otaku (die-hard anime fans) will object. When a heavily edited version of "Cardcaptor Sakura" appeared on the Kids' WB as "Cardcaptors," for instance, fans mounted online protests about the changes in the characters and story line.

Anime offers a much wider array of situations and characters than American programs do, and often requires more complex voice characterizations. No Hanna-Barbera show ever demanded the kind of intensity required to play the beleaguered brothers Edward and Alphonse Elric in "Fullmetal Alchemist," or the cynicism that shields the wounded heart of the space cowboy Spike Spiegel in "Cowboy Bebop," or the constant shifts between samurai bravado and slapstick farce of the wandering warrior Kenshin Himura in "Rurouni Kenshin."

"When we start a new series, people come in with a translation, then one of the writers will prepare the English script," said Don Rush, a director at ADV Films in Houston. "I'll go over that script as I watch the show, getting a feel for the characters and thinking about casting. Then we hold auditions. I think it's real easy to do bad dramatic stuff. Look at any TV soap opera. They're horribly overdone. So I work really hard to make it come off as convincing and not sappy."

A major decision in casting is how close the English voices should be to the original Japanese ones. Fans want them as close as possible, but the higher-pitched, more childish voices of some anime heroines grate on Western ears. And there's no American equivalent of the voices of some other characters, like the long-haired androgynous bishonen ("beautiful boys").

"I tend to go more for the acting than a voice that sounds like the original," said Ken Duer, president of Phuuz Entertainment in Los Angeles. "But it's up to the client. When I worked on 'Lupin III,' they wanted comparable voices, so we held a lot of auditions to find actors who were good, and who sounded like the Japanese cast."

When the English voices are recorded, the actors have to match the words to the characters' mouth movements, which were originally timed to the Japanese dialogue. "That's the hardest part of the job," said Chris Patton, the voice of Sousuke, the highly trained, terminally dense hero of "Full Metal Panic: Fumoffu!" "If you're passionate about acting and telling the story, you go in and chain yourself to the fact that you're going to have to match those flaps."

Because each actor records alone, to allow for greater concentration on synchronizing the mouth movements, it is difficult to generate the chemistry needed to make, say, the fractious romance between Sousuke and the hot-tempered Kaname (Luci Christian) in the farcical "Fumoffu!" believable. Mr. Patton and Ms. Christian never saw each other during the recording sessions, so there was no chance for the kind of give and take actors in live-action series use to explore character relationships.

"If I have Luci read first, Chris has something to work off," Mr. Rush said. "Then I can tell him, 'It didn't sound like you were really talking to her,' or 'You're a little angrier with her.' If I don't like the chemistry in certain scenes, we can redo it parts of it, but that's pretty rare."

Although they too worked in isolation, Vic Mignogna and the child actor Aaron Dismuke created a deep, believable bond as Edward and Alphonse Elric in the popular fantasy-adventure "Fullmetal Alchemist" (shown on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim). The brothers try to use alchemy to revive their dead mother, but when the spell fails catastrophically, Edward loses his left leg and sacrifices his right arm to preserve Alphonse's soul in a suit of armor. Edward receives prosthetic steel limbs, while Alphonse remains a spirit housed in an empty metal shell.

Aaron Dismuke faced a special problem when he was cast as Alphonse: he was only 11 and needed to complete the recordings before his voice changed. He imbues Alphonse with a gentle honesty typified in the wrenching moment when Edward says to his brother: "I wouldn't blame you if you did, Al, but I've got to know: Do you hate me for all that's happened?" Stunned, Alphonse replies, "Brother, I could never hate you."

Mr. Mignogna said: "Aaron is brilliant as Al, but we were probably halfway through the series before I met him at an anime convention in Dallas. It was like I'd known him my whole life: I ran up to him and yelled, 'Al, it's me!' "

The challenges for the writers can also be daunting. Japanese humor runs to difficult-to-translate puns and wordplays, and jokes or clues may be hidden in the characters' names. In the original Japanese, the hero's name in "Tenchi Muyo!" can be read as "Earth and Heaven" or as "This Side Up."

"A joke may not make sense in English, so I have to explain why it's funny in Japanese," said the producer and translator Yurika Araki-Dennis. "If there's no lip sync, we may add a line or a subtitle to explain something.

"If the series is going straight to DVD, the audience will mainly be serious anime fans, which means we have to stick very close to the original. If there are too many discrepancies, they complain. If the show is intended for a broader TV audience, we have a little room to play with the interpretation."

Even if American viewers can be harsh judges of the English versions of their favorite series, they are often unclear about what makes a dub work, Mr. Rush said. "When I meet people and tell them what I do for a living, a lot of times I get, 'You need to talk to my son, he can do all kinds of voices.' But it's not just a matter of doing voices. The acting has to come across so you believe what you're hearing and you buy into the story."

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/arts/t...ref=slogin