#shrug...

laura les - haunted 💫

I gave it a watch because I’m generally a dub fan and this anime in particular seems like a good one to watch dubbed if you don’t understand Japanese well, since there is a lot of detail in the animation that you’ll miss by reading subtitles.

The dub seems pretty... lukewarm thus far, however. The script appears to be a very literal translation of the material, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing per se, but I find scripts that take more liberties with the content to be a lot more appealing (Kill la Kill’s English dub script is a good example). There’s just a lot more effort put into a script like that, and it makes watching the series dubbed after seeing the original so much more fun. 

Some lines in DARLING’s dub also strike me as odd; “My goodness, why must she always be such high maintenance?” is an example. I even had to rewind here to make sure I heard correctly because I found this so jarring.

In terms of acting, there are a lot of nice performances! I really enjoy what Tia Ballard brings to Zero Two (though it did take a moment to get used to), and Hiro’s parasite team seems promising as well. Austin Tindle’s acting for Goro---even though he only gets a few lines in this first episode---is especially promising. I was really impressed with his performance here.

And hey, you can’t go wrong with Chris Sabot as Papa.

The biggest head-scratcher about the dub cast is Matt Shipman’s Hiro. Shipman’s acting is fine, but he seems to play Hiro as a lot older than a teenager, which is a direction I really don’t understand. A lot of Hiro’s story is focused on his youth and naivety, and sure, having an older-sounding voice might serve as a thematic contrast, but I just can’t help but find it incredibly awkward.

Shipman does seem to play Hiro as older in his monologues, which might be a way of localizing how Hiro’s personal pronouns change from ore to boku in Japanese, and I would say that that’s a nice touch. However, even episode-1 Hiro simply sounds very off to me, and it’s disappointing, because from Shipman’s other roles, he seems plenty capable of sounding younger than this.