Motherfucking Eva Dub!!! SMAAASH!!! (rant/review)

By Utsanomiko

God fucking damn it to a fucking express train to motherfucking Fuck Land.

Now that's off my chest, on to my actual rant/review, because I just had the misfortune of hearing the Evangelion dub again. How the fuck I ever got through it all once through, I'll never know.

For various particular reasons that are mostly irrelevant to this rant/review, I decided to re-watch some of Neon Genesis Evangelion in the English dubbed format, in order to reevaluate the quality of the voice acting and the accuracy of the English characterizations. I grabbed two DVDs and planned on watching the first 6 episodes.

I only got through the first episode.

Actually, I only got through the first 20 minutes or so, then stood up and started pacing my room, thinking about writing this rant/review, until the episode finished playing.

What I'll first have to say is that the dub. Simply. Does. Not. Work. Not at all. There was something wrong with each and every voice and characterization here. Every single voice had the curse of being too loud, too boisterous/overemphasized, too whiny, and too nasally. Listening to them made me embarrassed of my native language and ashamed of my American accent. And I'm not talking simply about the inherent differences between English and Japanese, as can be noticed when watching anime with good dubs, such as Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star, or even fairly good ones like Bubblegum Crisis 2040, Gundam 0080 or 08th MS Team, and such. Those have acceptable differences, even among the less accurate voices and characterizations. It's as if ADV wanted everyone in Eva to sound horrendously nasally and over-the-top. It's insane. It's like they're all plugging their noses and shouting (the Escaflowne dub had the shouting problem as well). That was the first problem, now let's go onto the specific problems with the characters' voice actor and characterizations.

I'm saving motherfucking Spike Spencer's version of Shinji for last. The Bastard.

In addition to the above mentioned issues regarding the English acting as a whole (as in they all sound like squawking bird-like or porcine curcis ringleader, shouting their lines into the microphone, an effect that makes Eva simply a bad dub. This was worse with the Love Hina dub though, which in addition to its horrid miscasting made an unacceptably miserable dub, but that's another story), many of the characters suffer from either extra acting problems, inappropriate casting, and downright ineptitude act characterization (motherfucking Spike Spencer). I'll start with the most decent examples, generally go down the line of atrociousness, and finally meet motherfucking Spike Spencer down at the bottom.

I'd have to say that out of all of the characters, Gendo Ikari and Fuyutsuki are closer to their original characters. Their voices are a bit more off than some characters, but Gendo generally retains the same basic characterization (though overall misses some of the finer details and ranges), while Fuyutsuki is simply acceptable with his basic dubbed lines, though he certainly could have sounded older (in End of Eva, they actually re-casted him to sound much younger. Unbelievable). But even as the best voices in the episode, they are still quite mediocre. I cannot emphasize enough just how amateur and uncaring the overall acting and casting is in this series, so bear with me here.

Dr. Ristuko And Rei Ayanami sort of manage to retain the same characterizations. Ristuko's VA is of course a bit off with her voice, far too nasally and over-emphasized dead-pan seems to replace confidence and sternness with the character. If I remember right, her acting gets really bad in later episodes. This seems to be the modus operandi for the dub's directing and casting. Rei actually still sounds a lot like Rei, though an actual teenager could have provided something younger and softer. An actual voice actress could have provided something more skilled, then again.

Let's not forget how they mess-up the pronunciation of some stuff, especially by Ritsuko. 'Evangelion' and 'Eva' are supposed to use the short 'e' sound (which means the 'e's in the title title 'End of Evangelion' all use the same 'e' sound). Some dipshit working on the dub, however, decided that 'Evangelion' should be pronounced with a long 'e' (as in 'enough with the shitty acting!') while 'Eva' inexplicably uses a long 'a' sound ([My brother] says hearing it reminds him of a little German girl, while I start to imagine a busty blonde in white lingerie). Like the rest of the decisions made for the dub, there's no point to this. But let's not forget the even more pointless and incompetent scene discussing the overall likely-hood of the Eva 01 activating with someone. They added a pun? What the fuck? Did someone actually think there was some sort of point to making a stretched reference to the mythological Oni? Why? I merely managed to replace the clarification of the Eva's chance for activation with some pointless, meaningless pun. Holy shit.

Maya Ibuki is just wrong. Replacing her soft and fairly high Japanese voice with something deep and quite nasally (more so that most of the cast) may have worked for some other secondary character, but with Maya's prominence it's just too jarring. It really puts a strain on the naivety of the original characterization, and leaves us with yet another victim of loud, nasally, bad actors.

The UN officers in the first episode were just a joke in the dub. They showed up in the first 5 minutes, and I just started laughing out loud when they started their ridiculous squawking and oinking. These guys must have been vets of the godzilla school of dubbing. Rather than being pompous and frustrated, and barking out orders, they are almost literally reduced to animal-like noises; absurd characterizations that mock the original characters. They are the kind of voices I would have made if I were going to parrot and mock the bad dub actors. Except in this case, the dub actors beat me to it. Un-fucking-believable.

Then there's Misato Katsuragi. Where do I start with this moronic mess of a characterization who's been reduced to a one-dimensional character with the single attribute of 'nasal'? She not only talks with her nose, she probably acts out of it, too. It's like they found some nobody who sounded like a 16-year-old girl, gave her electric nose-kazoos, and set them to 'shriek'. My god, they really did cut out a lot of Misato's character by sticking her with this person. I'm not ever sure if the sound of the voice even fits, because everything else about the way she reads her lines fails so bad. I didn't study Japanese for 4 1/2 years to be bullshitted with this kind of horribly inappropriate dubbing. Fuck you, ADV. That's about all I can say on that. If you cannot see why her character has been messed-up and lost in the dub, I cannot help you.

Motherfucking Spike Spencer. The Bastard. This means we're at the bottom of my rant/review. Simply put, I now really hate this sonofabitch. His version of Shinji is absolutely horrid, and unlikable/unsympathetic in any manner. Holy fuck, I think I now know why so many people hate Shinji more than they should. I know not all his detractors can be going by motherfucking Spike Spencer's version, but if they were, it would make a whole lot more sense. I never had a problem with Shinji while watching in the original Japanese, mainly because he worked as a character and his voice created the right characterization for him. Watching this first episode made me start to really, really loathe Shinji, but then I realized it was because of motherfucking Spike Spencer's horrid version of the character. The Bastard.

The underlying problem with him? He embodies everything that's wrong with the direction of this dub, even more so than the UN personal. He screeches and shouts all his lines, he doesn't use real emotions, he is horribly nasal, he whines, and a whole multitude of other things that both makes the sound of his voice unbearable, but shreds the depth and competence of the original voice acting. And worst of all, HE SQUAWKS! The Bastard literally makes bird-like squawking noises instead of screaming! Abso-fucking-lutely unbelievable.

But those aren't the biggest problem with his version of Shinji, far from it. The worst is that he not only reduces the original characterization, but he ADDS to it! His version of Shinji adds the horrible, over-the-top, and previously un-present attributes of:

SARCASTIC
HYPERACTIVE
TANTRUM-THROWING
HABITUAL SCREAMER
POMPOUS

And several other personality quirks which were either never there or never stretched to that inhuman level that the Bastard does. I don't care to remember them, and it's a bit hard to, as I've seen Evangelion in Japanese enough to get a clear understanding of Shinji's character, and this is clearly not Shinji.

Need an example? It's really fucked-up, I'll warn you. Here's the scene where Shinji first enters the unlit chamber with the Eva 01, and then sees it when the lights go on:

The dialogue on Japanese (I had to re-watch it this way just for sanity's sake, but it gave me something to write up here as a comparison of quality. This is paraphrasing from not only the subtitles, which I had on the whole episode, but from the Japanese dialogue itself):

(Lights go out)
SHINJI (Megumi Ogata): "Huh? It's dark in here."
(Lights go on)
SHINJI: *Gasp*

And now for the same two lines in English:

(Lights go out)
SHINJI (motherfucking Spike Spencer): "WHAAT?! WHY IS IT SO DARK IN HERE!!!??1111~"
(Lights go on)
SHINJI: "SQUAAAAAWK!!!"

I am not shitting you. I wish I were. The Bastard squawks when there's no screaming, shrieking, or even shouting present. Anybody else would have been a better choice than this motherfucker, so long as they actually had a decent grasp on Shinji's character. I hate him, I absolutely despise him even more for having re-watched this dubbed episode. I wish he was never born. You hear that, motherfucking Spike Spencer? Of course you ended up hating the character by the time you dubbed EoE, you shitwit; you royally fucked him up to hate-able levels! Even I hate your fucking version of him. I'll punch your lights out if I ever get the chance.

I don't have any way to wrap-up this rant/review, to be honest. There's probably a bunch of things I could have mentioned, like how off the voices sound, or whether or not the dub script is even accurate, but right now I'm just to pissed-off with the above mentioned faults. The only really decent aspect with the dub is that although most of cast doesn't sound the right age of their characters, a few of them do. It seems however that someone caught on to this inconsistency, and by the time of End of Eva they recast enough people to guarantee that NONE of them sound their age. I'm probably going to have to re-watch the episode in the original Japanese, and maybe the first six episodes like I originally planned. And maybe watch a good dub like Outlaw Stars, just to reassure the whole medium isn't a total farce. Oh, and those specific reasons I alluded to in the opening paragraphs? Yeah, the dub is totally unacceptable and unsuitable for what I was looking for. It's worse than I remember, so now I'm back at square one. Oh well, glad I got that off my chest.

Motherfucking Spike Spencer, the Bastard...

© 2005 Head Cancer Productions, James H. DeYarman II