Thursday, November 15, 2007

Quando Dico "Whoa..."

I don't have much to say at the moment, so I'll toss out this question: have you ever come across a foreign-language dubbing of a cartoon (either something dubbed into English, or English dubbed into another language) where you thought one or more voice actors really did a good job of capturing the spirit of the characters?

What brought this on was seeing this clip from "Sahara Hare" in Italian and thinking that whoever did Yosemite Sam really got the character right:



What I like about that dub is that the actor is uninhibitedly screaming at the top of his lungs, which is the only way to properly voice Sam. One flaw I notice in a lot of cartoon dubbing is a certain amount of inhibition, as if the actors can't quite bring themselves to be as loud or over-the-top as the originals.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you ever get a chance to look at any Region 2 Beavis & Butthead DVDs listen to the German language track. Cunning audio editing has maintained Mike Judge's distinctive sniggers, whilst the voice artists doing the duo are doing perfect Beavis and Butthead impersonations - albeit in Deutsch.

Anonymous said...

Bob Clampett really liked the french dub voice of DJ from Beany & Cecil. He joked that his voice made DJ's laugh sound "ever dirtier"

J Lee said...

Some of the Spanish language dubbing on the pre-48 WB pacakge that the Turner people syndicated in the late 80s-early 90s had voice actors who were too over the top -- i.e., they felt some need to make too many of the voices "wacky" in a way that seemed to say either they or the dialogue director had little or no faith in what was on screen soliciting laughs, and decided they had to make the voices sound goofier so there would be something to laugh at when the gags failed.

This strategy might make sense on some of the sedate 1930s musical WB cartoons that were part of the Turner package, but thinking you have to make the voices funner in a Clampett cartoon or a Maltese-Freleng Bugs short to make Spanish-language audiences giggle is wildly mistaken, and comes off as though the voice actors are trying to divert attention away from the visuals and onto themselves.