The Big O Effect: the Voice Acting Constraints of a Japanese Paradigm

I first watched "The Big O" in English on the Cartoon Network. Back then, I called it a dub. The showing was contemporary with Fox-scaflowne, which dared to turn down the volume on Yoko Kanno's dulcet tunes. Evagelion featured a bitchy Asuka and a teeny-bopper Misato-san, and the horrendous yak-yak performance of "Lily Cat" still grated on my ears years after I'd last seen it. I was impressed by the emotion and humor injected into the acting in "The Big O". That was the first time that I started using the term "English Language Version" without the irony.

When I bought the DVD, I didn't expect to like the English language version so much more than the original Japanese dialogue. The voices sounded flat in the Japanese. Dorothy sounded like a young girl and Roger Smith was a tough guy. The performances were straight forward, plain and simple. There was nothing wrong with them, but Lia Sargent and Steven Blum interacted with a snarky and dynamic chemistry.

Part of magic came from the American voice talents, and part of it came from the advancements in the voice directing, but I believe that much of the difference was cultural familarity. Here in America, the Speak Easies, G-men, and the tommygun are stock settings. The era was popularized in the "Dick Tracy" comic, lionized in "Scarface", and then parodied in "Looney Tunes" and "Guy Noir: Private Eye"[1]. The tradition continued on the big screen on the dark streets of Gotham City in "Batman Begins". The charged exchanges between Sargent and Blum are played to an audience comfortable with the Noir milieu.

Just as the Meiji Era feels foreign to most Americans, I conjecture that mood, style, and accepted imagery of film noir is foreign to the Japanese audience. Many Japanese have probably seen Scarface or another gangster flick, but even as a single samurai flick gives a gaijin only a taste of the Shogunate, a single gangster flick does not convey the glitz and grit of 20s Chi-town. Therefore, Dorothy and Roger were played straight as the girl and tough hero to convince a teenage Japanese audience to buy into mood and milieu of Noir.

The cultural gap between the audience and the milieu caused the voice directors and actors to play the roles safely and flatly. Instead of an impertinent waif, Dorothy was a girl first and foremost and a sarcastic side kick as a far second. That is what I call the Big O Effect.

[1] A skit on Public Radio International's "Prairie Home Companion".