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I believe that many good actors don't make good voice actors. Where in live acting, different characters can be expressed by different body language, the only way for an actor to portray a character differently in animation is with their voice, and varying the voice is a quality that many otherwise good actors lack.

When I hear Eddy Murphy in an animated movie, I think of him as Eddy Murphy, not the character he is playing.
One of the reasons I don't like the Kiki's Delivery Service dub, is because I can't hear Phil Hartman and not think, "Hi, I'm Troy Mcclure and you may remember me from..." The Japanese version of a lot of Studio Ghibli films has celebrity VAs too, but since I don't know who they are I'm fine with it. xp

Of course, this might not be such a bad thing if the character had a 'rural' accent in the original. Of course, it's impossible for me to know if that's the case or not.

I thought he did an excellent job portraying the old man. Besides, a lot of times characters have "southern" accents because their japanese counterpart have an accent. If he had had a distinctly asian accent among every other character who did not have an asian accent he would have felt out of place. He wasn't a foreigner, he was just has a slightly different dialect, or whatever you call it. If they are a good actor, whether voice specific or not, chances are they have studied the importance of inflections and such. True not all actors have that talent, but it is important to their career, and are most likely aware of it. At least if they've had an formal kind of training. And recognizing their voice doesn't hurt the experience unless it sounds out of character, which would be the fault of the casting director, not the actor persay. And most of the time I was under the impression voices are sent to the japanese director or whatever for approval.

Besides, a lot of the time the choice of a Japanese accent other than the normal often says something about the character... it is good translation and dubbing to use a similar accent in english that says the same things, like Osaka being given a mild Texan accent in Azumanga.

If they kept an accent that meant nothing to a large part of the audience the dub was meant for rather than going with one that conveyed the same basic information about the character it would be bad dubbing/translation, not good.


I think a good example of good and bad dubbing by celebs in the same show would be Armitage III. Keifer Sutherland was goddamn awesome in it, whereas Elizabeth was horrible.