2017’sPrincess Principalis a fairly underrated action series set in an alt-history 20th-century steampunk analog of Great Britain following a group of young female spies. While it’s gotten praise for its characters and worldbuilding, there’s one aspect of this series that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves, and that’s the English Dub.
In 2018, a year after the series premiered, Sentai Filmworks produced the dub andpremiered it on the streaming service HIDIVEin September, with a home video release scheduled that same month. The dub was directed by Kyle Jones, with Carolyn Johnson serving as the dialect coach, and the starred Avery Smithhart, Elizabeth Bunch, Shanae’a Moore, Rachael Messer, and Patricia Duran, to name a few.
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An Uncommon Mix
For the majority of the series, the dub is what one would expect from a series set in a British-English-speaking country, which is to say that the cast was more than eager to use accents. As an American, I’m not exactly an authority on the accents' authenticity,but any English dub with British accentsis one worth checking out at least once.
But Episode 5, “Bullet & Blade’s Ballad,” breaks from the formula to do something unheard of in dubbing. The episode focuses on the story of how Chise, a Japanese ninja and one of the main girls, ended up joining the group. It follows an assignment escorting a Japanese lord to London by train, and the attack by a group of assassins led by the infamous Todo Jubei.
For the first half of the episode, the characters are all speaking in English, although Japanese characters are speaking in distinct accents for the sake of authenticity. It also further emphasizes the cultural differences that are seen from the main characters' perspectives and thenot-so-subtle prejudice among the majority white populace.
But when Todo Jubei appears, the tone shifts immediately, and in a way few English dubs manage to convey because of context alone. When Todo Jubei and his fellow assassins speak, they aren’t dubbed at all; they only speak in Japanese, voiced by their original actors. The exception is Chise, whose Japanese lines are spoken quite well by her English VA, Rachael Messer.
Why It Works
Obviously, there are a lot of contextual reasons as to why this works in this instance, namely how the storydistinguishes characters based on cultureand uses it to lay subtext about race. Additionally, by introducing Lord Horikawa as an English speaker and Todo Jubei as a Japanese speaker, it further informs how the two men differ and why they have come to blows.
On the whole, it works for the simple reason that it lends authenticity and an extra layer of immersion to the characters by acknowledging the existence of language as a barrier. And it isn’t the first time that characters have spoken other languages in anime, but it’s arguably one of the few examples where it’s handled in a way that doesn’t take the viewer out of the experience.
In the case of the original Japanese, there’s a tendency to have English speakers voiced by Japanese actors who might not be fluent in the language. And the only realremedy that English dubs providein these instances is to make everyone speak the same language. Because if it’s an English dub of a show set in Japan, there aren’t many ways to acknowledge a language barrier.
The dubs for films likeYour NameorSuzumehave had to come up with clever ways of cloaking parts of the script where Japanese is hard to avoid confronting. In the former case, the remedy was to rewrite a joke about the proper gendered phrases while the latter simply had the English VA sing songs in Japanese.
A History of Integrated Dubbing
What makesPrincess Principalmore impressive is that viewers have seen what can happen when there is a direct acknowledgment of other languages handled less elegantly.In 2015,Psycho-Pass: The Moviecame outand there was a lot of English spoken in the original Japanese, namely because there were a lot of English-speaking characters.
Think of thePsycho-Passmovie as the inversion ofPrincess Principal’s approach to multilingual storytelling. To the credit of the actors, they are speaking English quite well for not being fluent, but it can be hard to understand when characters are giving lengthy monologues that sound straight out of Metal Gear. Understandably, many were eager for the English dub.
But at some point, there was a fan edit of the film that began to circulate, one that mixes the English and Japanese versions together. The English dub itself was already quite good, and the returning cast members do an excellent job, but this new version did something special.It kept the original Japanese vocal track, but only for Japanese characters.
The significance of this change really hits during a scene between the main character, Kogami, and one of the antagonists, Desmond. Because Kogami is a native Japanese speaker talking to a fluent English speaker, Kogami’s broken English comes off as a more genuine, diegetic attempt to penetrate the language barrier to give a threat.
In the time since the fan-madePsycho-Passvocal track andPrincess Principal’s fifth episode, anime has experimented with language barriers more. Whether youwatch 2020’sThe Great Pretenderin Japanese or English, there is a clever way in which they intermix audio depending on the spoken language of the characters.
This is an incredibly clever way of telling stories, and it’s surprising that more anime don’t do this when in cases where there are people of different nationalities and languages comprising the cast. However, it is also understandable how, depending on the context, this could be difficult depending on how much of a story hinges on such multilingualism.
WithPrincess Principal, it was a single episode, and withGreat Pretender, all they needed was a fourth-wall break early on to address a shift to the viewer’s chosen language track for the majority of the series. The reason that something likePsycho-Pass’s integrated dub wouldn’t likely happenofficially is more complicated.
The entire reason that English dubs exist is to present an alternative vocal option, but it is decidedly referred to as an English dub, whereas the original is defined by one language as well.Psycho-Passalready had a dub, so it isn’t as if they’d ditch the English VAs for Akane or Kogami, whereas, in an original production or a new dub, such creative choices are fair game.
As anime expands and its definition blurs in the face ofan increased appreciation for animation’s possibilities, it wouldn’t be surprising if more stories came about that opened opportunities for multilingual dubbing. Such an idea might even transcend like English dub or Japanese dub. With the medium’s expansion, it wouldn’t be a surprise if there were dubs that intermix international talent for some fascinating results.
