Met a guy at a con who changed how I watch dubs vs subs

So I was at Anime Expo 2023 waiting in line for the Makoto Shinkai panel, and this guy next to me starts chatting about Weathering With You. He told me he actually prefers the English dub because the voice actor for Hodaka added a stutter in emotional scenes that wasn't in the original Japanese. I never noticed that before, and now I rewatch scenes in both versions to compare those little choices. Has anyone else caught a voice acting decision in a dub that totally changed how you saw a character?

2 comments

2 Comments

alex5241mo ago

Stutters hit different. Changes everything.

the_fiona1mo ago

Pay attention to the pacing too, not just the emotion. Dubs sometimes stretch or compress a line to match mouth flaps, and that changes the whole rhythm of a scene. I rewrote a whole character in my head after hearing a dub actor pause a full second longer than the sub, never heard them the same way again.