We’ve been a bit quiet here at This is Sternbild recently. Mainly for two reasons: I spent the last two months on my bachelor’s thesis, and Aki was getting ready to go to Japan for a year. Now my thesis has been defended and Aki’s getting cozy with all the Taibani available in Japan so we’ll be more active. So, down to business.

The English dub of Tiger & Bunny premiered a couple of days ago on Viz’s Neon Alley PS3 service. I don’t own a PS3, nor do I live in North America where Neon Alley is available. There’s a rip on the interwebs that I watched instead. This is all my personal opinion, Aki hasn’t been able to watch the dub yet.

I think that when you rate the dub, you have to take into account that the English dub actors had an advantage over the original seiyuu. The original version was recorded with the seiyuu getting only the information necessary to play their characters correctly, they didn’t get any extra information until they received the scripts. The English VAs on the other hand have had the opportunity to watch the series and build their performance from that, and there’s a lot more background material available now. The Japanese version is also more subtle, the English dub is blatant with some things compared to the original. It’s a cultural thing, Japanese language just works differently from English. I think they also added some lines to make some things clearer or to substitute things that wouldn’t have worked in English.

Individual voices

This is a short version because Kotetsu’s got the most lines in the first episode, hard to judge the others based on just a few lines. Continue reading →