I wrote a 2400 word story in 2014 for a creative writing class at uni. It's about Japanese anime, English dubbing, going to my first anime convention and meeting a woman called Aimee Moffat-Foster who had incredible stories about dubbing Cantonese/Mandorin/French cartoons in Hong Kong. If that's not your thang, then scroll on by and find some other shorter things I've written or photos I've taken. Enjoy~
When I was ten years old, my grandma took me to see my firstJapanese anime at the local independent cinema in Collaroy.
We rode the bus in together, sucking on Werthers and staring out the windows at the Norfolk pines lining Pittwater Road. As we hopped off, I looked up at Collaroy Cinema. It stood tall and proud like a bright blue Art Deco wedding cake layered with white ledges and perfectly rounded corners. Walking up the aisle of the theatre my grandma pulled two plastic ziplock bags full of home bought treats out of her handbag. The salt of the chips had laced every jelly snake, leaving my lips dry by the end of the trailers.
The red velvet curtains widened and the brass lights dimmed. As the first moving images of Hayao Miyazaki’s film Howl’s Moving Castle lit the almost empty 11.15am session, the grandeur of the cinema was forgotten. I was hooked.
The word “anime” has evolved into what the Western world understands as Japanese animation. The term was coined in the nineties, but animated television series and movies existed long before then. The first full-length animated feature called Momotaro Umi no Shinpei (Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors) was released in 1945. It was black and white, with a muffled orchestral score behind the crackling film reel. Characters wordlessly floated across the screen, their movements slippery and round. During the 1970s, the wave of anime hit North American television. But American producers blurred the Japanese culture within each show. They obscured the origin, characters and plot to meet the growing demand of young American audiences.
I sat down with my MacBook, opened YouTube and hit play on the pilot English dub of the 1980 remake of Astro Boy – a show that was in the highest accolades of my parents. The domestication of the show was obvious in a lot ways, namely the accent, language and plot. Astro Boy’s father spoke with a heavy American drawl. The language was forced, as the lips of characters were out of sync with the dialogue that spilled through my headphones. After persevering with the pilot, I poured myself another Bushells and watched the same episode in Japanese with English subtitles. The most noticeable difference was the narrative – Astro Boy’s journey had four scenes that didn’t take place in English dub. The tone was more serious. The language was more complex. There were even references to Astro Boy as a “devil”, reflective of Japan’s highly spiritual culture, something that was never uttered in the Americanised episode.
The Western treatment of anime did improve from the nineties onwards, especially the dubbing. Hayao Miyazaki’s epic fantasy films brought a new standard of language, colour and awe to the anime world. My Neighbour Totoro (1988) showcased Japanese culture to global audiences, but it was Spirited Away (2001) that left the lasting impact, grossing $244 million. There’s now a sentiment of utter respect and care for this cultural export, and only the best English-speaking actors have the opportunity to dub anime characters.
Tucked away in an industrial plot of Redfern, 200 or so cosplayers and anime consumers wait to enter the last Animania to take place in Sydney. As I walked from Redfern Station to the Australian Technology Park, I followed a group of 20-somethings dressed in fantastical costumes. They wielded oversized swords that stood up to their shoulders, and had kitsch Japanese keyrings attached to their backpacks, which swung with each stride down the hill.
Animania is one of Australia's largest anime events, celebrating the world of Japanese pop culture. The sense of community and colour welcomed me as soon as I entered the line of friendly anime enthusiasts outside the warehouse. I spoke to dozens of cosplayers with perfectly executed costumes and makeup, and they allowed my eager hands to feel the textures of their getups – silk, taffeta, buttons, lace, mesh and latex. Halfway through the convention I spotted a bright orange mop of hair above the crowd. Dressed in a black cotton kimono, he held a sheathed katana by his side. Standing at six foot nine inches tall, I looked up at Ben while talking about anime and dubbing.
“It’s been changing in the anime industry with English dubbing. It’s definitely getting better,” he said. Meeting other cosplayers reinforced this, as they all tended to enjoy the Japanese versions more than English, but like Ben they admired the work put into making quality anime series and movies for Western audiences.
New York Magazine’s pop culture site Vulture recently published an article on the modern dubbing of Hayao Miyazaki’s films. They claim The Wind Rises, his final film in a two-decade run of international successes, is a genuine work of art. Producer Frank Marshall and head of Pixar John Lasseter (as Disney released The Wind Rises in North America) handled delicate issues with the crossover, approaching the task “with the utmost seriousness”. Marshall wanted to expose the art of Miyazaki’s anime to as many people as he could, but he said, “you really have to maintain the integrity of what the director and writer wrote”. Comments on the article praise the work of producers like Marshall in their treatment of language and meaning. “Both versions (subtitled and dubbed).. are of the highest quality. We’re not talking about Godzilla level dubbing atrocities” user tsarstepan said. Another comment by TrueNerd said “I appreciate that so much effort and care is put into these dubs”.
Not all art can be worked on in the same intricate and careful way. On a sunny Tuesday afternoon I met with Aimee Moffat-Foster, who used to voice English dubs of Mandarin, Cantonese and French cartoons. We shook hands on the sandstone stairs of the Centennial Park Café, and minutes later were settled into steel chairs on its polished wooden deck. “I was always the screaming pregnant lady or ninja granny,” Aimee laughed, describing the outrageous and childish humour of the Mandarin cartoons she used to dub.
Aimee lived in Hong Kong between 2010 and 2012, moving from Sydney because her husband took a job in Asia; work as a financial servicer in Sydney during the GFC was cleaned out. Sipping tea, we overlooked the endless green fields of the park. Nike clad joggers, cyclists, and women with prams revolved around the ovals and in between the robust fig trees. In some ways, her lifestyle in Hong Kong was not too dissimilar from this. She lived in Discovery Bay, on Lantau Island near the airport. Amongst eight very large identical complexes, a community of 7000 stay-at-home mothers rode golf carts to and from tennis practice and pilates. The bars were open and plentiful, and every cuisine that an expat could want was available - except for local Hong Kong food. And somehow these 7000 mothers managed to peacefully coexist with only two cafes in the area.
The escape from this sterile expat life was to work. But the studios Aimee worked in were shoved in a chaotic urban environment on the mainland. And they were nothing like she had experienced in Sydney; no plush harbour side sound booths with coffee machines and glossy magazines at the front desk there. “I was working in much more rugged conditions. Over there you would have to travel to the outskirts of the city; not the slums, but the real factory areas,” she stirred honey through her tea, pushing her D&G sunglasses to rest on top of her brown curls. “For one job I worked in a studio above a menthol factory.”
The factory was in Mong Kok, a tourist and local attraction about 50 minutes away from Discovery Bay. She showed me pictures on Google Images and they were exactly as she described - streets always full, bustling, colourful and surreal. Above the street was a canopy of a thousand neon lights and gaudy signs. Locals held bright umbrellas and chatted happily to each other, walking in the middle of the road. Tourists hugged the walls of the electronic stores and noodle houses.
The menthol factory was in the industrial area of Mong Kok. As soon as she set foot inside, the smell filled her lungs and throat. It left a coating of ice that would prickle with each breath. Forklifts and factory workers moved around her with cigarettes hanging from their cracked lips. There was an old lift, but it was broken so she had to walk up 15 flights of wet stairs to the booth above. During the monsoon season, every crack in the studio bubbled with leaks and mould spread from the corners of the room.
“They still smoke in studios; they’re like 20 years behind Australia,” Aimee chuckled. “Everyone would just be puffing away the whole time. And I did all this pregnant or breastfeeding.” When the director and sound recordist weren’t taking long drags from their cigarettes, they were fighting. “It was very..” she paused with a sly smile. “… animated. They would often blow up in massive arguments. You could see them in booth going absolutely crazy at each other.” The sly grin appeared again.
“It’s a funny city Hong Kong - it’s a money town. The arts aren’t a high priority there,” Aimee explained. “It was more about how cheaply you could do the work for.”
“Did you have a house in Discovery Bay?” I asked. Aimee finished off her tea and set it back on the saucer.
“We had an apartment, on the ground floor. It opened out onto Hong Kong harbour, which was nothing like Sydney harbour. It’s a working harbour. It’s incredible, and I could watch it all day. But it’s not beautiful. It’s industrial.”
The production of the anime and cartoons Aimee voiced in Hong Kong worked like the harbour. Dubbing was quick and dirty. It was a massive task, where the actors could voice half a series in one day. And if they got in the way or slowed down the process, they wouldn’t be asked to work again. They would have to rewrite the script on the fly so it would make sense in English. In any other professional environment, a change of syllable would be agonised over.
“Your job is functionary,” she said. She was just a worker who had to get in front of the microphone and deliver the lines without pissing anyone off. The production of making these cartoons was amazing in their sheer mass and speed, but it was always quantity over quality.
The beauty and value in what she did was irrelevant. And after I sheepishly asked what the point of her dubbing the cartoons was, Aimee had to pause and muse out loud to determine an answer. It wasn’t for tourists… Did locals even watch them? No.. It really had no audience… it was just filler.
It was strange to think that I had been amongst hundreds of anime fans in Redfern celebrating the art that brought them together and gave meaning to their lives. Cosplayers like six foot nine Ben were grateful for the work that went into making anime something dynamic and beautiful. But there is no denying that the “Hong Kong Harbour” industrial process goes on. Art as commodity occurs everywhere, and anime is no exception. In 2004, Takahashi Hiroshi, president of the Japanese animation studio Toei Animation (that created famous series like Dragon Ball Z), said that the global success of Japanese animation can be explained not only by its particular visual style and strong narrative emphasis, but also because “Japanese animation companies are just the best in the world at getting the media mix right” – simply meaning the franchise that connects products together from animation to video games, soundtracks, t-shirts and toys. And that was a large part of the convention with a lobby full of stalls from plush toys to life-size Hentai pillows of naked women squirming erotically between bed sheets.
I left the convention with a yellow Pikachu t-shirt, a few hand painted artworks of my favourite anime and a feeling of pride that I was into something beautiful that could be shared and celebrated with strangers. But I left also thinking about who would watch Aimee’s dubbed Mandarin cartoons starring ninja grandmas and pregnant women. Maybe there would be a kid watching television in Hong Kong, like the way my parents watched Astro Boy – it didn’t matter that the dialogue was clumsy and there were scenes with loose ends, it was just something entertaining and fun. Maybe the point of dubbing these obscure cartoons was simply to make them accessible to more people. Frank Marshall the producer of the English dub of The Wind Rises knew not everyone was going to like it, but he was “dying to put Miyazaki's films in front of every audience he could”. Aimee even reflected this saying “Maybe the more exposure we have, the better?”
Aimee stood up from the table and we paid for the drinks. “We can’t all make high art. We want to. But circumstances in life are just different. If you’ve got lemons, make lemonade.”
It had been 11 years since I sat in a dark cinema watching my first Hayao Miyazaki film. The Collaroy Cinema was now permanently closed. The Dendy in Newtown was the only place showing Miyazaki’s final film, The Wind Rises. This time, I watched it in Japanese with subtitles. 11 years ago I clutched grandma’s endearing ziplock bags of treats. But that night in Newtown I loitered outside while my friends finished their cigarettes, and we smuggled a $9 bottle of red into the movie. Sitting in the dark theatre, the sound of tipsy open mouths crunching on popcorn felt like world away. I was lost in the animation of a gentle breeze through soft hair and the fluttering of eyelids. Every line was sharp. Every colour was vivid. It was then that I knew the dubbing of animation was important. I could have missed out on this storytelling art form because, let’s be honest, as a ten year old I wouldn’t have been capable of watching the movie and reading subtitles. How fortunate I was that my grandma took me to see a film we both knew nothing about, but saw that Christian Bale and Jean Simmons played the main voices. That accessibility and exposure meant I could appreciate what anime was and could be.
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