Last night's zoom sent me down one very specific rabbit hole again. A while ago I made a post asking what these three fictional characters have in common. I never got back to it because my squirrel brain forgot about this particular walnut, but here we go again.
+ a nerdy little niche bonus character for the berena crowd:
I could have asked the same question about these three characters:
It's their German voices, of course. Grey's Anatomy is such a treasure trove for this - the post could be so much longer, but I'm almost at my photo limit for this post already so the rest needs to go into a reblog. Anyway.
As I mentioned yesterday, the German voice acting industry is fascinating, and it's a huge established industry, and I have a bit of a love-hate-relationship with it.
I would always argue that German voice acting is generally rather high quality even though there are some issues I have with it.
Most of them don't really relate to the performance of the voice actors themselves, though. A big one is badly translated scripts: one massive gripe I have with watching Grey's Anatomy in German is how they use formal vs informal You. Sometimes you'll have characters who have been friends for ages address each other in formal You for no apparent reason (for example Teddy and Arizona - it took forever after Arizona actively befriended Teddy for the German script to catch up with that), and then you have characters who are neither peers nor particularly close in canon who for some reason address each other in informal you (Teddy and Ben, for example - at a time where Teddy and Bailey still address each other in formal you?).
Sometimes the vibe of the dialogue shifts from the original (from neutral to more tense/dramatic, or from tense to less dramatic) which then gives the scene a whole different meaning.
Sometimes they make the voices sound really artificial and soap-opera-y in post production. Sometimes the voice acting itself is really theatrical, too, and this seems to have gotten worse over the years (or maybe I'm just more sensitive to it since I started watching shows in English?)
Sometimes they cast voice actors whose voices kind of fit the role, but sound nothing like the actual actor. Some roles actually benefit from that in my opinion (for example, Jemma Redgrave doesn't have a fixed German voice, and I feel like it works in the favour of the characters when for example Zoe Evans and Kate Stewart do not sound alike in the German shows, because they cast the voices role-based instead of actor based), but sometimes it's just weird for me personally when a voice sounds incredibly different from the actor's real voice and I'm very familiar with their actual voice.
And then again, sometimes voice actors voice character that are basically the polar opposites of each other, as you can tell from some of the examples above. Personally, I find that hilarious, but sometimes it also drives me nuts.
One 'issue' for me is a very individual one which sounds like a luxury problem but kind of made it hard for me to continue watching big shows/movies in German: I am really, really bad at remembering names and recognising faces, but I am very, very good at recognising voices. With the German voice acting industry actually having some very established, even iconic voice actors who are basically a-listers and get cast in all the huge movies/franchises and TV shows etc. this leads to a very specific problem for me: whenever one of those very iconic voices is on screen, I get distracted. I don't focus on the show/movie anymore, I focus on this question: who else do they voice? Where else do I recognise that voice from?
And there's another issue that ties in with this one: some voice actors have a fixed portfolio of actors they are voicing, and when two actors they're voicing work on the same project and possibly even have scenes together, they will of course have to replace the voice for one of those roles with a different voice actor. Which can be incredibly confusing if like me, you like to do other stuff (for example crochet) while watching, and therefore don't always look at the screen. I gave an example for Downton Abbey last night (Phyllis Logan's character being voiced by the person who usually also does a lot of voice work for Penelope Wilton), and there's another good example on the list I posted above: Kim Raver and Emily Deschanel have had the same voice actor (Ranja Bonalana, one of my favourite voice actors btw) for decades. When Kim Raver did a two episode guest appearance on Bones, they of course had to give her a different voice. Which already felt strange enough, but on top of that, they gave her another very well-known voice actor who also happens to have voiced a major character on Grey's Anatomy (I'm probably gonna put that one in the reblog). See how that might be distracting for my particular brain?
So yeah, these two final points are probably the main reason why I mostly stopped watching English movies/TV shows in German.
I do want to say though that Germany really has some fantastic voice actors, and most of the time I think it's fun to try to figure out where I've heard those voices before (even though it really does distract me). And of course, genAI poses a real threat to the industry. For example, Netflix has been trying to force German voice actors to sign over the rights to their voices, so that they could basically synthesise them with AI to save tons of money and put those voice actors out of work. This led to a boycott, and currently lots of German voice actors refuse to sign new contracts with Netflix, which means that not only it has gotten much harder for Netflix to find good voice actors for their new shows, but also some characters in established shoes might have to be recast. I really hope this will hurt Netflix, because fuck genAI etc. (Here's a German news article on the topic: tagesschau.de)
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