social.noyu.me

was remarking to my gf that it's been years since i consciously thought about the fact that part of what makes anime anime is that it doesn't have lip-sync, that speech is dubbed over and is subservient to the animation, not vice-versa; the original japanese is also a “dub”

anime actually does have meaningful mouth shapes occasionally, for dramatic effect

さ・よ・な・ら

this looks amazing when animated. maybe because it's four syllables. you just couldn't get that drama out of a “goodbye” or « adieu »

…but it's not synced, it's silent! hehehe

anyway a fun realisation is that the idea that lip-sync is important is very… anglophone. the significance of lip shapes matching what a character is actually saying is probably less to you if you grew up watching redubbed things

i should clarify that i'm talking about two things at once:

• that in anime, the animation is done first, and the voice is dubbed over second to match the animation timing
• that western animation likes making mouth shapes match pronunciation, not just (vaguely) timing

i think i like the anime way better. there's something about how it makes the voice-acting subservient to the animation and not vice-versa, and how it is relatively neutral with respect to which language is dubbed over, that i think is pretty cool

@hikari my understanding is that they do match lip flaps coarsely to the written dialog but its animated before/in parallel with recording so exact matches tend to be intentionally rhytmic pronounciations

@hikari also iirc for some of the Disney Ghibli dubs they did some lipflap tweaks to the video(!) but i don’t remember the source of this so don’t quote me

@erincandescent @hikari spirited away's DVD behind the scenes mention this!

@scarlet @hikari ooh, I need to look at a raw rip of a Spirited Away BD to see if they did Blu-Ray Seamless Branching

@erincandescent yeah, they have to anticipate and imagine the performance (and the performance has to not stray too far from what is imagined)