Really enjoying Carole & Tuesday so far on Netflix, with English dub.
It’s a great show and I binged the first 8 episodes non-stop one night earlier in the work week.
Had to look it up, and no shade on the actual VA, but since Carole in Carole & Tuesday is clearly (see top 2 images above) a person of color (POC), I’m a little disappointed a POC actress wasn’t cast. Japanese anime regrettably doesn’t offer that many POC characters and thus when a show presents you with some, I think ADR directors should bend over backwards to cast POC actors in those roles. It lends authenticity to the work of art and deepens the ethical commitment to representation that many ADR directors now profess to sign on to in the area of LGBT+ representation. If you also believe in and stand with Black Lives Matter, then hire more black actors for explicitly black roles, especially when the representation is such a positive one like Carole in Carole & Tuesday. I could understand it being a harder sell for an ADR director to convince a black actor to audition and accept a more caricatured and borderline racist portrayal like Sister Krone (bottom image) in The Promised Neverland. It would be an awkward, difficult conversation and if I were in an ADR Director’s shoes I would be up front about how that portrayal is problematic and I would encourage dialogue with potential actors even at the script writing stage how we can manage the balance between an accurate translation from the Japanese and a story that’s still relatable to a multicultural English speaking audience, and to black audiences in particular.
The easier thing to do is just cast from your pool of regular (mostly white) actors and get the show done and onto the next project, right?
I know one of the beauties of voice acting is you can “….play anyone in the booth not just someone who looks like you!”…. but c’mon, man, that’s a cop-out and you know it. Please try harder to cast black actors for explicitly black characters in anime. It matters, it really does my dudes. Cast more black actors in roles where it shouldn’t matter who voices the character, like aliens and monsters and demi-humans. Don’t fetishize black performers but don’t alienate them completely either.
Was told by one VA “dude, they try” last time I complained about this on Facebook regarding a black character voiced by a white male actor in a Sci-Fi anime re-licensed by Funimation that he himself had a bit part in. I won’t name the actor in question but I’ll reiterate what I said then, too: THEY don’t try NEARLY hard enough to cast black actors for roles like this and they damn well should.
Anime has a lot of talented Asian-Americans (Stephanie Sheh, Xanthe Huynh) in voice roles and some Latinx too (Christine Marie Cabanos, Cristina Valenzuela, Lisa Ortiz) and that’s great but I can count on one hand the number of black actors I know working as VAs in anime, and that’s just not right. Beau Billingslea, Jovan Jackson, Dani Chambers. Beau’s voice is iconic and established. Jovan is an up and coming voice actor mainly doing roles for Sentai Filmworks…he has a deep, sexy baritone voice that I always enjoy hearing in my anime. Dani Chambers is very new to the profession as far as I know and voices the younger sister of the two main Tachibana brothers, named Otome, in the new simuldub baseball anime Mix: Meisei Story. I would not have known she was a black performer from Otome’s voice alone, but thanks to a FUNimation YouTube clip featuring the cast. Khary Payton is well known as the voice of Cyborg on Teen Titans and has moved on to mainstream television but I’ve always felt it a shame that Khary has never been in any anime productions that I’m aware of; it could be that anime just doesn’t pay well enough for Khary to audition for at this stage in his career and I can respect his broader ambitions if that’s the case, but the anime world should’ve recognized his bona fides from his success in Teen Titans and cast him in anime roles shortly thereafter.
To circle back to Cristina Valenzuela, she began working in the anime profession under the stage name Cristina Vee (read: Cristina V.), presumably to avoid drawing attention to her Latina heritage in order to have greater success booking roles. It’s unfortunate she had to do that, but you can’t argue with success…it clearly worked for her and now that she’s established her own bona fides as a voice actor and ADR Director, she feels comfortable dropping the stage name and just going by her real name of Cristina Valenzuela in the credits of her shows. She has enough fans who know and follow her work (yours truly included) that she’s able to reassert her Latina identity at this stage of her career.
Black performances in anime shouldn’t be confined to niche, fetishizing projects like Afro Samurai. No disrespect to Samuel L. Jackson, and that anime is supremely bad-ass and iconic, but it’s also a one hit wonder. No other anime is quite like it. Because black performances in anime are so under-utilized and rare themselves it adds to the mystique and mystery of a show like Afro Samurai. The individual show benefits, perhaps, but the industry as a whole suffers. English dubbed anime performing is still so overwhelmingly, painfully white. It doesn’t have to be this way, not for a country so richly diverse as the United States of America.
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