- I'm Ash Ketchum, I came from
Pallet Town in the Kanto Region.
And this is my good buddy, Pikachu.
[giggles]
Nice to meet ya.
[upbeat music]
Hi, I'm Sarah Natochenny, I'm a voice actor.
You probably know me best as Ash Ketchum on Pokemon.
I'm also Delia Ketchum, and Staraptor, and Misdreavus.
Today I'm gonna be showing you my process
for dubbing Pokemon into English.
Pokemon is a show that's originally
voiced and animated in Japan.
So when the show comes to me,
my job is to reinterpret it for an American audience.
We start every session with my director
telling me all about the episode.
The turnaround time for these shows is extreme,
so sometimes we are working with scripts
that were finished the night before.
I never get to see the script ahead of time,
it's always a cold read.
- Hi, I'm Lisa, the voice director.
And Ash, today you're gonna be running down the beach.
- Yes! - Gonna have some beach time.
- My favorite.
I record in a booth by myself.
So I very rarely get to hear the other actors' performances.
My director is the dungeon master,
she knows how everything is gonna sound,
she can predict all of their performances,
and she knows exactly how to direct me
to get exactly what she wants.
Next we watch the scene in Japanese, let's take a look.
[speaking in foreign language]
- [Pikachu] Pikachu.
[yelling]
[speaking in foreign language]
- So a lot of stuff is happening in this scene.
He's running, he's out of breath, he's tripping over Litten.
And then he runs to his mom all excited and huffing.
And he's always huffing, he's always excited and huffing.
So I wanna do justice to that just with my voice.
So what I'm looking for when I see this in Japanese
is the mouth flap, where he moves his mouth.
Where he opens his mouth really wide,
where he has a [groan] like a clenched kinda teeth thing.
And that'll indicate to me where
to put all the words on the page.
So first we're gonna do a whole run of the scene
and then we're gonna go back
and pickup all the parts where I messed up.
- We are on line 45. - 'Kay.
- 023504.
It's gonna be on there, you won't beat me.
You are about to meet Litten for the first time.
So this is where you're gonna keep running through
over there as you saw in the scene.
As soon as you get there you're gonna step on his tail
and then you'll go into sorta like
the comic tumbles after that.
So let's give it a whirl.
- There are three beeps that cue me in.
I come in on the fourth beep.
- So Sarah, I'm gonna give you three beeps
for the first cue, and then one beep for the following.
[beeping]
- You won't beat me.
[panting]
[yelling]
Whoa.
Oh sorry.
So basically my eyes, if you notice,
are darting back and forth from the page to the screen
to make sure that I have the line right
and that I have the flap right at the same time.
So while I'm matching the flap
and getting all the words out,
I have to match the emotion that's happening onscreen.
More so than the original performance.
So I'm looking at the animation
and figuring out how to emote based on that.
So I look at his eyes, I look at his eyebrows,
I look at his mouth, I look at the way the animation is.
If it's like in a really crazy scene
and the background changes,
then I know I have to get much bigger.
So now that we've done one take of this long pass
my director's gonna give me some notes.
And she'll have a lot of 'em.
- Let's give that another pass.
The line that you're, I know it's a long set
for you to sorta take on there,
is gonna be, sorry, as soon as you
turn around and go on that.
So when you ramp yourself up after Pikachu
get up a little bit, you can even get in
a little bit more with that.
So that you're sort of like pretty intense
by the time you actually step on Litten's tail.
- So the sorry is onscreen?
- The sorry is onscreen.
The turnaround-- - it's that.
The turnaround, that's sorry?
- Yeah. Okay.
- That turnaround right there that
you're seeing, that's you having
the reaction into the sorry.
- Okay.
So while this happens our engineer
moves the three beeps over to the spot
where I need to punch in the uh, sorry.
- Cool, so we're looking at line 50.
You got an open shock react and then a sorry.
So you're gonna do the turn and then the double flap.
[beeping]
[grunting]
- Sorry.
Oh man.
[groaning]
[laughing]
Sometimes I have to deliver a line in a way
that doesn't feel natural to me.
Sometimes I have to go really really slow
or really really fast.
Sometimes a line will be really urgent,
but there's not enough mouth movement
for me to say something really really fast.
And that can be a problem.
[beeping]
Blue water, fluffy white clouds,
and delicious Pinap juice.
I messed it up.
- Yeah, you got that, you can hit that second line.
- I was too early so I messed it up.
I was too early and I messed up the line,
it's not fluffy white clouds it's white fluffy clouds.
I'm bad at this.
Let's do it again.
So long before the script ever even gets to me
an adapter has to take the Japanese translation
and make it make sense in English.
And make it also fit into the mouth flaps.
That's how we get this.
The timing of my performance is really important
because first of all, you don't wanna hear
somebody talking when their mouth isn't moving.
Secondly, and this is the adapter's job,
he has to make sure that everything
he gets out of the translation makes sense in English
and fits into the mouth flap.
So if a character has a big wide open mouth
halfway through the sentence, he has to justify that,
he has to write a script that justifies that.
- Coming to ya.
[beeping]
- Blue water, white fluffy clouds,
and delicious Pinap juice.
[slurping]
Mm.
It's so refreshing.
- Yeah, it's great. - Great.
- It's great?
I play many characters on the show.
Usually I do them one at a time,
but for the purposes of this demonstration
I'm gonna do them together.
- Ready for it?
- I guess.
[beeping]
Hey Mom, I'm back!
Hope you had fun, Ash.
Sure did, we went diving with a Sharpedo,
saw lots of Pokemon I've never seen before, yeah!
- That was great, we're just gonna stretch out
one of the ones in the middle over there.
You gave us enough time so that we can do it perfectly.
So that's perfect.
- So sometimes my performance might be a little bit short
and they can digitally lengthen it
so that it fits the mouth flap perfectly.
Sure did, we went diving with a Sharpedo,
saw lots of Pokemon I've never seen before, yeah!
Sure did, we went diving with a Sharpedo,
saw lots of Pokemon I've never seen before, yeah!
- All right, that looked great.
- Coming to ya.
[beeping]
- That sounds like fun!
We have Mimey to thank for winning
the tickets for our vacation.
Thanks very much, Mimey.
Ooh, that's short.
So sometimes the line in the script
comes up a little bit short and we have to
add a few syllables to make it fit the flap.
So Lisa, what do you think?
- Well let's take a look at what we've got.
Why don't we add in have Mimey to thank
for winning the tickets for our Alola vacation.
- Okay.
And how about, that does sound like fun?
Rather than that sounds like fun.
- Great. - Awesome.
- Coming to you.
[beeping]
- That does sound like fun.
We have Mimey to thank for winning the tickets
for our Alola vacation.
Thanks very much, Mimey.
- Great. - That works.
All right, let's see the completed scene.
[upbeat music]
- You won't beat me!
[panting]
[grunting]
Whoa!
Sorry.
Oh man!
[groaning]
- Blue water, white fluffy clouds,
and delicious Pinap juice.
[slurping]
Mm.
It's so refreshing.
- Hey Mom, I'm back.
- Hope you had fun, Ash.
- Sure did, we went diving with a Sharpedo,
saw lots of Pokemon I've never seen before, yeah!
- That does sound like fun!
We have Mimey to thank for winning the tickets
for our Alola vacation.
Thanks very much, Mimey.
- And that's how I dub Pokemon.
So because the English dub is so widespread
I'm getting emails from people in India,
and Bangladesh, and Russia, and Japan, and Brazil,
thanking me for helping them learn English.
It's amazing.
It's really an important thing that helps bridge cultures.
In 1931 a French actor's union
told its membership, you cannot dub
because it is beneath you
and it is offensive to the original actor.
I disagree.