Mastering Accents in Witch Hat Atelier with the English Dub Cast

Kamome Shirahama's Witch Hat Atelier manga is a global story - not just in terms of how popular it is, but also in the universality of its themes and characters. To reflect that, the English dub for the anime gives characters different world accents, using them to emphasize the different places each of them is coming from and the sheer breadth of the series' world. We sat down with Joshua Waters (Qifrey) and Madeleine Morris (Agott) to discuss bringing the series to life in its English dub, their favorite lines, and how director Emily Fajardo helps to make it all come together.

ANN: I want to know your favorite voice line for your character!

Joshua Waters (Qifrey): Oh no, there are so many good ones! I really enjoy—because of the dichotomy of it. We have multiple different times when we play around with this line. At the end of episode 5, I'm talking to Mr. Nolnoa. I get to hit him with the “You will tell no one, not a soul.” And I love that!

And then in one of the most recent episodes, right after another interaction with Mr. Nolnoa that I shan't say, I'm talking to Coco, and it's like, "Nobody will harm you. Not a soul.” The back and forth between those two separate lines, I love it.

I did it by accident at first, and then our lovely director, Emily Fajardo, called it out and was like, “Did you mean to do the same cadence as last time?” And I'm like, “No, but that's awesome! Let's do it again!”

Madeleine Morris (Agott): “Let me do it ON PURPOSE THIS TIME!” Big Phantom of the Opera energy there!

Seriously though, Madeleine and I were both like, "What?" We were blown away! I love it!

Waters: [Starts mimicking Phantom of the Opera]

Don't get me started on Phantom, we'll be here for longer than 10 minutes. Madeleine, what about you?

Morris: I, as an actor, love yelling. It is refreshing. It is cathartic. It always makes my day a little bit better. Agott having what I think is a very justified crash out, “Never touch a witch while she's drawing!” Really digging into Coco on, "Oh, you didn't mean to? You didn't mean to turn your mother to stone! And you didn't mean to put us all in danger! But it doesn't mean it's not your fault!!” I mean, she's right! At the start, Coco, whether she realizes it or not, is kind of leaning on that like, “I just didn't know! I didn't know! I'm so sorry, I didn't know!” Agott snaps and says, “You need to learn. You need to figure it out.” I love that, I love a crash out.

But in this recent episode that's been released, we saw a much, much softer moment where Coco expressed genuine kindness to Agott in a way that's not transactional in the least. And Agott's reaction to non-transactional kindness is, “I don't understand you.”

How did you guys come up with these voices? No offense, I get dropped in here, and then you guys just switched into the voices. And I can see bits of them in you, but how did you find these voices? Obviously, they're speaking RP (Received Pronunciation) too. Did it just come easily, or did you have to do a little bit of analysis?

Waters: I've been personally a fan of the series for a very long time, so I've had a lot of experience reading Qifrey as a character. The series has been out in English since 2018 [Editor's note: It was 2019], and I started reading not but a few years after that. So I've just had this voice in the back of my mind when I've been reading. When you have a voice in your head when you're reading something, you sort of figure out, like, this is maybe how they're going to sound. That's sort of been my headspace for it as I've been reading the manga for the past, however many years. But our lovely director, Emily Fajardo, allowed us to really go into these characters. She knows everything about everything. She has her volumes of manga that have 7,000 different little tabs in them.

Morris: Little like post-it tabs.

Waters: Whenever we work on these characters together, it's a back and forth between me, Emily [Fajardo], and the engineer. It's such a collaborative process in that booth; it's never just you going in and being like, "Oh, well, I'm just doing this on my own." It's you and the entire team in that room making that voice together. And gosh, it's so much fun doing it in that room. It's such a good squad.

Morris: I was really excited for the opportunity to audition in dialects, because that's so rarely something that anybody asks for—if it's even being considered. Sometimes, audition listings will say, “Give us this if you want.” Usually, I think—and Joshua, you might be able to speak to this as well—a lot of auditions that voice actors will get will say, “You can do a dialect, but if you do, do one without—please also do your natural speaking voice.” But I'll always take the opportunity to mess around in a dialect, happily. I grew up watching a lot of British TV and a lot of English movies and English comedy. My background is in theater, and I've worked with several dialect coaches over the years for different plays that I've done. And so I will always jump at the chance to come in hot with a dialect. And I didn't know that's the direction we were going to go until I walked in on day one!

Waters: That's all on Emily. Emily is such a fantastic director, and the vision that she has for this universe, especially in terms of dialect, has been absolutely astounding. It's been lovely to see.

Morris: And I appreciate this too, because she's so on top of me all of the time. I feel fairly confident in my execution, but we're trying straight down the middle RP, straight down the middle BBC English. And sometimes my voice gets a little bit lazy. And I love that Emily doesn't let me get away with being lazy, too, because I'll slip, or a vowel will come out a little flat, and we'll spend—there was, I forget what episode. I forget what line it was. But there was one that was a pretty long line and it was like, "Okay, we missed this vowel." And then the next take it was, "Okay, we missed this." And then the next take it was, "Okay, now we missed this one."

Waters: We make sure, that's where the teamwork comes in. I've got my funny cheat code on my accent stuff. My partner is actually from the UK, so I go home, and I'm just like, "How'd the new Witch Hat episode sound, hun?”

Do you practice with him?

Waters: I do sometimes! We've been together for going on nine years now. So I constantly just am around that accent. So it's been a lot of help in that way. Plus, Emily and that whole team is so on top of it. It's so good.

Morris: Have you ever come home from a session and been like, "Can you just say this word like, four times for me?"

Waters: I do ask this! But my favorite thing in the entire world now is, my normal accent has sort of changed a little bit just because I've been around him so much. So when I talk in my American accent—just my normal voice—I've picked up his inflection on question marks. Because British question marks inflect downward, and American inflects upwards. And now I inflectlect downwards and have to correct myself when I'm in sessions doing American.

Why do you love your characters?

Waters: Being able to portray him in English has been such an honor and a privilege, as it's never been something that I've been able to do before is play a character that I've known already, where it's a character that I've read beforehand, and it's a series that I've loved beforehand, and it was pretty much my favorite character in the series. So going through the manga for so long, and then having this all happen still feels so surreal to me and every day it feels like a dream. I've been so happy.

Morris: I did not learn how to channel my spite into a motivator until I was much older than Agott is. But I see her defensiveness. I want to hug her and it's very therapeutic for me. I feel like getting to play with Agott is me doing my own inner child therapy. I want to take care of her and I want to do right by her so I can do right by me. She's my daughter. That's my little daughter right there.