This Week in Anime
Speaking Your Language

by Lucas DeRuyter & Jairus Taylor,

New columnist Jairus brings his English dub expertise to the table as he and Lucas talk recent dubs!

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.
Spoiler Warning for discussion of the series ahead.

Crunchyroll streams Overgeared, The Laid-Off Cheat-Granting Mage Enjoys a Second Lease on Life, The World's Strongest Witch, and Witch Hat Atelier.
Netflix streams Pluto and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run.
Prime streams New Panty and Stocking with Garter Belt and Ghost in the Shell.
OceanVeil streams Even the Student Council Has Its Holes!.

@Jetzero Infinity @BWProwl @LucasDeRuyter @vestenet

Lucas
Listen up, This Week in Anime readers! After sending off Coop last week, I have the absolute PRIVILEGE of introducing the latest addition to the TWIA crew! A regular Anime News Network Contributor, pillar of the Dub Talk Podcast, and a damn good Bluesky follow, Jairus Taylor!
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Jairus, with you being more qualified to speak to dubbed anime than just about anyone else on the planet, and one of the titles you're reviewing this season, Overgeared popping off for having an absolutely inspired English dub, I'd be remiss if we didn't kick off your TWIA tenure with a dive into the English dub section of the anime community! There are so many new great dubs out since the last time this topic appeared on a TWIA, and your perspective would be nothing short of illuminating on older dubs that have graced this column previously.
Jairus
Thanks for having me! I'd be lying if I said I wasn't nervous about being here, but if there's one subject I know how to ramble about, it's anime dubs. I've got at least a decade's worth of questionable opinions about anime dubs to back my credentials, so I'm sure I can make some worthwhile contributions to this discussion. Even with this being a bit of a slow anime season, I'm a little surprised the Overgeared dub seems to have gotten as much attention as it has, but looking at some of these one-liners, it's not too hard to see why!
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Now that anime adaptations of Korean webnovels and manhwa have lost their novelty and isekai/LitRPGs/VRMMOs are a dime a dozen, I cannot stress enough how we would not be talking about Overgeared here today if not for the over-the-top delivery and direction of the English dub.

Like, I had to watch almost everything that came out this season for ANN's Preview Guide, and this title completely slipped past me until dub clips started hitting my skyline and a few of my go-to Discord servers. While I agree with you that the ceiling is lower for anime this season, I think the floor for most releases is actually weirdly high this fall, and Overgeared is a great example of how an interesting dub can bring an otherwise forgettable anime out of obscurity.

Overgeared's crude sense of humor at least gives it a little bit of an edge over some of its VRMMO-related brethren, but I'd definitely be lying if I said I'd be having nearly as much fun with this show without Ricco Fajardo's performance as Grid. He's always been pretty good at comedies, but his comedic delivery in this show has been nothing short of spectacular, and it's been doing a lot to make me laugh in spite of how otherwise insufferable Grid should probably be as a leading man.
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As cool as the positive reception has been to see, though, it's a little sad that dubs only ever tend to go viral these days for one of two reasons: either making people laugh or making them angry, which is unfortunate because there's a lot of good work being done out there. And there's a pretty wide spectrum of what can make for good localization in them.
Agreed! And I think a big part of this localization's charm is how it brings the specific ways Gird sucks into a framing that English-language audiences can understand. While dudes like this exist in every culture, the choice to have Fajardo play him as basically an Archer character that's way too online and into anime (but still distinct from Krieger) creates a shorthand that makes it way easier to understand what this work is going for.

Though Overgeared isn't the only anime of this ilk whose praises I wanted to sing in this column! The Laid-Off Cheat-Granting Mage Enjoys a Second Lease on Life is an absolute delight for a lot of reasons, but chief among them is that it lets Justin Briner (most famously Deku's VA in My Hero Academia) cut loose and play the main character Rein as an absolute freak that makes the most of his range as an actor.

It can always be fun seeing actors otherwise known for more dramatic roles getting to cut loose with some good comedic material. Of course, with fantasy-based anime being more prevalent than ever these days, there's also no shortage of fantasy shows that lean more serious than comedic, and at least a couple of those have managed to grab some attention with their dubs. Just this year, we've gotten Witch Hat Atelier, which, in addition to easily being one of the most delightful shows of the year, has also been blessed with an equally charming dub!

The decision to use a lot of accent work throughout the dub also stands out as a pretty unique localization choice that is largely to the dub's benefit. According to the dub's director, Emily Fajardo, this was done in order to highlight the diversity of Witch Hat Atelier's setting, while also drawing more attention to Coco's status as an outsider. A lot of this would seem like a bit of an overreach given that this choice was unprompted, but the manga's author, Kamome Shirahama, has been pretty open about seeing the diversity of her characters as important to her work, so it actually demonstrates a really strong understanding of the material.

Not to mention that the audio directorial choice helps Witch Hat Atelier sound distinct from much of the field, while also giving the work its own "voice" (pun only intended if the person reading this thinks it's funny/clever). Even as we're getting more dubbed anime than ever before today, so much of it sounds interchangeable and "like anime" for lack of a better description from my perspective. To give examples in the opposite direction, The World's Strongest Witch is a lot of fun inherently, but its dub just sounds like someone reading over a Discord chat log in a way that feels like low-hanging fruit for an IP steeped in video game iconography. Similarly, Magical Explorer isn't bad by the standards of harem anime, but the cast can actively sound like they're bored in the booth, and that isn't doing the work any favors.
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© 坂木持丸・riritto・戸賀環・講談社／「世界最強の魔女、始めました」製作委員会
And to your point about accents, a big part of what I love about most dubs of Ghibli films is that they cast such a wide range of performers and make each film sound wholly unlike anything else in animation. While this direction doesn't always work (I think we can all agree that Christian Bale wasn't great as Mahito's dad in The Boy and the Heron), it can occasionally be brilliant, and I could listen to Robert Pattinson go full lil freak-mode in his performance as the Heron all day!

I've always been a bit mixed on the use of big Hollywood actors in Ghibli dubs myself, but they have led to their share of inspired performances, and they can work pretty well when the actors are taking the work seriously, rather than seeing voice acting as an easy gig, as some have been known to say when working on animated projects. Of course, it's also been pretty interesting to see how much more frequently big-name actors have been popping up in other kinds of anime projects. I didn't believe my friends at first when they told me the dub for Pluto had somehow managed to land Keith David as Dr. Tenma, but there he was, and he sure enough threatened to steal the show.

Of course, as great as it was to see his name attached to this dub, it also says a lot about the rest of the cast that he arguably wasn't even the best actor in it! The entire cast was a top-notch ensemble of actors giving pretty stellar performances across the board, from veterans like Laura Stahl (voice of Iruma in Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun) and Richard Epcar (voice of Jigen in the Lupin the 3rd franchise), as well as its lead Jason Vande Brake, delivering a really good performance as Gesicht despite the show being his first major role in an anime.

Oh, I actually didn't know that Keith David played Dr. Tenma in Pluto and that's SO RAD!!! But no, that is absolutely the correct choice! Who could be better at playing a morally compromised dad who you really want to love in spite of him not really earning that affection?
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© LUCKY LAND COMMUNICATIONS/集英社・ジョジョの奇妙な冒険SBR製作委員会
Though, we should mention that Netflix is quietly becoming the home for some of the best anime dubs in the game! While I'll admit that I'm already pretty fond of the series, the EN dub of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Steel Ball Run has been some of the best dubbing work we've seen out of the anime in its decade-spanning run. Kaiji Tang as Gyro is a great choice since he basically is JoJo's Gojo (though Gyro existed in the manga LONG before JJK's Gojo and the influence actually runs the other way), and Daman Mills has exactly the range and presence to cover Johnny Joestar's character arc.
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© LUCKY LAND COMMUNICATIONS/集英社・ジョジョの奇妙な冒険SBR製作委員会
Hell, they even brought back Dan Woren to voice this universe's version of Stroheim after he played the original version of the character in Battle Tendency! That's a lot of fun and I think proof that the JoJo's fandom has successfully bullied Netflix into giving this anime the care and attention it deserves.
Bringing him back to do the same bad Arnold Schwarzenegger accent and then proceed to immediately bite it is some real dedication to the craft!

I can definitely agree that the dub for Steel Ball Run is among the best that franchise has gotten over the past decade and change, though having followed the dubs for JoJo'sever since the days of Warner's ill-begotten attempt at a DVD-only release of the first season back in the day, I also have a lot of affection for the earlier runs of the JoJo's dubs. After all, it's hard to resist the charm of Ben Diskin's young Joseph Joestar. Especially when half the performance is just him doing an aged-up version of his voice for Numbah 1 from Codename: Kids Next Door!

Oh no, I never put together that Ben Diskin voiced both of those characters, and now I'm never going to be able to unhear it!!! That's incredible and, for as much attention as Richard Epcar's take on an older Joseph in Parts 3 and 4 gets, this "American mostly doing a British accent" take on Young Joseph really is perfect sound for this tricky boi.
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© TRIGGER・今石洋之／NPSG製作委員会
Though, speaking of characters who have been voiced by multiple actors, are we as a society ready to give the New Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt dub its flowers? I know it sucks that the original voice cast didn't come back for this season on Amazon (though Christopher Sabat should not have come back for the role of Garterbelt regardless, nor been cast in that role originally), but the new VAs all do a great job, and the work is super well directed!

Hell, Courtney Lin is such a good voice match for Panty's JP VA, Arisa Ogasawara, that I didn't even realize that anime didn't dub the songs from the musical episode into English when that episode first dropped!

Recastings generally suck, and it would be nice if cast consistency was as valued in the dubbing sphere as it is in Japan. As unfortunate as such situations are, they're rarely on the actors themselves, and it's nice whenever a new cast manages to make the most of an unenviable situation.

Although when it comes to unenviable situations with being the new cast being a previously beloved dub, I can't imagine a more nerve-racking one than being among the actors in Science SARU's The Ghost in the Shell, having to follow up on the work of the cast from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. Not only did the latter feature a group of actors who've all since gone on to be industry icons, but it was also helmed by the late Kevin Seymour, whose work on directing dubs stretches back to some of the earliest days of the anime home video market.

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© 2002-2005 Shirow Masamune • Production I.G/KODANSHA.
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© 2026 Shirow Masamune/KODANSHA/THE GHOST IN THE SHELL COMMITTEE
To their credit, the new cast is doing a really good job! Suzie Yeung's take on The Major certainly isn't as sultry as what Mary Elizabeth McGlynn was doing back in the day, but it works really well for this goofier gremlin version of the character, and her take has a pretty good amount of instant charisma to it in its own right.
As Chris and I discussed in a previous TWIA focusing on the iconic character, I feel like recasting for Motoko Kusanagi in different iterations of Ghost in the Shell is less jarring than when it happens in most other instances, because GitS is now fundamentally just a vehicle for different creatives to explore how they feel about the future of the world with new technology informing that future.
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© 1995 Masamune Shirow/Kodansha Ltd./Bandai Visual Co., Ltd./Manga Entertainment.
To drive that point home further, even as the dub of the 1995 Ghost in the Shell film feels a bit dated by today's standards, Mimi Woods' lost and somber performance as The Major in it feels tonally appropriate, as the work is overtly informed by the fear of the emerging internet, ultimately creating a lonelier, more isolated world. All of these performances have their charms!
Absolutely! It just goes to show that there can be a lot of ways to interpret material when it comes to the art of localization, which is why it's so unfortunate whenever discussions on the subject tend to linger on the infamy of more...questionable interpretations.
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© Akira Hiramoto, KODANSHA/Prison School Partners Licensed by Crunchyroll, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
It says quite a bit that I don't even have to show the line associated with this image for most internet denizens to know what it's referring to.
Agreed. There's so much great work being done in EN anime localization today, and it's never been easier to drown out the flubs and bad faith criticism. Thanks to OceanVeil, I even get my longstanding wish of hentai and hentai-adjacent series getting English dubs, which is an idea that's just made sense to me personally ever since now that we're in the era of ASMR, VTubers, and indie audio-adult content creators.

There's lots to celebrate in this space as well as interesting trends to analyze, and I'm glad to have you aboard so we can draw on your expertise in the weeks and months ahead in this column!

If there's one thing I hope folks take away from this one, it's that dubs can be pretty neat in ways other than just being funny. Of course, it's still great when they're funny too.
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