The Crunchyroll shows’ voice casts reflect on accents, timing, and collaboration, detailing how ADR directors, writers, engineers, and performers shape English dubs and faithful adaptation performances
Ayumu Watanabe’s Witch Hat Atelieranime, now renewed for a second season on Crunchyroll, is a storybook come to life. The show follows a young girl named Coco in training to be a witch apprentice in order to uncover the secrets behind the dark magic that turned her mother and home to icy stone. While there’s plenty of enchanting scenery and fantastical magical arts featured in this series, which seems to capitalize on close-ups and reflections of wonder in the eyes of its characters, there’s also a good amount of spine-tingling horror that looms under the surface of each episode.
And that darkness occasionally breaks through the glittery surface to remind viewers that this is not a fairytale story. It’s a nightmare… or, as one of the show’s leading voice actors Madeleine Morris puts it, “hauntingly creepy.”
See for yourself in the newly released Season 2 trailer:
The animation studio Bug Films has experience animating subtly sinister stories directed by Watanabe with the 2022 anime Summer Time Rendering. However, this was Joshua A. Waters’ first time playing a character with so much hidden darkness and unspoken agenda.
“I actually got scared by my own character in the booth,” admits Waters, who voices Qifrey, the Witch training Coco. “At the end of Episode 5, there’s a moment where Qifrey says, ‘You will tell no one. Not a soul.’ And no one in the studio told me that they were going to cut the ending music before he said his line. I came in and listened to the original Japanese audio and, when the music cut out and the camera got close up on his face, I got legitimately afraid in the booth.”
Despite being a long-time fan of Yasuki Tanaka’s original manga, Waters was still surprised by Qifrey’s character in the series but credits a lot of that to the film’s sound design
“The amazing sound design on this show does not get talked about enough,” says Waters. “We have so many moments of quiet, so many moments where not much is going on, but you have ambient noise. There’s a moment in the first episode where Coco goes up the stairs to sneak a look at Qifrey’s spell being drawn. The creaking of the wood, the scratching of the pen, and wind blowing through the house allows us to be a lot more subtle and soft with our characters. And that doesn’t happen a lot in ADR. I find it so rare where the clips for an anime that get spread around are these moments of quiet and calm. But people are seeing that and are really appreciating that.”
The need to be more intimate with the mic for Witch Hat’s ADR, embracing every subtle inflection, is what ultimately led Waters to voice Qifrey’s English dub in a mild and hushed British accent
“It allows him to have that more soft-spoken nature where he’s in a teaching sort of mindset, talking slowly and clearly and crouching down to make sure he’s on eye level with the children,” he explains. “You have to constantly think about character intention, how their voice is being projected, who they’re talking to, where they’re talking, who might hear it, and why they’re saying what they’re saying.”
Morris, who voices for one of Qifrey’s witch apprentices Agott, also took a British accent approach, but leaned on the colder side
“She reminds me a whole lot of me when I was young,” shares Morris. “And there were times where I had a chip on my shoulder and felt I had something to prove. She doesn’t have to speak loudly to be heard, but there’s a defensive attitude that manifests as this cold exterior and, even if she’s not being loud, you start to get a sense of her imagination and fear of rejection. You get this feeling like she’s going to crash out.”
Among anime fanbases there’s much debate over the value of English dubbing versus listening to the original Japanese. But for many voice-over actors, this isn’t just a job. It’s their life’s passion… even their mission.
“One of my favorite things about adaptation is bringing these characters to life in someone else’s native language,” notes Brandon McInnis, who voices Gen in Shūhei Matsushita’s anime Dr. Stone: Science Future, which just concluded its fourth and final season on Crunchyroll last month. “My undergrad degree is in Japanese, and I used to work in Tokyo as a translator. So, I love adaptations, specifically from Japanese properties. And what is so beautiful to me is that the humanity of these stories is universal. It is not just Japanese. It’s not that it can only be consumed by one type of person or one nationality. It’s humanity. It’s universal. And I feel so passionate about what we’re doing in that it makes that more accessible to people and allows them to connect with these characters even more fully.”
Aaron Dismuke, who voices Dr. Stone’s main character Senku, adds, “And, doing dubbing, we get to act with the music. When performing, there are few thrills quite like that of delivering a monologue as great music swells beneath you.”
But, to get that humanity across in another language, to the same degree as the original, it’s a collaborative effort among not only the voice actors, but their script writers, ADR director, and recording engineers.
“Our director Emily Fajardo is so on top of us and is so particular about what she asks for and expects of us as her performers but also gives us tons of room to play and have our own ideas,” says Morris. “We can try different inflections and test out stressing different words. We’re constantly collaborating with everyone in the room.”
Felecia Angelle, the voice of Kohaku in Dr. Stone and ADR director for titles like One Piece and Blood Blockade Battlefront, adds, “I am also a voice director, and as long as you are rooted in something true, as long as you can connect these characters you’re playing to the moment, to a feeling, to an action, to what is going on around them, it doesn’t matter where your ceiling is. You can take it to the moon. But it will read as true for the audience.”
But there is a double-edged sword to dubbing work, especially for actors who are fans of the
“I’ve been a fan of Hiromu Arakawa for years,” says Ben Stegmair, the English voice of main character Yuru in the anime Daemons of the Shadow Realm, which recently released its first season’s 13th episode on Crunchyroll. “Daemons was the first manga I read of hers, alongside Fullmetal. On one hand, it’s very exciting to have the source material because you get to know these characters even more and live with these characters even longer, which builds a strong connection. However, one of our biggest jobs as voice actors is to give a performance that makes the audience think we are reading the line for the first time. That’s hard when you already have the context of the whole story.”
Molly Zhang, who voices Yuru’s twin sister Asa, adds, “I know some actors, like Alexis Tipton, for example, who are very reactive actors, and I’ve been trying to do that more often because I tend to get obsessed with the source material and then start getting too familiar with it and I get too in my head. But, in the case of Asa, that actually works, because she’s operating from a place of knowing more than you do. But, in Ben’s case, with his character Yuru being so reactive because his world is turned upside down, it makes sense to try to act more in the moment, not based on what you know is coming.”
Looking ahead to Witch Hat Season 2, voice actor Erin Lundquist plays a similar character to Zhang’s. While we’ve seen Lundquist’s ominous, masked character Iguin of the Brimmed Hats a couple times in Season 1, the interactions have been brief. Iguin is certainly creepy. We’ve deduced that much, as they take every chance they can to trick Coco into using dark magic. But they also seem to be at the center of everything and know more than anyone else. They also are the only character that gets Qifrey to drop his soft-spoken charm and go into full diabolical mode. In Season 2, it looks like we’ll see a lot more of Iguin.
“Shout out to Erin Lundquist who is stealing the show,” says Morris. “This is her show, I fear. I met her for the first time at the studio recently. We had sessions back-to-back and had never met face-to-face. I came out of my session, and we screamed at each other and hugged like it was a sorority reunion. She is consistently my favorite part of the show. She’s so spooky in a way none of the rest of the show has allowed… yet.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She’s reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com
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