Answerman

Why Don't Dubs Cast Real Kids?

In anime, it doesn't seem to be at all unusual for small children's rolls to be voiced by actual small children (“Barakamon”, “Sweetness and Lightning” and the currently airing “School Babysitters” come to mind). In English dubbed anime however, this is virtually unheard of. So, why the difference?

It's not completely unheard of. Funimation used to use real kids all the time (not so much these days), and actually hatched a minor voice actor celebrity -- Aaron Dismuke -- from his role in the original Fullmetal Alchemist, which he recorded before his voice changed. NYAV Post regularly also casts real kids in kid roles. In fact, for Mai Mai Miracle they even somehow managed to find Japanese American child actress Megan Uesugi, whose Japanese was fluent enough that all the show's myriad Japanese names and references gave her no trouble at all.

But you're right in that casting real child actors as kids in anime dubs is something of a rarity. There are several reasons for this. Child labor laws are one: kids can only work 18 hours during a school week. That's probably fine for a one-episode role or for a movie, but if their character is a major role in an ongoing series, that can be a pretty tough limitation to work around. Dubbing isn't a major enough production to take kids out of school for any period of time, and budgets are famously very tight, so hiring an on-set tutor to get around such limitations is out of the question.

Really, the biggest reasons not to hire actual children are practical ones. There are very few kids who have the level of concentration required to stand or sit still in a dead silent sound booth for hours, acting the same lines over and over while matching animated lip-flap. It's a job that can test the patience of adults. Almost all kids who are capable of that sort of work are at least pre-teens. If the role calls for someone who sounds younger, finding an actual young child who can actually sit and be quiet in a recording booth is a near-impossible task.

Directing kids in a recording booth calls for a very different skill set that some dub directors just don't have. Kids have to be kept occupied and happy in a way that adults simply don't. While occasionally you get a young person who's a true professional, those are exceedingly rare. Most child actors act like kids, and even if they want to do a good job and make something great, their patience runs thin pretty quick.

Seasoned dub directors have all sorts of tricks that they employ to keep kids' head in the game a little longer than might be possible otherwise. They get to sit in the booth (most adults stand). There's lots of joking around and playing, turning dubbing into a game. This takes time, and not many productions have that sort of time and money to kick around. Kids also tend not to have very long careers in voice over, either because they lose interest or their voice changes. This makes finding and casting them more of a challenge.

This sort of thing is less of a problem in Japan, where anime voices are recorded in a big ensemble session. Having everyone voice their lines at once makes for a much more engaging experience for kids. That said, even in Japan it's pretty rare for kids to voice a major ongoing character. Almost all major child roles in longer TV series are filled by adult women.

While very few adults really sound convincingly like kids, most dub productions decide that the obstacles to casting real kids are insurmountable under their tight budget and schedule. There aren't as many women actors in the US that sound convincingly like young boys as there are in Japan, and unfortunately this means that many anime kids just end up sounding like adults in the dub. Actors and actresses that can pull off sounding like prepubescent boys tend to get cast constantly, because they're so rare and those roles come up so often.

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Anime News Network founder Justin Sevakis wrote Answerman between July 2013 and August 2019, and had over 20 years of experience in the anime business at the time. These days, he's the owner of the video production company MediaOCD, where he produces many anime Blu-rays. You can follow him on Twitter at @worldofcrap.