Neon
Genesis Evangelion
The Tyranny of the English Voice in Anime
published in Real Time No.31, Sydney,
1999
Way
past midnight, the TV plays an old movie. I'm in the kitchen
working. The sound of the movie is heard in the distance.
It's a melodrama - a ''woman's picture' from the 30s with
Joan Crawford. I savour the soundtrack: the thickly compressed
duco of its arcing violins, occasional sound effects and
- most of all - the breathless dialogue. It's still the
30s: films are 'all-talking'. Not simply because dialogue
is important due to cinema's centralization of the script
as a sanctioned authorial fountain, but moreso because lip-synchronization
was the holy grail which film technology had sought since
the end of the preceding century. To join speech seamlessly
to the enunciation of the written word was and remains cinema's
lofty enlightenment. This would be repulsive enough by itself,
but fortunately the energy which fuelled this drive was
the sound of the human voice. It is not unreasonable to
claim that the Hollywood star system from the dawn of sound
to the dawn of television feted the voice as much as the
face. Garbo, Cagney, Monroe, Grant, Hepburn, Wayne - their
voices are as readily recalled as their faces. The sexy
sound of 'classic' Hollywood comes from erogenous larynxes
which performed the wordy scripts hammered out on sterile
typewriters manned by a thousand uptight Barton Finks.
Just
as I am charmed by the unlikely marriage of captivating
vocal performances and over-written scripts in old Hollywood
movies, so am I repelled by the post-dubbing of the most
popular trans-English form of cinema/television in the 90s:
Japanese animation. How often have I recommended an anime
I know in subtitled version to someone who then encounters
it as an American or English dubbed version. Needless to
say, most dismissive views of anime are founded on the atrocious
use of bad American and English actors who sound worse than
footballers and phone sex workers at an office Christmas
party. Yet, I remain mystified as to why I think the original
Japanese versions sound better. Am I a snob? Do I like practicing
my Japanese? Can I speed-read subtitles? Well, yes to all
of the above. But whilst watching a Ninja fly through trees
and shifting dimensions as a nuclear ball hurls toward him,
I hate the way I suddenly get the image of a San Francisco
computer salesman at a basketball game. Never has the American
voice sounded so prosaic, flat and dumb than in dubbed anime.
And despite the deafening iconic presence of the American
voice in so much media, never has it sounded so out of place
as it does on the Japanese soundtrack.
Hideaki
Anno's TV series Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995) has a soundtrack
that is so Japanese it will be decades before Occidental
forms of audiovisual entertainment begin to successfully
mimic it. Not only does Evangelion have many memorable vocal
performances (Shinji, his father Gendo, the other 'children'
Rei and Asuka) but there is a total logic to the sound design
which both typifies its 'Japaneseness' and qualifies the
role of the recorded voice within its aural netting. In
fact, it should never be forgotten that 'sound design' is
the creation of a sonic logic wherein all elements are orchestrated
in accordance to our peculiar and precise understanding
of how an imagined reality would acoustically operate and
psychoacoustically resonate. To understand how any one element
- a voice, for example - appears, happens and/or is rendered
in a narrative form, one must wholly investigate the narrative's
sonic logic. Neon Genesis Evangelion exemplifies 4 primary
categories of audiovisual narrativity which define the sense
of its soundtrack: mecha design, musical eclecticism, spatio-temporal
rupture, and emotional compaction.
The
design of mechanical devices and machines - known as mecha
design - is an important area of pre-production in Japanese
entertainment. In manga and anime , objects are imagined,
envisaged and designed as if they have to be used. That
is, their logic is based less on their 'look' (a very Western
notion that joins DaVincian optics and modernist sensibilities)
and more on their tactility. Virtually all Japanese design
promotes an erotic relation between user and machine, between
object and hand, between shape and body. This pervades everything
from a Kawasaki motorbike to Sailor Moon's skirt. Most importantly,
the 'look' of objects in Japanese design is accepted as
a separate and auxiliary aspect of the objects' purpose
and function. Bank machines can be based on the look of
tomatoes; skyscrapers on milk cartons; cars on deep sea
crustaceans; perfume bottles on carburettors. They each
will do what is required of them, so there is not real reason
for them to speciously prove their existence through their
look. (This is but yet another aspect of the 'calligraphic'
in Japanese culture, where an image or a look is embraced
as pure visual substance with no referent to the real.)
The design of machinery in Japanese manga and anime is therefore
a prime textual layer in the many futuristic scenarios wherein
man and machine exist in a complexly modulated harmony.
It is no surprise then that Japanese sound designers for
anime obey the logic of the mecha design, carefully analysing
issues of weight, density, force, energy and mass before
they even start to imagine the acoustic and transmissive
properties of the machines.
Neon
Genesis Evangelion features such a sharply defined sense
of acoustic design by Toru Noguchi (in dialogue with director
Anno who is also one of the key mecha designers of the series).
Firstly, most of the human machinery is connected to either
one of two places: the city of Tokyo-3 (a spread of 'armament
buildings' which retract underground when the Angel invasions
occur) and the headquarters of NERV (based underground in
a 'geo-front' complete with artificially maintained land,
water, light and air). Simply, all preconceptions of difference
between inside and outside, between stasis and motion, between
base and apex, between form and ambience no longer operate
in such a city of the future. Accordingly, acoustic ecology,
industrial compression, noise pollution and aural atmosphere
operate under new logics and codes. Secondly, each of the
Angels (the diabolical threat to Earth) has their own look
and an equally distinctive sound. This is especially noticeable
due to the design of the Angels whose visuality references
a series of modernist and ancient archetypes of biomorphic
form - from Aztec wall paintings to Miro's murals to Donald
Judd cubes. Amazingly compounded sound effects accompany
their terrible force, based on the power of violence they
unleash on Tokyo 3. And despite the problem in designing
sound for such impossible imaginings, an effective 'mismatching'
of unexpected sounds with unexpected forms/shapes/beings
runs throughout Neon Genesis Evangelion . And thirdly, Shinji
and the other 'children' operate their Evas (giant robots)
by being inserted into the machines via a liquid-oxygenated
capsule which psychically links their nervous system with
the Eva's sophisticated robotics. Sound is bound to behave
differently under such conditions, and an awareness of this
governs much of Evangelion's sound design.
Now
if the acoustic and psychoacoustic world is turned inside-out
as it is in Evangelion, it is entirely appropriate that
a musical eclecticism prevails. Japanese anime has consistently
offered alternatives to the Wagnerian leit motiv approach
to serially repositioning a melodic refrain or theme throughout
a film score. While this approach has typified both romantic
and modernist film scoring, anime employs a string of motifs
which effectively cancel each other out - or at least render
their significance fluid and unfixed. Americans have often
commented on how the Japanese place their music cues in
the 'wrong' place - as if George Lucas and John Williams
control the universal imagination. The use of New Jack Swing
in Blue Seed (1995), Electro-Ambient in Please Save My Earth
(1995) and Prog Rock in La Filliette Revolutionaire (1997)
as score rather than sourced songs further typifies this
seeming 'wrongness' about anime. The European orchestral
machine is employed in anime for pure effect - not because
'that's how movie music should sound'. Further, there is
usually no governing or determining style in any one anime.
Shiroh Sagisu's score to Evangelion at varying times sounds
like The Thunderbirds, FM-soft rock, Steve Reich and Ken
Ishii. but the result of this eclecticism is not arched,
strained or postmodern: it simply mutates and evolves in
response to the surges and pulsations in the location and
dispersion of dramatic energy.
While
the score to Evangelion seems to simulate a radio station
programmed in a chaotic random fashion, there is a purpose
behind such chopping and changing. For the future in Evangelion
- like the post-apocalyptic continuum which paves the way
for Japan's unsettling existence - is on the brink of destruction,
and all that is calm is merely the potential for radical
destabilization. Spatio-temporal rupture thus rages throughout
Evangelion. Often we are caught in the claustrophobic mind
of young Shinji as he grapples with an aching existential
dilemma of how to live alone, divorced from social and human
contact. The screen will go black, white, or assault the
eye with Pokemon-style strobe-cutting; radical shifts in
sound density will accompany these visual ruptures. Silence
screams and pierces the soundtrack; detonations capitulate
to a soft roar; all energies are continually inverted and
reversed to complement and counterpoint their dramatic weight.
Sometimes complete sections of plot disappear to convey
Shinji's loss of consciousness inside an Eva. Sometimes
his psychic sensitivity teleports him unexpectedly to ill-defined
locales and spaces. The musique concrete collage of sounds
and atmospheres which play with these spatio-temporal ruptures
is never gratuitous. If the sound design - like the music
- in Japanese anime sounds 'wrong' it is not simply because
we aren't listening carefully enough, but that we are not
cogniscent of the way that Japanese sound reflects narrative,
rather than neutralizing it as does Western audiovisual
entertainment.
A
postwar cliche of the Japanese - in American eyes - holds
them as being 'inscrutable', as if they are strange aliens
who behave suspiciously in ways we do not understand. This,
of course, is both their power and their continual threat
to the hegemonic Euro-forces which have shaped our ways
of thinking, seeing and hearing. And as their society is
impenetrable, so is the very concept of 'drama' - pathetically
universalized by the western intelligentsia as they lick
the butts of Grecian philosophers - unworldly in Japanese
entertainment. Not that Japanese characters behave 'differently',
but that the schisms which we perceive as corrupting and
interfering with a character's identity are acknowledged
as the substance of a character's identity. In the West,
we will crudely designate the hero, the buffoon, the cynic,
the sage, etc.; in the East, characters are founded upon
their schizophrenia, established through their multiplicity,
and defined by their inability to be grounded. Evangelion's
characters - especially the three 'children' who complexly
represent Japan's own problematized Generation-X - are formed
by means of emotional compaction. Joy harmonizes grief;
suffering prompts laughter; compassion folds violence; hatred
suppresses innocence. Evangelion's characters are quintessentially
good, bad and ugly. Music, sound and voice dance in intricately
orchestrated lines that map out these characters not as
containers or vessels of emotion, but shimmering and shifting
apparitions of emotional complexity - not 'rounded out'
by authorial conceit, but unrefined as befits the prickly
irrationality which dictates our everyday exchanges.
Now,
having very briefly outlined some issues of mecha design,
musical eclecticism, spatio-temporal rupture, and emotional
compaction and how they impact upon the sound design in
Neon Genesis Evangelion, consider the presence of an American
voice in the midst of its non-Western sonorum. All the finely-tuned
relationships between score, spot-effects and vocal performance
are jettisoned by actors who - trained in the Western theatrical/dramatic
tradition of naturalism - would probably neither understand
nor agree with anything I said above. American post-dubbing
is woefully exaggerated as the actors reinterpret the emotional
schisms of Japanese characterization as aberrant and illogical.
Western post-dubbed performances always sound devoid of
context: the American voices unconvincingly enact and narrate
a scenario which is beyond their comprehension, while the
English voices pathologically expel a smarminess which polarizes
the worst cliches of nobility and decrepitude.
Even
though SBS-TV has screened the embarrassing dubbed-version
of Evangelion, there is an opportunity to encounter the
complete cinesonic experience of the series thanks to the
release of the subtitled edition by Siren Entertainment.
Granted that most people probably hate reading subtitles,
those who are intrigued by sound - and those who are genuinely
interested in immersing themselves in the audiovisual 'inscrutability'
of anime - are encouraged to experience Evangelion in its
original format.
