The Fix Is In: Dubbing as Transcultural and Transmedia Adaptation

Abstract

tension of being “between” different aspects of film culture, aesthetics, and technology offers a productive space to renew our investigation into film dubbing. The present article will focus on the dubbing of Hollywood films for Japanese television and video, with a particular emphasis on films from the 1980s and early ’90s. This period saw the arrival and subsequent explosion in popularity of home video, but also a realignment of how films were being licensed for television broadcast. These factors led to a proliferation of film dubbing in Japan, which in turn fed into the trend of voice actors (seiyū) becoming figures of cult celebrity. The practice of using the same voice actor to dub a Hollywood star across a large body of films (known as “fixing,” or fikkusu) also contributed to this trend by allowing for composite forms of personality, celebrity, and screen performance to develop. Following those points, this article will approach dubbing as a form of transcultural and transmedia adaptation. I am using adaptation as a companion concept to translation in order to consider how film stars are made to more easily “fit” into local idioms concerning performance style, genre, and identity, both through the aforementioned generative relationship between onscreen body and audible voice and through the intertextual resonance generated by how voice actors are repeatedly paired with Hollywood stars across films. Furthermore, by emphasizing transmedia adaptation as part of the same analysis, I also aim to address some of the ways that dubbing adapts Hollywood cinema to Japanese television and video as dubbing has commonly been understood as an issue of translation and exhibition practice in both film studies and audiovisual translation theory.1 Topics such as the differences between dubbing and subtitling, issues with image/sound synchronization, and the spatial location of the voice in relation to the moving image have all been part of this approach. However, recent scholarship by authors such as Charlotte Bosseaux and Tom Whittaker has connected dubbing to questions of screen performance and film stardom, often by attending to locally specific characteristics of national and regional media cultures. This revitalization of interest in dubbing has developed alongside the emergence of transnational film studies and scholarship on other forms of voice work in cinema, such as playback singing and postsynchronization. As such, if dubbing presents a complication of film performance that exists “between” the body we see onscreen and the voice we hear, it is also something that travels through the spaces between film industries and audiences from around the world. Furthermore, dubbing is also frequently used in the adaptation of film for television and video platforms, suggesting a circulation between different types of screens. With all of that in mind, the