Kotono Mitsuishi: “The Industry is Dumping Skilled Seiyuu”
- Categories: Anime, News
- Date: May 14, 2011 18:50 JST
- Tags: Business, Evangelion, Idol, Interviews, Marketing, Music, Seiyuu
Veteran seiyuu Kotono Mitsuishi, known for scores of top roles including Misato, Boa Hancock and Excel, has spoken out against the anime industry’s harsh treatment of seiyuu, saying it has forced them into penury and discards as soon as they become experienced rather than pay them more, causing a dearth of skilled seiyuu as a result.
Her comments were made in a recent interview given to a careers website:
Actually, at the moment conditions in the industry are very harsh.
Production budgets are low, so the only seiyuu who get used are young, cheap ones, and the more experienced ones don’t get called upon at all.
In short, there are no “experts” in place. There aren’t the kind of opportunities I had to experience moving performances by senior seiyuu. As a result, new seiyuu can’t grow.
Even young seiyuu who do manage to improve find themselves no longer called upon as soon as their fee rises a little.
You can’t make a living on such low wages, it’s a vicious circle.
[...]
Of 100 classmates, only 1 or 2, if that, are able to make a living doing seiyuu work alone. But even so many keep doing it as part time work. It’s their life and they want to fulfil their dreams.
That seiyuu are paid a pittance is common knowledge, but up to now it seems to have been assumed this has no impact on their actual performing ability…
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Again, this news disheartens me.
I hope my purchases end up as royalties and ultimately as bonuses to seiyuu, since I know no other way to support them, other than spreading their good name (or voice) of course.
Sponsor a seiyuu today.
dozens of seiyuu die each decade, from over working, malnutrition, and old age. for just $20 a year (pennies a day), you can feed this poor, hungry seiyuu and her family, and make sure they get the medicine they need. Don't you think they deserve better?
call 1-HELP-SEIYUU
Entertainment industry generally is very harsh and it seems very tough for a seiyuu to have a long career. Economics and competition for few jobs - its got to be difficult.
Plus so many of the anime are teen boys/girls and they like seiyuu's to match it seems most of the time. So once a seiyuu hits 25, or god for bid, 30, there aren't many characters for them.
I was looking that the lead seiyuu's for My Ordinary Life (nichijou) most have very little experience....
KyoAni is known to hire relatively unknown VAs and they do a damn good job. They get more roles in the future. Just look at the K-On cast.
All the royalties from merch go to the greedy corporations
The only real way to support seiyuu directly would be to buy whatever they set out to do themselves, I think. Royalties are very small for the original creators of the manga many series are based on. The quantity of money a seiyuu might see from his or her work in a series could be even smaller.
Agreed.
They should be paid well for their labor and heart if the publisher is making money.
Perhaps they should form some sort of union.
This is a shame... it takes years for these artist to become truly good. Otherwise, the quality goes down and the customers don't want to buy it.
Crappy art/stories are not worth buying.
Compare Wingman to Video Girl Ai - for which I own all the original manga. Katsura was good, but he got much much better with experience and time. Products (dolls, games, toys, etc) are created when something is good and popular. Junk doesn't usually get popular.
PS: Kotono Mitsuishi is a rather hot looking.
Oops. I should have been more clear.
Manga artist, voice actors, musicians, etc - will all get better with experience.
Watching something with BAD voice acting is grating, English or Japanese.
No wonder certain seiyuu that seems to have some voice style of their own which actually can still be polished tend to be stuck on only 1-3 roles. Examples include the voiceactress who did Manabe Nodoka, and Oohashi Ayuru/Nakai Erika who did Eila. Even Kanemoto Hisako (Ika-Musume and Sorami Kanata)'s career has yet to be proven stable at this moment.
Anyway Kotono still looks hawt in that pic.
Indeed, Kotono Mitsuishi looks very good for her age, actually she looks better than when she's younger as seen in older pictures/photos. Some woman looks more and more beautiful when they age with the years, and Kotono Mitsuishi is one of them (I think).
By the way, Kotono Mitsuishi is Usagi Tsukino (Sailor Moon)!
And Asuka!!!
(of Shinseiki GPX Cyber Formula :p
[which btw is a great anime if you like Formula 1])
Seriously, she's one of my most favorite seiyuu and probably the most influential one to ever grace the anime industry. It makes me happy that she was featured in an article here on SanCon.
Usagi Tsukino/Sailor Moon should've been the first Kotono Mitsuishi role the introduction to the article mentioned. All her other roles are secondary in importance compared to one of the top 10 most recognized anime characters of all time.
She is known for that role.
Kotono Mitsuishi is very much a hottie, especially at 43+ years old! Looking at her younger photos, she was always a good looking girl.
yea, excellent fap material
This might explain why someone like Aya Hirano has tried to branch out into other forms of entertainment. To have more work.
She or her agent may have seen the writing on the wall for experienced seiyuu and decided it was in her best interest to not limit herself to doing ONLY seiyuu work.
I wonder.
I remember Megumi Hayashibara saying something along these lines afew years ago...
I wish America would dump some skilled voice actors. I'm so tired of hearing Yuri Lowenthall and Vic Mignona (for example) in EVERY GODDAMN THING.
"An anime or game needs to be dubbed to English here in the US? Just get Steven Blum, Crispin Freeman, and the rest of the people we get to do it every time, what else do we need done?"
Seems to be the attitude of those companies.
Get some more skilled actors you mean... and now you know why Anime is getting unpopular in America. And they blame it on piracy?! Bullshit. No quality voice actor= no pay. I mean nobody wants to watch an entire anime when the voice acting sucks and the voices are carried over FROM another dubbed anime you watched -_-
I think it's more of an attitude problem. A lot of American voice actors still have the mindset of "it's just a cartoon it's good enough". Perhaps they just don't pickup on the cultural nuances. Off the top of my head I can think of only three anime where I prefer the English dub to the Japanese sub. Those are "Cowboy Bebop", "Black Lagoon" and "RahXephon".
The anime industry is taking a beating on both sides of the Pacific with the economy.
I hope things turn around for all our sakes.
All western voice actors trying to dub anime are crap.
Watch subs instead. With original Japanese voice actors. They can.
let's just put it this way, take a sad anime, and with jp voices, you cry.
flip it to the states with english voice actors, you laugh.
enough said.
...you yanks could also just stop raping your ears and watch original .jp audio + engsub.
And rape my eyes with fansubs that drag my vision to the extreme bottom and far left corners of the screen, all while making me try to distinguish some unreadable "anime-fitting" font from similarly-colored backgrounds? No thanks, I'd rather watch anime, not decipher CAPTCHAs.
My response to that would be where in the heck is Crispin Freeman? He was a good one, but he doesn't seem to do a lot of VA work anymore....
Crispin Freeman right now he is playing Speedy, and Guardian in Young Justice.He has done Theater as well he has experience.
It's not really skill American voice actors that have a problem of being overused. It's that they lack flexibility in their vocal abilities. Disney and Pixar are a good example of this, they have some awesome voice actors that can play multiple roles and you'd never notice unless you either read the credits or watched the "making of". That's what a real skilled voice actor is, someone that can completely change the sound of their voice to fit a role without sacrificing the tone the character should be conveying.
There is also Canadian Voice Actors as well that are consider not skilled by others.
It's not just American voice actors. They really overuse seiyuu in Japan actually. Kana Hanazawa and Yu Kobayashi are in practically half the shows that come out now.
Sometimes they voice two characters within one anime...
And that's a bad thing how?
For the same reason people complain about it with American VAs - lack of vocal range. In particular, the ones that are really popular these days have very little, whereas the ones that actually have some aren't popular at all.
yes this needs to improve gradually. heck i even heard Eng Dub actors get's paid more than the japanese ones.
no wonder Aya chan is being getting all kinds of press no matter what it is.
Just yesterday she was in the big apple & some users here "just" missed her.
What a tragedy, her voice is a national treasure; for me she is equal if not better than Hayashibara Megumi; I feel so bad to know the anime bussines is so ungrateful...
you know, she was the voice of Ebichu in orochuban Ebichu =(
cheap way of saving money
Why paying seiyuu more for experience and excellent performace, since otakus have almost 100% visual reception of the world? It is sufficient, that a seiyuu can speak in anime voice is young and has cute, girlish appearance, that's all. Cuteness is far more important for otakus than excellence in voice acting. They unconsciously receive voice of "kawaii" girl more pleasant, than the voice of the girl not-so-generously donated by nature.
As long as the industries are not dumping nuclear waste it's fine...
oh they won't
Each time I read one of these articles about the golden age of the anime being defiled, I die a little inside.
I'm seeing a lot of why bother w/ older Seiyuu when the "otaku" market is ever after "kawaii/moe"
Kinda tragic in a way how the industry has pretty much been reduced to the "appeal to the common deniminator" approach now a days. Whats actually worse is this whole "moe/kawaii" obsession is in the end something the industry bought on themselves by practically shifting focus on that spectrum.
Honestly.. there was a time when Seiyuu work wasn't just the realm of the new and kawaii voice. It was actually decent acting work w/ more flexibility depending on your talent to work on characters..
Not one seiyuu these days can ever hold to the flexibility and work from the "ye olde seiyuu" specially the queen of seiyuu - Hayashibara, Megumi
The only solution to this would be to form some sort of Seiyuu Union, unless something like that happens she can complain all she wants. In the end anybody with a bit of acting experience can voice act, all industries will take advantage of their respective segments of the labour force, it is natural to them unless of course you monopolise your talent with certain roles, for example aya hirano will forever be known as haruhi and haruhi cannot be made without her neither can lucky star.
Sankaku Complex says anime is denying the skilled seiyuu jobs.
Fumihiko Tachiki is a skilled seiyuu.
Guess who's narrating Kaiji season 2?
Yeah, you're all misinterpreting Kotono's words thanks to the headline.
One way or another, if there's not at least one experienced voice on any seiiyu crew...
Wait a bit--the narrator's role is a prime piece of real estate.
It's exactly what happened with the DBZ Kai dub in Latin America - the old dubbers were asking a decent salary because of their experience, and got dumped and replaced by baseline dubbers which asked less money.
That is a shame.
It's good that there's new talent being given roles, but it's sad that the more experienced ones are given less opportunities.
Compare this to say western dubs which have commonly repeated veteran names in the industry.
That being said, they need to give more roles to Rie Kugimiya
Actually, how well are the American voice-actors paid for their dubbing in anime and/or games?
Dubbing anime supposedly pays crap in America, but it's also supposedly a good bit more than what the Japanese make. Game voice work apparently provides a good bit more money, even something as lowly (budget-wise) as dubbing a Japanese game.
Look at Brad Swaile. He's a legend among western voice actors.
What they need to do is give more roles outside the tsundere typecast to Kugimiya.
The balance between her non-tsundere and tsundere type characters are wayyyy out of whack.
I'm with you there. I love Kugyu both for her tsundere and non-tsundere roles, but she's getting pigeonholed into tsunderes because she's basically the best in the business at it. She's done some great work outside of that (Mizore from Rosario to Vampire and Sabato from Dokuro-Chan just off the top of my head) so they should hire her for more stuff.
As far as the original post, it's a sad reality of the current production regime. I think it's a symptom of the industry focusing so much on semi-pornographic harem/moe shows aimed at a ridiculously small audience spending a lot of (what's likely their parents) money on their obsession, instead of the more wide appeal anime had even 5-10 years ago when there was a more balanced range of shows. You can't afford to pay for experience when you're making shows you don't expect to sell more than 10k in BD/DVD sales, so they get disposable seiyuu who may not be that talented or long lasting, but some of them sure look cute so you can use them to sell a few pictures too.
Even knowing how exploitative the whole thing is, voice acting's still something I always wanted to do but never had the chops for.