Ask John: Why Don’t Anime Mouth Movements Match the Dialogue?

Question:
All the animes created (from a stupid thing like Remi to the greatest animes of all time like Evangelion) have something in common. When a character speaks or say something, his/her mouth just opens and closes. Why is that? Are the animators to lazy to do this better? Is the capital low or what?

Answer:
Anime is created with a much smaller budget that typical American animation, so the methods of creating anime are different than the production steps used to create Western animation. While American animation often records the audio first then animates the mouth movements of the characters to match the spoken dialogue, Japanese anime is created in the reverse order. All of the animation footage on an anime film is usually completed before the audio is recorded. In practical terms, this saves time and money. It’s much faster to just create the animation quickly than it is to painstakingly match the mouth movements to each word and line of dialogue. When Japanese voice actors perform their roles, they often see a line underneath the completed animation footage. They time the reading of their lines to coincide with the beginning and ending of the moving line. That, then, matches the timing of the character mouth movements. The result of this sort of animation production is that, as you’ve pointed out, in many cases, the mouth movements of the animated characters don’t match the spoken dialogue. This is something that most viewers simply overlook. The compromise is that while American voice roles are recorded separately, usually without the actor seeing the character and the animation, Japanese vocal tracks are often recorded with all of the various characters in the same studio room, at the same time, reacting to each other and to the actual animation footage on screen before them. So while the mouth movements may not match up in Japanese dubbing, the dubbing will often be more lively and spontaneous and more appropriate to the tone of the animation footage than Western animation dubbing. Neither style of production is more “right” than the other, and the effectiveness of the end result is simply something to be determined by each viewer’s personal preference.