Studio Ghibli Season on Film4

[chojin]

that doesn't bother me... i'm the other way round, I feel that the us actors sound a bit more rigid, or they goto the other extreme and ham it up and are far over the top... each to their own I suppose

[Anpanman]

Bugger, read the title and thought great!

Still, got a couple on DVD I might watch.

[Asura]

I've often found Japanese original voice actors are actually more jarring than the dubbed ones. When half the characters on screen are young and Caucasian looking then start speaking in Japanese with the voice of some gruff old male actor who sounds as if he's auditioning for the latest samurai epic it is just bad casting. Young character should equal young sounding voice.

To be fair though, you only see them as caucasian because of a western cultural background. When asked, most Japanese people believe anime characters to be racially Japanese, unless they're visibly black or their race is specifically mentioned.

I don't mind a good dub; I've watched a fair few over the years and I can get along with them OK - but I dislike it when localisation is taken too far. For instance, the Laputa dub recasts the children as older (presumably because the amount of violence and peril was seen as too controversial for young children in the west).

For Ghibli stuff, it varies very much depending on the film.