Content area
Full Text
Anime voice actors speak out
ON SEPT. 20, 2022, KYLE MCCARLEY, AN experienced and well-respected voice actor, had bad news to tell his fans. He had been approached by Crunchyroll, the leading distributor of anime in the United States, to reprise his leading role as Shigeo "Mob" Kageyama, an awkward boy with immense psychic powers, for the popular Mob Psycho too-but without a union contract.
At the suggestion of a castmate, the vocally pro-union McCarley offered to accept that nonunion contract on the condition that Crunchyroll would have a good-faith discussion with SAG-AFTRA, the union for voice actors. "It felt like such a small concession," McCarley tells In These Times. "I was like, 'They'd be crazy not to take this.'"
They didn't take it.
So McCarley-despite being offered more than he would have made with a union contract-walked away, as did several castmates. They were promptly replaced with other actors and, despite outrage from the infamously passionate anime community, the show went on.
"It seems like their plan is to just weather the storm and wait until people get tired of talking about it," says McCarley. The problem, he thinks, isn't money: "It very much feels like an ideological issue for them." Crunchyroll did not respond to In These Times' requests for comment.
The company's resistance to unionization is the latest roadblock for anime voice actors, who have struggled for decades with such issues as underpayment and vocal injuries.
FANS BECOME WORKERS
UP UNTIL THE 1990S, ANIME WAS VIRTUally unknown in the United States. Even into the 21st century, according to voice actor Marin Miller, the entire anime dubbing industry involved "basically the same 10 people."
The dubbing profession as a whole was considered unimportant, let alone the dubbing of obscure Japanese animated shows. Actors generally took on dubbing work to earn extra cash and weren't experts at certain techniques, such as matching their line delivery with the "flaps," the movement of a character's mouth.
In the 2000s, as more people discovered anime, fans of the genre-like Miller-began entering the industry. Their passion was great for the growing audience, who had long suffered infamously terrible dubs of their favorite shows. But it created a labor pool whose eagerness and inexperience made them vulnerable to...