The Four Color Media Monitor

Anime News Network interviewed voice actress Lisa Ann Beley, who worked in anime dubbing for at least 2 decades from the 1990s to the 2010s (and does have USA/Canadian cartoons to her credits as well) about her work on Gundam Wing from the past 3 decades, and I noticed something dismaying that comes up. First, though, take a gander at the following inaccuracy on the writer's part:

Twenty-five years ago, Lisa Ann Beley was living in Vancouver. She had graduated from the University of British Columbia's acting program and was working as a voice actor with Ocean Productions on a number of English anime dubs. She voiced Eda in Black Lagoon, Murrue Ramius in Mobile Suit Gundam Seed, and Chi-Chi in Dragon Ball Z. [...]

When I looked up Lisa Ann Beley, I quickly learned that she has since moved to Washington, D.C., along with her husband, Jonathan Holmes, also a former Gundam voice actor. She is a teacher at the Shakespeare Theater Company Academy, specializing in voice and speech. She has worked as a dialect coach with actors like Daniel Radcliffe and Freddie Highmore.

But I couldn't find any of her contact information. She'd made all her social media accounts private. What's more, I learned that Beley has only conducted a single on-camera interview about her anime voice acting work in 2022, and she stopped voice acting and attending fan conventions in the early 2000s.

Excuse me? Black Lagoon was first adapted to anime in 2006, and Beley's resume on the IMDB indicates she hasn't worked in voice acting since 2018. Her last role to date was in what appears to be a remake of Superbook, a bible-themed anime series originally produced in the early 80s, here produced more in 3D. That the interviewer managed to goof off in the same article where he alludes to Black Lagoon for one is enough to fall off the couch laughing, but probably isn't all that surprising when you consider this is a news site that's had its share of morally questionable positions over the years.

The main subject is the character of Relena Peacecraft, whom Beley voiced years before in the English-dubbed editions. And there's some pretty peculiar stuff that comes up here. First:

I thought about my conflicting feelings about Relena. She's a spoiled rich girl who doggedly pursues a boy who keeps threatening to kill her. Even now, people argue about whether they love or hate her on Reddit—and it has been 25 to 30 years, depending on your nationality. Could somebody have possibly taken their frustrations over Relena out on Beley?

Let me get this straight. The male star of the show, Heero Yuy, threatens to kill the leading lady, and they're telling us Relena's the problem? This is disgusting. And no disappointment with the original screenwriter, Katsuyuki Sumizawa, for characterizing Relena so questionably, and the male lead so appallingly? And then:

“I thought [Relena] was annoying at the beginning, I have to admit,” Beley told me.

Filming Relena's scenes out of order, as was par for the course for an Ocean Productions dub, Beley said she had to trust what the authors meant, even if her lines didn't seem to make sense.

“That was challenging sometimes, because [Relena] would say things and I'd be like, 'Huh? What is she saying?' Like at the very beginning of the show, when she was responding to her father. And I was like, 'Why are you obsessing over this boy?'”

As she continued recording, however, she gained more affection for Relena. And now that Beley has a teenage daughter of her own, she can reframe some of Relena's brattier exhortations as, if not totally justified, certainly more familiar.

“You grow to love these characters. You really do,” Beley told me.

I did know, I told Beley. On my subsequent Gundam Wing viewings as an adult, I gained a new softness for this character I was once so hard-hearted towards. Where I thought she was pushy, she was resilient. Where I once thought she was naive, I realized she was brave for insisting that a better world was possible than the one she had been handed.

The considerable flaw here is that we have here an example of animation specialists who act like a fictional character is a real person, and have no complaints about the original screenwriters characterizing Relena as a potential brat, let alone somebody who pursues a boy with a bad attitude of his own. Interesting how, beyond the non-committal reference to the boy himself, no serious arguments made about why it's unfortunate the girl's on the receiving end over something that's not her fault as a non-existent person. They may view Relena differently in terms of personality today, but their failure to distinguish between fiction and reality - let alone take issue with how the male star's written - remains the same as it's been for many years with alleged pop culture fans.

This therefore makes another sad example of how "professionals" vehemently refuse to rise above an illogically juvenile viewpoint, and if it damages the status of anime in the long run, it'll be their fault. Just very disappointing.

Labels: animation, history, manga and anime, msm propaganda