Female Voice Actors in Male Anime Roles

[Bruce Baird]

It is a little late to chime in here, but in my manga anime class we  
read James Welker's article on Yaoi (citation later), in which he  
says that because of the influence of Takarazuka on shojo manga which  
can be traced all the way back to Tezuka (and the concomitant gender  
blurring) many of the boy's roles in subsequent anime were voiced  
using female voice actors.  (Of course, as my students reminded me,  
so was the voice of Bart Simpson so there may be a limit to how  
meaningful the choice is.)  Welker even includes a picture from a  
movie called 1999-nen no natsu yasumi which is a live-action version  
of Hagio Moto's Thomas, in which the director, Kaneko Shunsuke, has  
teenager women actors in drag playing the roles of the young  
beautiful boys.

Beautiful, Borrowed, and Bent: "Boys' Love" as Girls' Love in Sh?jo  
Manga
Author(s) 	James Welker
Identifiers 	Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, volume  
31 (2006), pages 841?870

Bruce



On Apr 8, 2007, at 3:55 PM, Michael McCaskey wrote:

> Thanks to everyone for the help - I really appreciate all your  
> answers. We dealt with FMA in class, so the Elric Bros. example is  
> perfect for my students, and all the other examples you all  
> provided seem to establish the practice as being fairly common.
>
> Michael McCaskey
> Georgetown Univ.
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Silvia Groniewicz <sil at blackbox.net>
> Date: Sunday, April 8, 2007 7:44 am
> Subject: Re: Female Voice Actors in Male Anime Roles
>
>> I agree that is is actually pretty common. Especially young males
>> are
>> often voiced by female voice actors (the main characters from
>> Hagane no
>> Renkinjutsu, Hikaru no Go, Hunter X Hunter to name just a few),
>> children
>> of course (Conan from Meitantei Conan, Chiriko from Fushigi Yuugi,
>> Momiji from Fruits Basket) and the occasional adult male with very
>> child-like or feminine features (see Kenshin, Satoshi from Gakuen
>> Heaven).
>> To get an idea how common it is, just try browsing through the top
>> 200
>> titles on http://www.animenfo.com. They always list at least a few
>> of
>> the voice actors and it's not difficult to see in which cases
>> females
>> get chosen for male roles.
>>
>> Best Regards,
>> Silvia Groniewicz
>>
>> Michael McCaskey wrote:
>>> When I was doing a class on "Samurai X" recently, I realized for
>> the first time that the Kenshin Japanese voice is that of a female
>> voice actor.
>>>
>>> All of the Japanese Kenshin voice roles were done by Sukukaze
>> Mayo. But when Sukukaze appears in live action films, she plays
>> female roles. Her other anime voice roles are also as women -
>> except possibly in the anime Blackjack: The Movie (1996), where
>> she does the voice of Joe Carol Brain, and I'm not sure yet
>> whether that is a male or a female part.
>>>
>>> The English Kenshin voices are done by Richard Hayworth, and in
>> some cases by another male voice actor.
>>>
>>> The only other similar case I can readily think of is Otomo's
>> anime "Steamboy," where the lead young male role of Ray Steam is
>> voiced in Japanese by Anne Suzuki, and in English by Anna Paquin.
>>>
>>> Does anyone know if it's fairly commonplace to use female voice
>> actors for male anime character roles? Or is it quite unusual?
>>>
>>> One of my students wants to know, and I have no satisfactory
>> answer for him as yet.
>>>
>>> Maybe 15 years ago, I used to hear a female storyteller on NHK,
>> I think once a week. She voiced both males and females in her
>> stories. I realize now that the male voicing I heard was close to
>> the Kenshin voice.
>>>
>>> Michael McCaskey
>>> Georgetown Univ.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>

Bruce Baird
Assistant Professor
Asian Languages and Literatures
University of Massachusetts Amherst
But?, Japanese Theater, Intellectual History

717 Herter Hall
161 Presidents Drive
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst, MA 01003-9312
Phone: 413-577-4992
Fax: 413-545-4975
baird at asianlan.umass.edu




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