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This is not a Kissing Trope. Just getting that out of the way.
When something gets dubbed into a language it wasn't originally in, that's when the trouble starts for this trope. The actors have to lipsync along with the old footage, which is tricky if they don't want to turn it into a Hong Kong Dub. Contrary to popular belief, the people who need to deal with Lip Lock are not the voice actors (who only act out what is written in the script) but the people who translate/write the dub script (sometimes the translator and the script writer are the same person, sometimes not). Script writers usually read lines out loud while writing, to make sure that they fit the mouth flaps.
If the translator doesn't pay attention to match the lip flaps, the result is that the new actors are forced to speak at strange tempos in order to better fit the lipflap. The main ways in which this is manifest are:
- Speaking With An Odd... Enunciated Slowness... As If Every Word Were Capitalised. In Extreme Cases... This Results In The Character Sounding Like A Cartoonish William Shatner. See: Anything Dubbed By 4Kids, Particularly Dub Piece.
- Speakinginaveryrapidunnaturalmannerwithnopauses. See: Speed Racer.
- Speaking at a normal speed, but with extremely unusual emphases on seemingly random syllables. This is to fit moments where the character's mouth is slightly wider open. See: It's Over Nine Thousand.
In anime the Japanese studios create the animation first, and then record the voices. This means that characters' mouth often just moves up and down, however, the larger the animation budget, the more effort animation studios make to make the lip flaps match the dialogue ( Honey And Clover is a good example with mouth flaps that match the lines perfectly). With American cartoons, the voices are recorded first and the animation is built around them. This means the mouths move in a manner much more consistent with the dialogue, at the cost of making it more difficult to translate into another language. This difference can be very clearly seen in the English dub of Akira, a Japanese animated movie which, unusually, recorded the voices before the animation and took pains to make the mouth flaps match the dialogue. The result is that the English version looks distinctly off. Ironically, live-action dubs are easier to write because the natural movements of the mouth while speaking are a lot less clear-cut than in cartoons.
The most depressing thing about this is that no translator and voice actor can avoid the curse of Lip Lock. A skilled translator can make it a lot less noticeable, but can't do away with it entirely.
There are, however, ways of avoiding it, but all have their own disadvantages:
- Editing the footage so that the Mouth Flaps match the new dialogue. This is expensive in animation so it's very rarely used. It's also never used in live-action dubbing, because it's well-nigh impossible. It's a lot cheaper in video games, where all you need to do is edit the facial animation instructions, which can be handled by software, and tends to be used more often there. See this 20-second clip
 from Kingdom Hearts II for an example. Doing it for in-engine scenes like this is simple; redoing a pre-rendered cutscene is effectively just like redoing an animated production.
- Rewriting the dialogue so that it fits the Mouth Flaps better. This is what usually happens, sometimes leading to meaning being lost, or useless fluff being gained. This is an unavoidable product of every translation. The degree to which it's done varies but most translators try to find a compromise to match the lip flaps but also get the meaning across. (Unless they just don't care.)
- Dont Look At The Camera! When there's no lipflap to mouth to, say the character is talking off-screen or standing with his back to the camera, the translator's work is a lot easier. Forcing a dialogue off-screen, however, isn't really doable; even if it can be done, it screams of cost-cutting, despite the intention, and 4Kids can once again demonstrate that it doesn't always work.
- A related, and largely more effective method is when the character has No Mouth, so the translator just needs to match the length of time. (Lord Zedd from Power Rangers is an example of this, and was voiced by a scriptwriter.)
- Subtitles.
Considering the flak companies tend to get for playing with the original footage, it's best to just avoid it as much as possible by using good translators (or script writers, if it's done by a different person) to keep the worst of the effects at bay. Of course, this does rely on the companies' ability to find good translators. This is the hard part.
Examples:
Anime
- 4Kids' tendency to do this is parodied mercilessly in this Gag Dub of Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni, along with the Macekre'd dialogue and premise.
Keiichi Casey: GET out - my way! I'm - going - to - a - FEE-ey-staaaa!
- Here's a clip from the One Piece dub. Luffy suffers heavily from Lip Lock here:
Luffy: You and your NAVY...are ruiningCoby'slifelongDREAM!
- One Piece is also a key example of one of 4Kids's more... interesting translation tendencies. "Devil Fruit" becomes "Cursed Fruit", with "cursed" (normally one syllable) yanked out into "CUR-sed" (technically not wrong, but rather archaic/poetic). This odd pronounciation is seen in a lot of 4Kids properties.
- Besides the normal edits to the dialog necessary for timing, the North American dub of Ranma 1/2 used a video editing system (WordFit) to tweak the mouth-flaps.
- The 1986 movie dub of Fist Of The North Star suffered from this a lot, though not as much as some of the other titles.
Raoh: See... It's different now... I'm a king... and a king... must demand respect from everyone.
- The dub of Bobobobo Bobobo actually engages in some Lampshade Hanging regarding this. In episode 53, Bobobo states "Now I'm going to tell all of ya where we're...going. I just hope by the time we arrive I can speak without weird pauses."
- As mentioned above, The Ocean Group dub of Dragon Ball Z has quite a few notable examples, the first being the (in)famous scene where Vegeta, voiced by Brian Drummond, is asked by Nappa what his scouter says about Goku's growing power level, at which point he takes the scouter off and growls "It's over nine thousa-aaaaaand!" before crushing it in his hands. This has since become an internet meme. Another instance of this elongated delivery is when Vegeta has Gohan by the scruff of his neck and says "I'm going to crush you like a grape in the palm of my hand, you understa-aaaaaand?!" in an especially raspy tone. It can be viewed here.
- In Gankutsuou, this actually resulted in the somewhat trite "Wait and hope!" of the original The Count of Monte Cristo being rendered into a memorable Catch Phrase uttered at the end of each On The Next Week's Episode teaser: "Bide your time, and hold out hope!"
- The dub of Death Note had the very Narm-inducing line (which was also both of the original creators' favorite part in the series): L whispering "I-just-wanted-to-tell-you, I'm L!", translated from a considerably shorter Japanese sentence, had the former line been spoken at a normal pace.
- The dubbing of Transformers Energon was notably bad about this; whenever there was an additional syllable needed, the dub had the characters say various things that sound like they were made up on the spot causing a constant stream of "what?", "uh?", etc. (or as tfwiki.net calls "The Pain Count"). Transformers Cybertron suffered less from this and had a better dub script overall.
- Gash Bell suffered from this immensely during the musical numbers, in which the dubbers would insist on having the VAs sing along to the lip flaps at the expense of any sense of harmony and timing. A good example is the infamous "Very Melon" tune, where the lip flaps did not match at all in the original, but in the VIZ dub they painstakingly made the voices match, which ruined the rhythm of what might have been a nice tune.
- Most of the "Very Melon" song was in Gratuitous English anyway, so what exactly ruined the rhythm? The 'Yeah!'s being added fit the rhythm better, I thought, and the few lines that weren't in English originally didn't have any lip flaps to be locked into.
- Spider Riders (of which an actual Japanese version may or may not exist) appears to feature this in spades, to the point where it takes several full episodes to get over the fact that most of the characters come off as having serious mental illnesses. Luckily, it seems like the actors (or the sound editors) get better and better as the series rolls on, so gratuitous pauses grow more and more rare. Strangely, some characters seem almost entirely exempt from this throughout the show.
- Heroic Age has a rather hilarious example in the third episode when Age says that he likes to paint then enunciates it, so the dub has to act like "paint" has three syllables ("pa-ain-tu").
- Digimon (the original version) usually uses only one or two voice actors to say something in crowd shots; the rest of the scene is completely silent. In the dub Saban usually got a handful of voice actors to the scenes, which results in the crowd scenes sounding more natural, altough harder to hear the "important" facts.
Film
- Ignored and spoofed in Kung Pow: Enter The Fist, where the writer/director/main actor went out of his way to write joke lines for the actors to speak so he could dub over them later. For instance: The main character says calmly 'I implore you to reconsider', even though it's very obvious on the screen that he's shouting.
- A bonus audio track on the DVD reveals that the line being dubbed over was "I'M SOMEBODY'S MOMMY!!"
- The English dub of Godzilla Raids Again (as Gigantis the Fire Monster ) went to extreme lengths to make the English dialogue match the mouth movements of the Japanese actors, which has the unfortunate side effect of making the actual content of the dialogue almost incomprehensible.
- An example of which was a Japanese word translating to 'stupid fool'. As the lips still had to be in sync, it was replaced by 'banana oil', which makes for a very nonsensical insult.
- And Mothra vs. Godzilla involves the great line "Yeswealwayskeepourpromises." Apparently, the equivalent Japanese word is really really short.
- Can be noticed a few times in the otherwise excellent English dub of Sky Blue, where Korean sounds don't match well with their English equivalents.
Video Games
Exceptions:
- Pixar has handled the dubbing of some anime imports, such as the films of Miyazaki. They tend to be meticulous in reworking the dialog to fit the lips and the meaning of the original script, even doing several takes in dubbing to see what works. Getting good voice actors doesn't hurt. Or the fact that the original creator has told Disney in no uncertain terms that gratuitous changes to the movies were to be avoided.
- Neil Gaiman, who wrote the English script for Princess Mononoke, said in an interview, "People have been asking if we reanimated it. There are two schools of thought coming out from the film. School of Thought #1 is that we reanimated the mouth movements. School #2 is that they must have made two different versions at the same time."
- Half-Life 2 and games based on Valve's Source Engine, have a phoneme editor built in. It takes the written script and the recorded dialogue, and makes a near-perfect set of facial animation instructions for the character. So, changing languages, at least for languages built on the Latin alphabet, is as painless as feeding the game new scripts and new sounds.
- Shadow Hearts II eliminates liplock in cutscenes by having the characters ad-lib or grumble for or in-between certain lines. The effect makes the dub sound much more natural than in most video games.
- And yet many lines still seem to come just before or after the mouths move.
- The translator who worked with Sergio Leone on The Dollars Trilogy was given basically free reign to rewrite dialogue to make it fit better with the Italian and Spanish lip movements, to the movies' infinite benefit. He describes in the DVD special features of The Good The Bad And The Ugly how he spent a whole day trying to figure out how to translate the line "piu forte" ("louder"), eventually opting for "more feeling". He also changed the name of Lee Van Cleef's character Setenza (Sentence) to "Angel-Eyes" - a change generally considered a Woolseyism.
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