: When making any animated show episode, is the voice acting done earlier or the animation?

Question

If the animation is done first, do the actors have to remain strictly to script leaving no room for improv and also have to nail their timing?
And if the acting is done first, how do they time it? Do they have to do it blindly, only by imagination?

In: Other

Answer 1

Voices are recorded first for a lot of animation (and then the animators match the facial animation to the voice).

But I just recently watched a YouTube podcast (called “Trash Taste”), where they interviewed a Japanese anime animator (Ken Arto) who has animated on a lot of the most popular recent modern animes.. and he said that for Japanese animation, they do the animation first, because it’s ‘faster’ that way.

This is somewhat surprising, because among people who watch anime, there’s often a split between fans who prefer “dubs” (where English voice actors dub the Japanese animation) vs “subs” (where the show is presented with English subtitles and the original Japanese audio). But it turns out that, apparently, all anime is “dubbed”.

So maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle. Different animation studios do things differently.