'Hunter X Hunter' Movie With English Dub Coming in Spring 2018
Viz Media has announced that it will be bringing the movie "Hunter x Hunter: Phantom Rogue" to Western shores. The film will be released with an English-language dub and is set to hit theatres in the coming spring.
The film was announced at this year's San Diego Comic-Con to the surprise of many fans. This is mainly because the anime film is anything but new.
"Hunter x Hunter: Phantom Rouge" was released in Japan in January 2013 and was well-received by fans and critics alike. The U.S. release followed eight months later at the first Japan Film Festival of San Francisco.
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Viz Media recently acquired the license for the film and has begun porting it to English. The film's voice actors include Tara Sands ("Pokémon," "Yu-Gi-Oh!"), Todd Haberkorn ("Fairy Tail," "Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV"), Beau Billingslea ("General Hospital," "Star Trek: Into Darkness") and Dorothy Fahn ("Magic Knight Rayearth," "Ghost in the Shell"). Fans should expect to see the English dub by March 2018.
But while a port of the film is certainly welcome news especially with the manga currently in hiatus, English dubs have had a bad rap among anime fans as of late. While there are the obvious cons like mistranslation and lost cultural norms, recent controversies have stained anime dubs for allegedly pushing political agenda.
Who could forget the fiasco surrounding Funimation's "Gamergate" dub of "Prison School" in 2015? The scandal, which involved the replacement of the original line with one referencing Gamergate, resulted in Funimation distancing themselves from their writers.
It's very unlikely that such an incident will happen with Viz Media's port of the "Hunter x Hunter" movie. But with the current reputation of anime dubs, it might mean that fans will sit this one out instead of paying to see their favorite anime in a different language.
