Originally published in manga form starting in 1985, Banana Fish was both controversial and influential at the time for several aspects of its story of a noble gangster investigating a crime ring using the titular drug to control people’s minds: Its violence, yes, but also its sexuality, whether that meant more explicit material happening in the criminal underworld, or the implied-so-hard-it’s-one-shade-short-of-canon relationship between main character Ash Lynx and his friend Eiji Okumura. The series was given an anime adaptation in 2018, produced by Japanese studio MAPPA, and syndicated internationally by Amazon. Although it released with English subtitles, the series never got an English voice track—until this week, when AI-generated Spanish and English versions of the show’s dialogue were offered as “beta” features for Prime Video viewers.
The response to the news has included a lot of very strongly negative reactions, for a lot of very strongly obvious reasons: Animation fans take their dubs and subs extremely serious regardless, and having voice actors be put out of work while a mega-giant foists off a product that can’t hope to match the richness of a fully voiced set of performances is an extra twist of the digital knife. Per CBR, at least one voice actor who’s worked on a number of big-name projects for Amazon in the past—Daman Mills, whose credits include Rebuild Of Evangelion, Dragon Ball Super, and One Piece—has stated on social media that he won’t work for the company again if they keep the AI-generated dub up. (Meanwhile, we popped up the show’s first episode for a minute just to make sure we weren’t talking out of our asses on the quality of the resulting dub, and woof, is that some hideously lifeless robot talking. If the goal here was to completely drain a vibrant, fascinating show of all life in the most piss-the-fans-off-way possible, that’s definitely one way to pull it off.)
