A few days ago, I watched the free episode of Honey and Clover that’s on iTunes to how the dub sounded and ended up buying the second to get a better sense of it before writing my opinion of it.
Overall, I thought it was pretty good. I started unconsciously comparing the English actors to their Japanese counterparts before acknowledging the English cast would probably not stack up so I resolved to just judge the dub on its own efforts. It was a little unnerving to hear Takamoto, Mayama, and Morita called by their first names (Yuta, Takumi, and Shinobu, respectively) but I guess it makes sense to use those since given names come before family names in English-speaking countries.
Takamoto (Yuri Lowenthal) sounded a little flat and grating at first but that got better as it went along for the most part, contributing to the inexperience of his character. I first thought Mayama (unknown) sounded like a 30-something cop but then he just sounded like Takemoto’s senpai when giving him some advice. Sam Regal voicing Morita was a little grating initially while nailing his playfulness and bestowed a good serious voice. Shuuji (Chris Kent) was okay and sounded good giving adversarial lines to Mayama. Yamada (Julie Ann Taylor) and Hagu (Heather Halley) barely got any lines in the first episode so that’s why I decided to plunk down the $1.99 for the second.
There was more moments of Yamada and Hagu speaking in the second episode but no Rika (unknown). I looked at the sample for episode 4 and she has a weak voice with small variations, which fits her condition but still seems a little lacking to me. It’s been a while since I’ve watched any of the series, though. Hagu had a soft, feathery voice and groans that sounded appropriate. Yamada sounds like a student in her early 20s should; I’ll have to check episode 3 when I get the DVDs for her angry voice. Takemoto had some moments of worry that were expressed well and Hanamoto sounded more like a experienced advisor when he wasn’t being an over-adoring uncle.
The side characters such as Kazuhiko from the dormhouse, the sculpture club girls, Yamada’s ceramic teacher, the Asahiro book guy, and the upscale shop girls had voices that sounded good. “Koropokkuru” was kept in and so was the insert music. (I re-admired the sequence near the end of episode 1 where Morita is running around as if I were watching it for the first time.)
On the technical side, the 1st episode had a bitrate of 1.40mbits/sec and the 2nd had one of 1.25 mbits/sec. Both had the standard 23.98 fps and 640×360 resolution of a widescreen iTunes file.
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