Between Languages: How English dubs are rewriting emotion across global anime hits

Whether it is a teenager carrying the weight of a citywide massacre, an immortal mage learning to recognise grief too late, or a goddess who swings between divine poise and child-like exuberance, the current anime slate feels packed with a range of curious characters. Once treated as an auxiliary track for international markets, the English language dub for a lot of these popular anime is now far closer to the centre of that exchange, shaped by a diverse group of talented voice actors.

Crunchyroll’s Winter 2026 lineup brings together returning giants and new experiments, with Jujutsu Kaisen’s third season continuing its descent into the Culling Game arc, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End’s sophomore run refining its study of time and memory, and the new Sentenced to Be a Hero reframing fantasy heroism as institutional punishment. What links the three is the degree to which their English casts are asked to navigate tone, emotion and cultural specificity, across languages that do not always align cleanly.

In Jujutsu Kaisen, Adam McArthur approaches its main protagonist Yuji Itadori with a grounded kind of pragmatism. “If you boil down what he’s feeling, it’s immense guilt,” he says, describing the aftermath of the Shibuya Incident, where Yuji becomes complicit in a catastrophic mass murder under Sukuna’s control. The third season pushes him into the Culling Games, a sprawling death tournament engineered to destabilise Japan’s cursed energy system, with Yuji positioned between execution orders and moral obligation. 

Yuji Itadori in a still from ‘Jujutsu Kaisen’ Season 2
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Crunchyroll

McArthur’s task involves holding together the memory of a character who once operated with an unguarded, shounen-MC optimism while allowing that optimism to persist in altered form. “What I love about Yuji is he is always going to be Yuji. He’s going to choose good even when bad things happen to him. He continues to do that.”

The cost of sustaining that emotional register revealed itself in the routine he describes. “I’d go in and record those scenes. The director would be like, ‘okay thanks!’, I’d get in my car, cry on the way home, try to act normal, only to come back next week and do it again. It was the scene with Nanami, the scene with Nobara, all of it. It’s not just one episode. It keeps coming back” he recalls. But McArthur does not frame that strain as a burden. “It’s tough, but it’s also rewarding. You don’t always get to do that with characters in animation. You get to do the light stuff and the really heavy stuff, and that’s a treat.”

Yuji Itadori in a still from ‘Jujutsu Kaisen’ Season 3
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Crunchyroll

Kayleigh McKee approaches Yuta Okkotsu through a more technical lens. “He’s a year older, he has more friends and more support, so I wanted to keep that friendliness from the movie but make him come across as more competent,” she says, describing Yuta’s reintroduction after Jujutsu Kaisen: 0 as a villain-apparent tasked with killing Yuji. “When he first appears, he almost seems like a villain, but he’s only portraying a villain to Yuji. So, I was portraying a character who was trying to portray himself as a villain. That was a unique challenge, and I had a lot of fun with it. I tried to sprinkle in little bits where, if you know he’s not fully selling it, you can pick up on that.”

Yuta Okkotsu in a still from ‘Jujutsu Kaisen’ Season 3
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Crunchyroll

Her work extends to Kirara, a confident and mischievous trans Jujutsu sorcerer whose playful exterior masks her strategic combat style. As one of the few openly trans women working prominently in anime dubbing, McKee occupies a space that has historically remained opaque even within an industry long accustomed to gender-fluid casting traditions — Mayumi Tanaka’s Luffy, Masako Nozawa’s Goku, and Junko Takeuchi’s Naruto stand as defining performances that have shaped these iconic shounen MC’s so completely that questions of gender fall away in the act of listening.

Kirara in a still from ‘Jujutsu Kaisen’ Season 3
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Crunchyroll

“I’ve portrayed non-binary characters, binary trans characters, cis characters, creatures, monsters,” she says. “I’ve seen overwhelming support from fans. People will say things like they want to see me voicing an entire series, which is flattering, but what it really comes down to is skill, which is something anyone could develop. I just had more of an existential reason to put the work into it,” she smiles. McKee also situates that effort within the industry’s response. “Most directors use me as a utility artist. They know I can do this range without hesitation. As long as I can portray the role in a respectful and representational way, then why not use me. That’s very flattering.”

The contrast between Japanese and English performances remains a constant negotiation. Mallorie Rodak describes her approach to Frieren as more than mere imitation. The elven mage, who has lived for over a millennium, speaks with an insouciance that risks reading as absence if handled too literally, and Rodak adjusts by introducing minimal inflections that suggest interiority without overt signalling. “Frieren is a difficult character because of her lack of emotion,” she says. “There’s a sliding scale. You don’t want to be completely devoid of emotion because then it feels boring, but you also don’t want to infuse too much emotion because it won’t feel like someone who’s been alive for a thousand years.” She traces that balance back to the original performance. “Atsumi Tanezaki’s work was a big inspiration. We hear the Japanese voices before we record, so the depth she brought to the character really informed how I approached it.”

Frieren in a still from ‘Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End’ Season 2
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Crunchyroll

Restraint seems to define Frieren more broadly — the series emerged from its first season as one of the most critically celebrated anime in recent years, with its contemplative pacing and attention to detail distinguishing it within a crowded field. This second outing continues Frieren’s journey north, while maintaining the episodic structure that allows smaller interactions to accumulate into something larger. The English dub follows that structure closely, with Jill Harris and Jordan Dash Cruz locating Fern and Stark’s emotional cores through specific moments.

Stark and Fern in a still from ‘Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End’ Season 2
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Crunchyroll

Harris points to a brief exchange involving a cute head pat as the key to understanding Fern, whose outward composure conceals a need for validation that shapes her behaviour. “There’s a flashback where Heiter says that Fern needs a lot of praise,” she says. “And Frieren gives him a head pat, and it just clicked for me. Fern often seems stoic, but I think she often feels unappreciated. When she passes the mage exam and tells Frieren the spell she chose, and Frieren gives her a little head pat, Fern is just beaming. She wants to do a good job. She wants to make people happy. She wants head pats”, Harris smiles.

Fern and Frieren in a still from ‘Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End’
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Crunchyroll

Cruz approaches Stark by identifying the gap between his self-perception and the way others see him. “For me, it was the dragon fight and also the episode with his brother,” he says. “You get to see exactly how strong Stark is, but you also witness why he views himself negatively. His relationship with his father also explains why he believes he is weak even when everyone else sees him as strong. Once you know that, it informs everything. You understand why he reacts the way he does, why he doubts himself.”

Frieren, Fern and Stark in a still from ‘Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End’ Season 2
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Crunchyroll

The actors’ reflections converge around the genre’s ability to hold more tender emotions within heightened settings. “When I watch something, it’s almost always fantasy or sci-fi,” Rodak says. “There’s an immersion that feels separate from reality, but the relationships and emotions are universal.” Cruz extends that idea through identification. “You can put yourself in these characters. You feel like you’re going on the journey with them.” Harris frames it in terms of accessibility. “My parents don’t watch anime, but they watched Frieren. It has a human element that appeals to everyone.”

Though Frieren refined the genre’s introspective potential, 2026’s latest offering, Sentenced to Be a Hero pushes in the opposite direction, using its premise to interrogate the structures that define heroism itself. The series centres on Xylo Forbartz, a condemned figure forced into endless cycles of combat as part of a penal system that weaponises heroism as a cruel form of punishment. Emi Lo describes the appeal of this inversion. “Nothing is as it seems,” she says. “Heroes are criminals. Goddesses are weapons. It makes you want to keep looking into the world because everything you expect is flipped.”

Lo’s performance as Teoritta — the self-proclaimed “Goddess of Swords”, who forges a contract with Xylo and commands an arsenal of summoned blades while oscillating between divine authority and childish enthusiasm — reflects that instability. “She’s a gremlin,” Lo chuckles. “When she summons a sword, she’s excited and energetic, and that comes from her desire to help. She just believes she needs to help. If you think about that as childhood innocence, where a kid hones in on one emotion, that helped me balance it.”

Teoritta in a still from ‘Sentenced to Be a Hero’
| Photo Credit:
Crunchyroll

Dawn M. Bennett approaches Patausche Kivia with an emphasis on evolution. The disciplined captain of the Holy Knights enters the story as a staunch believer in order and duty, a figure shaped by doctrine who gradually learns to question it. “What resonated with me was her ability to listen,” Bennett says. “I expected her to be very set in her ways, always arguing with Xylo, but she becomes more open-minded. She realises that if she wants to do the right thing, she has to question her own beliefs.”

Patausche Kivia in a still from ‘Sentenced to Be a Hero’
| Photo Credit:
Crunchyroll

The idea of questioning preconceptions seems to align quite well within the wider moment of anime’s current global circulation, where streaming platforms have expanded access while also increasing demand for localisation. Increased visibility, expanded distribution, and a more diverse pool of performers have altered the expectations placed on English-language adaptations, pushing them toward a level of nuance that parallels their Japanese counterparts while retaining their own distinct rhythms. The actors navigating this space approach translation as an ongoing negotiation, where each line becomes an opportunity to locate meaning within the gaps between languages. And though the distance between languages persists, within that distance there is often room for a different kind of truth to take hold.

Rodak recalls how a single, three-worded line from Frieren — “Aura, kill yourself” — circulated online, drawing viewers who had not previously engaged with the series. “People would come up to me and say they weren’t going to watch the show, but they saw that clip with Aura and it convinced them,” she says. “There’s something cold about the way Frieren delivers that line, her back is turned, she’s walking away. It shows her power for the first time. That reaction, the memes, all of it made that scene one of my favourites,” Rodak beams.

Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Season 2 and Sentenced to Be a Hero are currently streaming on Crunchyroll, with new episodes airing weekly