K-ON! English Voice Actress

Upon looking up K-ON! on Wikipedia.com, I was pleasantly surprised to find the names of the English voice actresses chosen to do the voices of the Mio, Yui, Mugi and Ritsu. This is actually old news, but I felt like blogging about it because I'm very excited about the upcoming English dubbing. 

I know many people out there dislike English dubbing, and I must agree, there has been some terrible dubbing in the past, and nothing beats the original Japanese voice acting...NOTHING. But dubbing has come a long way. Looking back to when I was younger, companies that would license anime and air it on television tried soooo hard to remove any trace of "Japanese" it would give off. The names of characters were converted to a more suitable, "Caucasian" name (for example: Joey Wheeler from Yu-Gi-Oh!'s original Japanese name was Jonouchi and Ash Ketchum from Pokemon's original name was Satoshi). 

In some way, I understand changing the names of some characters. This was to allow children to relate to the characters better and also be able to pronounce their names easily ^^; But changing the entire dialogue of the anime and making it into something that it was not, that's when dubbing was getting out of hand *cough4kidscough*

Err, anyway, although dubbing has been horrible in the past, it's becoming better and better in my opinion, and I think companies are learning from their mistakes and listening to anime fans. They are keeping the content true to it's meaning and certain companies such as Bandai Entertainment have done excellent jobs with The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Gurren Lagann, and hopefully now K-ON!


Moving right along, as soon as I found out about the English voice actresses for the K-on girls, I quickly looked them up.


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Yui will be voiced by Stephanie Sheh.

"Her most notable roles are Orihime Inoue in Bleach, Eureka in Eureka Seven, Mikuru Asahina in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Wendy Garret in Gun X Sword, and Hinata Hyuga in Naruto." -Wiki

Although I think her voice is a little off from Yui's Japanese voice, I still think she can do it. She's a professional, and professionals know how to change their voices on target. I can't wait to hear her version of Yui!

Mio will be voiced by Cristina Vee.

I absolutely love the fact that they picked Cristina Vee to do the voice of Mio. I wasn't familiar with her myself until I heard her incredible voice acting on her You Tube channel. She's done several fan dubs of different animes and Disney songs, and managed to get herself out there doing so. If you'd like to get a taste of how she sounds like as Mio, check out the video of her singing her own English version of "Don't Say Lazy". That's probably what got her the job.

Ritsu will be voiced by Cassandra Morris.

Cassandra Morris is a voice actress I hadn't heard before so I tried finding out what other anime characters she had done the voices for so I can get an idea of how well she would sound like as Ritsu. I looked back and saw that she does the voices for several characters ranging from Pokemon to Yu-Gi-Oh! She's also very good at doing the voices for male characters. Since Ritsu is a bit of a tomboy, I think she'd do a great job at voicing her.

Mugi will be voiced by Shelby Lindley.

I don't know much about this voice actress myself, and apparently she's a bit new to voice acting anime characters. Her website lists the things she have done, and it looks like she is very talented. I would love to hear her voice as Mugi. That's all the info I've got on all the voice actresses so far. I'm still waiting to hear from Bandai regarding the other characters such as Sawako-sensei and Azusa. What do you  think of the chosen voice actresses?