We commented earlier this year on how Amazon was making waves in the anime streaming industry. They’ve produced several big series like New Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt and Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX, as well as the underrated City anime. However, their latest move to release AI-dubbed anime could put them in conflict with Japanese license holders like Kadokawa, Sentai Filmworks, and Aniplex.
Fans have noticed that some shows have new dubs on Prime Video. Banana Fish, No Game No Life, and Pets suddenly received new English and Latin American Spanish dubs, but there was a catch. The dub was listed as the “AI Beta” dub. None of these shows are new. For example, Banana Fish was released in 2018, so the decision to upload a new dub came as a surprise. Not just for the fans, but also for the companies that own the anime that Amazon is streaming.
Kadokawa Shoten and Sentai Filmworks own the rights to the anime prequel film No Game No Life Zero. According to Anime News Network, Kadokawa has not approved the film’s AI dubbing “in any form.” Meanwhile, Sentai Filmworks said it was “not aware of the AI dubbing in advance” and is currently “discussing it with Amazon.”
All of the AI beta dubs listed above have since been removed from Prime Video, suggesting that Amazon was told by its anime partners that this was unacceptable. By way of background, Japanese companies are notoriously protective of their intellectual property and are notoriously slow to develop relationships with new partners. That’s why the live-action Akira movie we’ve been hearing about for years never existed. Failing to approve a new dub for No Game No Life Zero, AI or not, could impact Amazon’s ambitions in the anime industry.
If I had to guess what happened, I would say that Prime Video was experimenting with using GenAI for dubbing anime and that these dubs were never actually intended to be released to the public. It’s hard to believe that a company as large and well-funded as Amazon would jeopardize its relationships with rights holders in Japan, a valuable growth field, just to produce a few AI-dubbed versions of years-old shows. But we’ll probably never know exactly what happened until something else becomes public.
