Disney Character Voices International

Headquarters of DCVI at the old Animation Building at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, California

The first dubbing issued for a Disney movie was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, supervised by Walt Disney himself.[4] The movie was originally distributed in 1938 in 10 languages: Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Latin American Spanish, Polish and Swedish.[5] Disney expressed his appreciation for this latter dubbing, revealing to Tatiana Angelini, Swedish voice of Snow White, she was his personal favorite international voice for the character.[6] Despite the fascist regime ruling Italy at the time, the movie premiered at the 6th Venice International Film Festival, winning the Grand Art Trophy special award.[7][8] Otherwise happened with the German version, for which the Walt Disney Company and Nazi Germany couldn’t find an agreement, so the German dubbing meant to be distributed in Austria and German-speaking Switzerland was made in Amsterdam, voiced by German refugees fled from their country.[9]

The real turning point for Disney dubbings occurred in the 40s, especially with the movie Fantasia, when Jimmy Johnson named Jack Cutting, Disney animator since 1930, responsible for the dubbing of Disney movies mainly in Danish, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. The DCVI affiliate branch itself was founded in January 1988, while Michael Eisner was in Paris for preparations to build Disneyland Paris (known at the time as Euro Disney Resort). On that occasion, he got to listen to the French dubbing of the series The Golden Girls and discovered several flaws and mistakes both in the translation and the dubbing. This realization, combined with Roy Disney’s disappointment with the French voice of Mickey Mouse, led Eisner to set up a dubbing department, directed by Roy Disney.[10][3][11]

Phil Collins was selected to sing songs from the soundtrack of Tarzan also in French, German, Italian and Spanish for marketing reasons.

To keep the whole production under control, Disney has established a centralized system that allows to gather on the same platform auditions by actors all over the world, which gained the Walt Disney Company the 2017 Technology and Engineering Emmy Awards.[3][12] Rick Dempsey, Senior Vice President of DCVI, said that the decision process to cast voices for Disney products works so that he specifically makes the decision on the cast from countries that make the top 14 percent of the box office, which sets the blueprint of the character’s voice with the director of the particular language hub. Local offices placed in countries whose voices are directly selected by DCVI will have competence over a specific geographical area, and they will cast the rest of the region in comparison to the selected voices. According to Dempsey, the voices do not have to be identical to the original English voices, but they must rather match the character, letting them shine through. Especially since 00s, local celebrities can sometimes be chosen for their appeal to their respective market more than their ability to match or accentuate the character, to make the movie more appealing to the specific audience.[3][11]

Disney movies are usually released in theaters in a set of languages, which varies depending on the product. Most languages covered by DCVI are fixed and all Disney animated movies are systematically dubbed and distributed in these idioms. However, there are languages covered by the departement on an irregular base, which varies depending on the movie.

Dubbings irregularly or occasionally released

Auliʻi Cravalho and Rachel House reprised their roles in the movie Moana in the Hawaiian and Māori versions respectively

Some languages are usually released on an irregular base, which sees dubbings in the same language being issued sometimes together with the rest of systematic dubbings, and some other times at a later date, usually not for theaters, but directly on TV or streaming services. That's the case with Malay, Indonesian, Hindi, Tamil and Telugu. For instance, when the movie Frozen was released in 2013, it numbered a Malay dubbing among the 42 originally issued,[14] while a Hindi and an Indonesian versions were released only two years later.[15][16] When the sequel had its theatrical release in 2019, a Hindi, Tamil and Telugu versions were made, while no Malay or Indonesian dubbings exist yet.[17][18][19][16] Some other languages number only one or few dubbings, due to attempts to expand the market to new languages, like in the case of Austrian German, Bengali or Marathi dubbings. Finally, there's a group of one-time special dubbing languages, usually dedicated to the culture who served as a source of inspiration for the movie. The first instance of such a case was The Lion King, which received a special Zulu dubbing.[20] The next case had to wait until the movie Moana was released in 2016, which received a total of three special dubbings in Polynesian languages in the space of two years from its original release date.[21][22][23] Following upon the success of these three productions, a special Northern Sami dubbing was also made for the movie Frozen II, while no dubbing in this language was made for the first chapter of the series.[24] A peculiar case in one-time dubbings was the Navajo version of Finding Nemo released in 2016, in collaboration with the Navajo Nation Museum. Differently from the rest of special dubbings, the movie is not linked in any way to the Navajo culture, and yet it was chosen as a means to preserve Navajo language, teaching it to kids through a popular Disney movie.[25]

Irregularly issued: Hindi Indonesian Malay Tamil[26] Telugu[26]

Occasionally issued: Albanian Bengali[26] Galician German (Austria) Marathi[27]

Special editions: Hawaiian (Moana)[28] Māori (Moana)[29] Navajo (Finding Nemo)[30][11] Sámi (Frozen II)[31] Tahitian (Moana)[21] Zulu (The Lion King)[32]

• Disney Character Voices International on IMDb (U.S. branch only)