Death Note: Sub or Dub?

This is the second series on this site where we will say the dub is a reasonable default, after Cowboy Bebop, and the argument here is completely different from the one there. Bebop's dub wins on register. Death Note's wins on your eyes having somewhere else to be.

The short answer

Either, genuinely, with a nudge toward the dub for a first watch and toward the sub if you are rewatching for the performances.

The reading-load argument

Death Note's central device is a rulebook. The rules of the notebook appear on screen as text, in full, and the show expects you to read them, because the plot is a sequence of arguments about what the rules permit. On top of that there is writing in the notebook, text on L's monitors, names, dates, and clocks. This is the most text-dense popular anime there is.

Subtitles put a second block of text at the bottom of a frame that is already asking for a careful read, and they are competing with the images, not accompanying them. Half of Death Note's direction is faces reacting while somebody thinks, and a viewer parsing two text sources at once will watch the subtitles and miss the reaction shot. That is a mechanical argument rather than a matter of taste, which is rare in this debate.

The dub is well suited to the material

It was produced by Ocean Productions in Vancouver under director Karl Willems and premiered on Adult Swim on 20 October 2007. Brad Swaile plays Light, Alessandro Juliani plays L, and Brian Drummond plays Ryuk.

Dubs are weakest on shouting and on comic timing built into Japanese sentence order. Death Note is neither. It is adults talking carefully in rooms, which is the register English-language voice acting is deepest in, and the script's long deductive speeches survive translation better than banter ever does. Drummond, incidentally, is the same actor who said the most famous line in dub history a decade earlier as Vegeta.

What the sub holds

Mamoru Miyano's Light, which is one of the celebrated lead performances in the medium and was nominated for best lead actor at the first Seiyu Awards in 2007, the year the show ran. He won the following year, for other roles.

The part is a technical problem: Light has a public voice, a private voice, and an internal monologue running under both, and the whole character is the distance between them. Miyano plays the polite one flat and hollow on purpose, so the drop into the private register lands. Kappei Yamaguchi's L is the other half of that, a mumble that never once signals how much attention is behind it.

Which to pick

Watch the dub first if you are new to it and want to read the notebook rather than the subtitles. Come back on the sub for Miyano, and expect to notice a different show, because you will be watching a performance rather than an argument. Spoiler-free context lives on our Death Note quote pages; if you have finished it, the ending is explained here.