Josh Grelle is a veteran voice actor, having been active in the industry since the mid-2000s and taking on some early roles in series such as Initial D. More recently he’s been featured in popular series such as My Hero Academia as Fumikage Tokoyami, Attack on Titan as Armin Arlert, and Yuri!! On Ice as Yuri Katsuki. We had the opportunity to sit down with Grelle at Otakon 2018 to discuss his recent work and how far the anime industry has come over the course of his career.

Scoop: How’s Otakon going for you this year?
Josh Grelle (JG): It’s pretty fantastic. My very first convention back in the day was this one, as an attendee. That was 2004, and it was my first time going to an anime con, and it kind of changed my life. I had literally just done like, two sessions in the booth – I had just started my career at that point. I made a little promise to myself that I would be a guest at this con at some point in my career, and it took me 14 years, but I’m here! The whole thing’s just been a dream come true.

Scoop: Let’s talk Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia, both of which I kind of qualify as “anime for people who don’t like anime.”
JG: Yeah, they’re kind of “gateway anime.”

Scoop: Absolutely. Could you discuss the response to these series so far and the continued success of both?
JG: Well I think My Hero Academia’s success especially, since it’s the more recent one in that regard – bringing it over to the states was a brilliant move. Funimation took kind of a wild bet on whether or not it was going to be “the next big thing” and holy crap, it paid off. But at the same time… no one, I think, is surprised that a superhero anime became big in the United States of America. It’s kind of a foregone conclusion that it was going to be the next very successful franchise.

For me, it’s the first shonen show in a long time that really grabbed my attention. It’s one that really pulled me in. I couldn’t really get into Naruto – my introduction to the shonen genre was Dragon Ball. It was one of those that really solidified my love of anime as a kid. There was just something, to me at least, at the time that I was watching Naruto and Bleach, that they didn’t have. There was something about them that didn’t click with me. My Hero Academia does in a major way. In those other shows, none of the characters were really relatable to me; I couldn’t identify with any of them. But I can identify with so many heroes in My Hero – especially Deku, who I think is the most relatable, much in the same way that I think Yuri Katsuki [from Yuri!! On Ice] is relatable for a lot of people. He’s the kid with big dreams and big hopes that doesn’t really have or doesn’t think that he has what it takes, and he has his dreams kind of crushed for a bit. But he still sticks with it, he works hard, and he gets it. Just in Deku alone you have an amazing story of character growth and of literally the hero’s journey. And that’s just him! But you have all these other characters that have something to offer for everybody. Everybody can find something in this show to relate to. All of those personalities are so large. All of them have something unique and something very tangible for other people to grab on to. It’s a sign of brilliant character design and writing. I think it’s a foregone conclusion that this show was going to be successful.

It was kind of the same with Attack on Titan, which for me is a lot about the mystery. Not to say that the characters aren’t good or that people can’t identify with them! The whole reason why I wanted to be Armin is because I have been of very much the same mindset and emotional state that he’s in at the start of the show – the feeling of “I’m worthless to my friends and the family around me, I’m no good, I’m just a burden, there’s nothing redeeming about me.” And for him to realize – “Oh, I’m just my own worst enemy. No one else thinks this about me, it’s just me.” That’s a very human experience; most of us at some point in our lives have probably felt that.

But it also is the mystery of the show. If I can sit in a room full of people and we all have completely different theories about what’s happening and all of them are equally possible, that’s a sign of great writing. I’m very blessed to be a part of both of these series and I’m excited to see both of them grow.

Scoop: You mentioned Yuri Katsuki. Yuri!! On Ice is just a phenomenon, and it kind of came out of nowhere. Were you at all surprised by the sort of universal response to this series?
JG: Very much so! I think a lot of us, just based on that first little preview clip they showed, we maybe had a preconceived notion that, while a beautiful piece of animation – and a testament to the power of good rotoscoping – it looked like, at first, that it was maybe gonna be another Free!. And while Free! is a fun show, I don’t like a lot of the queerbait-y stuff that they have in that show. So I was very pleasantly surprised that Yuri!! was something that broke that mold. And I had never seen something break that mold before.

To have that powerful representation and message, without shoving it in anybody’s face… the whole show was about the sport, about Yuri’s pursuit of perfection and his art and the battle that he faces every time he goes out on the ice. It was like you said – it came out of nowhere. But it was a beautiful piece of storytelling and it was so refreshing to see Japanese companies take a risk like that again on something that was 100 percent unknown. There was no manga, there was no light novel series, no dating sim game or anything. It was 100 percent an original creation, and that’s a big risk! That’s something that they’ve had to be very careful about doing for the last decade. It was really cool.

The role just kind of landed in my lap and it became this phenomenon; within just like three weeks, it had permeated the world. You had fandom crossovers! You had ice skaters and ice skating fans being like “what’s this anime stuff about?” and vice versa. It’s mind-boggling still, to this day, just how powerful it was. And much like in the same way as My Hero Academia and Attack on Titan, it’s a symbol of how powerful a bit of representation and good human characters can be.

Scoop: You mentioned you started in 2004. That was during such a boom in the anime and manga industry. Could you discuss what it was like back then versus what it is now – from your perspective as both a voice actor and an ADR guy, tell us about how this industry has evolved?
JG: Well, everything is much faster now than when we started. I even still have some old laserdiscs of like… Slayers. Back in the day, if you were a laserdisc collector – and that was one of the only ways you could get anime, because dubbing wasn’t even a thing at that point – you were getting two episodes per disc, no extras, subtitles only, and you had to wait six months to a year for another two episodes. And you spent roughly $108 per disc. So, yeah, it’s all free now!

Back then, as a fan and a collector myself and just starting voice acting, like you said, we were kind of at the tail end of what we now call the “Golden Age of Anime.” In the mid-’90s the anime industry had almost crashed on itself, and the American industry was born, and they became the legs by which the anime industry stood on for that entire period. That’s when we had the rise of ADV Films and Funimation and 4kids. If you’re a collector, if you were someone who was first getting into it outside of the mainstream, you had very few places you could go. It was like Sam Goody and Suncoast and that was about it. You had the choice of a sub or a dub VHS, and that spawned a whole war on its own. Eventually we moved into DVDs so it wasn’t an issue anymore, so you got both voice tracks on one disc. The prices were a little high at first – at that point they hadn’t mastered the art of compression on DVDs, so you could only get like four episodes at a time on a disc, max, especially if you were also gonna get two languages and extras and everything else. You were still spending a good amount of money, and as a young anime fan in high school, I didn’t have that.

So it was a challenge. It was really tough to be a young anime fan at that point. And to add to that, it would take roughly a year from the time a show aired in Japan, fully ran over a three to six-month season, to come out here. It would take three months or so for companies to bid on and win a series, get those contracts signed and whatnot, have the Japanese companies send the materials over, on a boat, receiving them, making sure that they’re not corrupted in any way, and then the whole process to transferring them to tape, casting people, writing the English script… it took roughly a year from the time a show finished for it to be released in the States.

It was very hard in the mid-2000s, when the internet kind of exploded in this country, and we went from Napster and Limewire to Bittorrent. The whole thing changed. The anime fans who had brought about the Golden Age of Anime by supporting DVD sales became the anime industry’s worst enemy. They started downloading everything and this attitude of fan entitlement that happened was very damaging. Despite a lot of the companies trying to speak out against it and try to say “Look, this is really hurting us, we’re a small industry, we’re not Hollywood.” It was literally killing the industry. And in 2008 to 2010 we lost some major players in the industry, we lost Gonzo, we lost some animation companies in Japan, we lost distributing and licensing companies in the States that never came back. It was horrible. And no one would listen, no one was willing to hear the message. But the Japanese side of the industry for the longest time were afraid of the internet, and they were afraid that if they put more of their stuff out there it would make it easier for it to be stolen. So it took a little while, but we finally moved into it, and now we have Crunchyroll and every major anime distribution has a free service where you can watch anime online for free the day they come out in Japan. We finally beat the fansubbers. No longer is it really an issue. Now the only issue is people having problems realizing what is an official website versus what is a scam. But it’s a far cry better than what it was in the mid-2000s.

Scoop: Anything coming up that you can discuss with us?
JG: We’re currently recording the new Dragon Ball Super episodes. I think we’re just coming up to the Tournament of Power, and that should be hitting Toonami I believe a week or so after we finish this interview. We’re also starting season three of Attack on Titan, which is also hitting Toonami soon. Other than that, nothing else that I can talk about, but I am also starting to create my own original content. I’ve started my own production studio, so check out my Twitter for future news on that!