We’ve all heard the iconic Animal Crossing
talking sounds before, right? But what do those sounds actually mean? Where do they
come from, how were they recorded? Well, in this video I’ll be deep-diving
into the fascinating topic of Animal Crossing’s “Animalese”. Let’s uncover the hidden
meaning behind the Animal Crossing language! The original Animal Crossing was in development
from around 1999 to 2001. And during that time, the main theme that Nintendo’s developers had in
mind was “communication”. Every aspect of this game was designed to have you communicate with
people, whether that was the in game characters or your friends and family. Like here’s an
example. Some of the game’s inhabitants have rude personalities, and will say mean things to
the player. The game’s director Katsuya Eguchi explained, “if a small child is playing and
an animal says something a little difficult to him that he doesn't understand, I hope he'll
then go ask his Mom about it.” For instance, they had the character Gulliver tell a
bunch of dark jokes that kids would just not be able to understand. This forced them
to communicate with their family. And that’s just one way that communication was the
focus of Animal Crossing’s development. And that focus on communication extended to the
sounds of the game, too. Animal Crossing had a pretty large sound team - 6 people in total -
but of those 6, it was this guy here, Taro Bando, who was in charge of the game’s sound effects.
He went out and recorded hundreds of bugs, footprint sounds and more to bring the world
of this game to life. At one point, Bando even put up a sign on the door of the recording studio
which said, “Do Not Disturb: Insect Collecting”. And one day, Taro Bando decided that he wanted
to have the animal inhabitants of this village speak out loud, in Japanese, again because
of the game’s theme of communication. Now, it’s actually a lot easier to synthesise Japanese
speech compared to English. Take this letter here, “ka”. Whatever word it’s in, it will always be
pronounced the same way - “ka”. But in English, the letter “A” could be pronounced “ah”, “ar”,
“uh”, “ay” and more! So for example, if you want to have a computer say the phrase, “Good morning”,
that’s pretty difficult - the computer has to figure out, “ok, is this good or jood or gooood or
something completely different”. It’s pretty hard. But with the Japanese phrase “ohayou”,
which also means good morning, all you have to do is record one of every
sound from the Japanese alphabet, and then play them back in the order they
appear in that word. It's much easier! And so, Taro Bando began working on a simple
Japanese language synthesiser that he could use to have each animal read their dialogue out loud.
The first stage was to record every sound that appears within the Japanese alphabet. Now, as for
who’s voice Taro Bando recorded, that’s a bit of a mystery - it might’ve been himself, or another
member of Animal Crossing’s development team - or it could’ve been someone else entirely within
Nintendo. That’s a bit of a mystery, I’m afraid. But after the sounds were recorded,
the next step was to play those sounds back in the right order so that they
sounded like words. With that done, Taro Bando's synthesiser was complete! It ended
up sounding pretty good. The only problem was that the characters would end up speaking too
quickly. Taro Bando explained, “this is a game where messages are also displayed in text when you
talk to someone, and we couldn’t get the timing right between the synthesised voices and the text
subtitles—they would end up speaking too fast.” Which left him with a dilemma - if he couldn’t
get the characters to speak at the correct speed, but he still wanted them to speak out loud, then
what should he do? In an interview, he said, “We thought about it for a while and realised that
since these are animals, there was no need to make them talk like normal humans. Maybe it wasn’t so
important to know exactly what they were saying; maybe all the players needed was to know the
feel and tone of what they were talking about.” And so, Taro Bando decided to flip the problem
on its head - rather than slowing down the synthesiser to match the text speed, he actually
sped it up even further, to the point that the characters would speak so quickly that you
couldn’t even understand what they were saying! It meant that Animal Crossing’s villagers ended
up having this really unique way of speaking which still conveyed the tone of their dialogue, but
didn’t bother trying to be understood by players. This new language was known as “Animalese”.
But while Bando was working on this language, he didn’t actually tell the other developers
of the game. It was kept as a secret! He explained, “When the Animalese in
Animal Crossing was first implemented, I wanted to surprise the developers so I
decided to not tell them about it. One day, the developers all said things like
“Are they… saying something?” “It kind of sounds like Japanese……”
and they looked really shocked.” And so at first, the rest of the development team
weren’t completely on board with this strange approach to Animal speech. But according to Bando,
“We said that “Even if nobody knows what they’re saying, it’s fine! They’re all animals anyway!”
and made the easygoing decision to officially implement it in the game. It was an approach
that was allowed only because it was this game.” So, that's how Animalese ended up being added to the Japanese version of Animal Crossing. So, what happened next? Well, during Animal Crossing's development, Nintendo was so happy with Animalese that they actually filed a
patent for the technology behind it! It was filed by Taro Bando in 2000, and describes a
method of synthesising Japanese speech. So, if any other companies copy Animalese in
their games, Nintendo’s coming for them! And so, throughout the years, Animalese has
become a staple of the Animal Crossing games! In fact, the only time that the villagers have
spoken using actual Japanese rather than this weird, synthesised version was in 2006, when an
animated movie based on the Animal Crossing games was released in Japan. In that movie, actual
voice actors provide the voices of the Animal Crossing characters, which is probably for
the best. But in everything other than that, this Animalese can be heard. Which I think
is really cool! The language came about by accident - Taro Bando couldn’t get his speech
synthesiser to play at the right speed. But because of that, he was forced to invent
something much more interesting and memorable. Hey, thanks so much for watching! If
you liked this video, I think you’d really enjoy my video about how Isabelle was
created. It’s a pretty interesting story, I think. And a huge thanks to
both Alex R and ObservingTrains who helped with the translation for
this video. So until next week, bye!
