Brown Blog Films

Following on from Richie’s recent blog about there being too much talking in animation, it kinda got me thinking about the way voice overs have changed….how they are used and more importantly, how they are cast.

Traditional voice artists can not only act using just the voice to convey emotions, but they know how to use it to its full potential. Many started out doing a lot of public radio drama/commercial spots whilst also going into TV & film. Although we didn’t know it at the time, guys like Mel Blanc (who is said to have voiced over 400 characters in 5000 cartoons throughout his career, including pretty much every Loony Tunes character) and Daws Butler (Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear) were the voice of many a childhood.

Nowadays celebrities are nearly always cast in the lead roles with voice-artists rarely getting a look in. Film actors are faces people recognise, adore and worship, and film studios react no differently. They buy into ready-made celebrity personalities that they can attach to characters. How often have you heard directors saying “we wrote this part especially for …….”? It strikes me as a slightly lazy form of character development. Plus any of these stars can walk into any chat-show and plug the new show to millions of prospective movie-goers.

Is there someone to blame? Well Disney have been casting celebrities of the day for a long long time but the most prolific offender has to be a wacky little tv show called The Simpsons.  The show is well known for its celebrity appearances and often make headlines because ot it – remember the hype around Ricky Gervais’s guest appearance? (not forgetting that day-in, day-out, the show is carried by very talented voice artists too!)

So is stunt casting money/publicity driven? I was born with a healthy dose of suspicion so yes.  I’m not trying to take sides because i can see why they do it – they want a face to make sure the picture sells – and some of the celebrities do get it spot on, eg Robin Williams as the Genie in Aladdin, The Incredibles was well cast (with Craig T Nelson as Mr Incredible & director Brad Bird as Edna Mode my personal highlights),Tom Hanks as Woody in Toy Story, Isaac Hayes in South Park, Billy Crystal and John Goodman were a great double team in Monsters Inc.

But when its bad, its just plain annoying!  Sometimes its hard to take a character seriously if he sounds exactly like super anti-terrorist agent Jack Bauer, and especially when Kiefer sounds like he’s just plodding along reading the script.  Just like animation can portray emotions all on its own, a voice track should be able to do the same.  So in reality would a voice-over artist have delivered an inferior performance? No. A better performance? Hmm, just maybe….

Is the art of voice acting a dying speciality? Well no. There’s all The Simpsons crew and people like Seth MacFarlane (who records a lot of the Family Guy voices on the fly, regularly voices characters in Robot Chicken and also played the voice of Johann Strauus in Hellboy 2).  To my surprise, a lot of the robot cast from the recent Transformers movies are voice over artists or, without being disrespectful, little known actors (I know, its not a true cartoon but for a Hollywood blockbuster it did surprise me!).  The cast includes Peter Cullen who played Optimus Prime in the original 1980’s cartoon and voiced Eeyore in Winnie the Pooh.  Jesse Harnell has worked on the The Simpsons, Animaniacs, Cars, Robots, Finding Nemo, Rugrats, Toy Story etc (he’s done the lot!)….oh, and Charlie Adler has been a Smurf!  Of course they also cast Hugo Weaving…

…..but there’s quite a bit of audio trickery before he sounds like Megatron so i think the sound designer should get a Hooray! for that…