Famous actors doing voice actor work

People who make their living doing voice work are truly impressive individuals.

They may seem like they have "easy jobs," because they can sometimes do their work in their pajamas without even leaving their homes, and often get paid handsomely for it.

However, depending on what kind of voice actors they are, they may have to master dozens of different voices, and be able to produce them on cue. Not only that, but if they do recurring characters, they have to make sure they can get the voice exactly right from the last time they did it, and then again for every other time they do it in the future, regardless of how much older they get. (Just think of the Simpsons voice actors, who have been doing the same voices -- sometimes a dozen each -- for a quarter century.)

They also have the difficult challenge of losing a lot of work to "normal" actors. That's where the big animated movies come in. Because the studio needs to make as much money on these movies as possible, they cast a lot of recognizable faces (er, voices) as the leads in these movies.

It would stand to reason, then, that audiences want to hear the actual, default speaking voices they are so accustomed to hearing from these "normal" actors. That's why I find a trio of animated movies I've seen recently so interesting: They feature name actors doing voices that are not their own. In these scenarios, the studios are essentially paying name actors to disguise their trademark speaking voices -- to do the work that a good voice actor usually does.

The first was The Pirates! The Band of Misfits, which it seems like I am talking about almost constantly on the blog these days. Although there are a number of actors "doing themselves" in this movie -- most notably Martin Freeman, Salma Hayek and Jeremy Piven -- the lead actor, Hugh Grant, is up to something different. The voice he's producing as the Pirate Captain is Grant-like, in that it has a few of his trademark affectations, but it is clearly not just Hugh Grant doing Hugh Grant. He's raised the timber of his voice in a way I can't put my finger on. Sometimes, he sounds so unlike Grant that I actually went online to determine if a different actor provided the voice for the British/Australian release of the movie (which is crazy, because Grant himself is British and the pirates are voiced by Brits in the American version I saw last year -- with the exception of Piven and Hayek, I mean).

Then it was The Croods, in which Ryan Reynolds has somehow made himself sound like a teenager. The movie features Emma Stone, an "actual" teenager (in terms of the roles she's still able to play, anyway), as a cavegirl, and Reynolds' character as her caveboy love interest. The role shouts out for someone like Zac Efron, yet Reynolds got the job for his ability to make himself sound like a Zac Efron type. I've always admired Reynolds' ability to do voices, showcased most notably by the spot-on Australian accent he has done on Saturday Night Live (among other places, I'm sure).

The third was yesterday morning, when my son was watching his copy of Alpha and Omega. I actually watched that one with him all the way through about a month ago, and afterward noted that Christina Ricci did the voice for one of the wolves. Since the movie was already over, I couldn't remember exactly whether it sounded like Ricci's voice or not, but on this time through I noted that she was doing a bit of a "baby girl" voice. I could recognize Ricci hidden in their somewhere, but she definitely didn't think she had been hired just to play Christina Ricci. She was kind of doing a Betty Boop version of herself.

If you are one of these actors, I can understand the desire to make the task more challenging for yourself. If you don't have to worry about your facial expressions or your body language, you want the craft of acting to come through in some other way, and what better way than having to master your line readings in a different voice? You could say it's the difference between someone who takes the job as a real acting assignment and someone who just shows up to get paid.

I don't as much understand the studios' motivation to let the actors do a voice, or let the director direct the actors to do a voice. Except that it's probably very simple: The actor is primarily being hired to lend his or her name to the movie poster and the advertising campaign. Once the audience has paid their admission, it doesn't matter if they sound like themselves or like Kermit the Frog.

Kermit the Frog was just a random choice there, but that character may actually illustrate the ultimate challenge to the good voice actor: that he/she is replaceable. After all, Jim Henson was the original voice of Kermit, but Henson died in 1990. Since then, the character has been voiced by a guy named Steve Whitmire. I can't really tell the difference. I guess the more famous a character is, the more talented voice actors are going to have a great impression of that character.

Now, if Ryan Reynolds took over the voice of Kermit ... then I'd be really impressed.

Not as impressed as I'd be if Ricci took over the voice, though.

Pirates vs. zombies

The early 21st century was a big time for both pirates and zombies.

You could argue that Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later revived our interest in zombie movies in 2002, and then the following year, Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl made pirates hip again. (If they were ever hip in the first place.)

Why, then, have zombie movies been allowed to proliferate without seeming to owe a debt to either Boyle or zombie godfather George A. Romero, but every time we see a new pirate-related property, we feel like it's an attempt to ride on Pirates of the Caribbean's coattails?

These may seem like rather outdated thoughts, since there is neither a new zombie movie nor a new pirate movie acting as a news peg, but I've been thinking them because my son has been watching The Pirates! Band of Misfits every couple days since Christmas, when he got it as a present.

I quite enjoy The Pirates, which is a big step up from non-Wallace & Gromit Aardman movies like Chicken Run and Flushed Away, but I do recall thinking at the time it came out that it was a rather too-obvious attempt to capitalize on Disney's Caribbean-led pirate rejuvenation. Perhaps being a rival studio of Disney -- albeit a significantly less powerful rival -- made the inevitable comparison seem all the more inevitable.

But it was the zombie thing that caused me to judge that comparison unfair. Did Disney take out the patent on the pirate movie? Certainly not. People can and should make whatever pirate movies they want to make without having to bear the burden of owing something to Caribbean, a series that only really has one good entry. (I actually didn't see On Stranger Tides, but the critical consensus on it was not great.)

Certainly, zombie movies exist in whatever forms they want to exist. One of my more delightful surprises of 2013, for example, was Warm Bodies, which sees a teen zombie as its lovelorn protagonist/ narrator. On the opposite end of the spectrum there was World War Z, a surprise only because it wasn't terrible, in which the zombies are like mindless swarming insects. The zombie movie genre allows you to go off in all different directions.

And here's where we see the reason why zombie movies have exploded and pirate movies have basically disappeared from the landscape, not to mention the reason why comparing zombies and pirates in the first place was only useful to the extent that they had a revival around the same time. People continue to want to see zombies in both traditional and non-traditional forms, while pirates all assume more or less the same form. And that pirate form will always be unduly influenced by puffy shirts and affected speech patterns and other silly elements that leave the genre perennially associated with comedy and children's fare.

I do sometimes wonder, though, why we couldn't have seen other types of pirate movies. Why couldn't you have a pirate noir, where characters are double-crossing each other aboard a pirate ship, resulting in a suspenseful game of wits? Why not a gritty pirate movie done in a realistic indie style? Why not a pirate movie in the Quentin Tarantino mold, violent and funny and full of pop culture references?

I may be answering my own questions here.

While I'm waiting for these movies to materialize, I look forward to the seven or eight new zombie movies we are sure to see in 2014.

Combo pack strikeout

My son has so many different ways he can get entertainment content delivered to him, I haven't been so worried lately about keeping our video library populated.

However, a three-disc combo pack of kids movies recently made me reconsider, and since I saw it during my Christmas shopping season, I gave it to him as a Christmas present.

The trick with these combo packs is to like all three of the movies. Since they are often thrown together somewhat randomly -- by studio, or by theme, but only generally -- it's no easy task. You might love two of them, but a rotten third spoils the whole basket.

So it was the unique combination of three worthy kids movies -- ones we didn't already own, at that -- that caused me to pull the trigger here.

As you have certainly divined from the art to this post, the three in this particular pack were Open Season, Surf's Up and Monster House. I like all three of these movies, and on a good day, I might almost say I love them.

Finding three movies you like is just the first part, though. The price also has to be right. At $13, the price was about as right as it gets in Australia.

Since my son watched the entirety of The Pirates! Band of Misfits on Christmas day, I was all the more heartened about a potential Boxing Day viewing of one of these other three. So when he tired of the normal Thursday morning repertoire on ABC 4 Kids, I was there at the ready.

My first mistake was letting him choose which one to watch.

At this point I should probably tell you that although I do like all three of these movies, that's quite a different thing from thinking they're all appropriate for a kid who just turned three years and four months on Christmas.

The one I had my doubts about was Monster House. It's animated alright, but it's pretty intense for kids. I remembered the titular house contorting itself into all kinds of menacing shapes, its front door a gaping maw ready to eat little children.

My son falls into the category of "little children."

Needless to say, that was the one he chose.

"This is a scary one," he said, before anything scary had even happened.

Uh oh.

"Should we watch something else?"

"No?"

My son doesn't have an Australian accent yet, but he has started saying the word "no" as if it were a question. And though the tone may sound uncertain, the meaning is anything but. He liked the fact that it was a little bit scary.

Then, actual scary things started happening. I remembered the house, but I had forgotten that a creepy neighbor, voiced by Steve Buscemi, is also in this movie. And he's not a fake creepy neighbor, like the creepy neighbor with a heart of gold in Home Alone (which my wife and I watched on Christmas night, her for the first time). He's the real McCoy. In the first three minutes of the movie, he screams at a little girl and rips her tricycle in half with his bare hands. He's not fucking around.

Again I asked my son if he wanted to watch the one with the penguins instead. Again came the questioning statement "no."

The next time the neighbor shows up, he holds the lead character (a little boy) up in the air and shakes him, then dies of what would seem to be a heart attack. "This is getting worse every minute," I thought. I already envisioned where this movie would go once the house itself -- something inanimate, inhuman, and therefore much more frightening -- started acting up. I was just asking for three weeks worth of nightmares.

We were just tiptoeing up to the edge of that kind of stuff -- I believe it was the scene where the house's front lawn "consumes" an empty beer bottle -- when my son said "I think we need to watch the penguin one now."

Whew.

So in went Surf's Up. In the clear, right?

No. See, surfing is scary ... didn't you know?

I don't know whether it was residual fear from Monster House, or whether my son was thrown by the faux documentary style of this movie, or because the movie's initial surfing takes place in the blue darkness of Antarctica, but Surf's Up was now pronounced to be scary as well.

"Okay, how about this one?" I indicated to the third picture on the package, which showed forest animals looking terrified -- but in a way I assumed would translate as funny to my son.

He nodded.

Of course, one of the first things that happens in Open Season is that a bear (voice of Martin Lawrence) tries (in vain) to scare a park ranger. Then my wife waking up distracted my son, and after an exchange with her, he told her that he didn't want to watch this scary movie.

Strike three.

It makes a certain sense. He knows that the movie that scared him is inside this case, the same case as the other two. He may not understand, therefore, that the one with the surfing penguins or the one with the flooming bear are actually different movies.

So in the end, it was not the perfect three-pack combo -- Monster House, the one that interested him the most, was also the rotten apple that spoiled the rest of the barrel.

Well, we'll always have The Pirates! Band of Misfits.

******************

I was all set to leave things there, but I have to come clean and admit that it's now December 27th, and my son is watching Surf's Up in the other room. 

I've also figured out what two of the three movies have in common, in two different ways. Surf's Up and Open Season are both from Sony Pictures Animation, and Surf's Up and Monster House both feature animated characters voiced by Napoleon Dynamite's Jon Heder.

I don't know what Monster House and Open Season have in common.

Cartoon characters seeking trophies

I couldn't help but notice a thematic similarity between the two animated movies I watched this past weekend, Disney's Wreck-It Ralph and Aardman's The Pirates! Band of Misfits.

The following analysis contains some spoilers, so if you haven't seen these movies, you may choose to abstain from this post. 

Both movies feature a protagonist who is "bad," whether he likes it or not -- the villain in a classic video game and a pirate captain. The video game villain actually wants to be perceived as less bad, while the pirate captain wishes people would see him as more vicious than he really is. In each case they are driven toward a talisman that they believe will validate them in the eyes of their peers. Wreck-It Ralph just wants to win a medal, any medal, while the Pirate Captain (that is his only given name) has his sights set on the prestigious Pirate of the Year Award.

Earning these trophies, they believe, will help them get out of the shadow of a rival. Ralph is naturally jealous of Fix-It Felix, the hero and namesake of the game, who is bestowed a medal as part of game play, while Ralph (quite diametrically opposite) must go sleep in a pile of trash at the end of the day. The Pirate Captain, on the other hand, has been trying to surpass the exploits of several rival pirate captains, most notably one so fierce and grandiose that he makes his entrance by emerging from the belly of a whale, whose every move he apparently controls.

Determined to reverse the natural order of things, each protagonist embarks on a quixotic quest into unfamiliar territory -- Ralph into the first-person shooter game Hero's Duty, and the Pirate Captain into 19th century London, where Queen Victoria is known for her zero tolerance policy toward pirates. In both cases the hero threatens the existence of his status quo by going after this elusive trophy. Ralph's departure from Fix-It Felix gets the game slapped with an Out of Order sign, which is the natural precursor to it being unplugged for good. And the Pirate Captain is exposing his whole crew to being lynched at the hands of the bloodthirsty queen.

When each hero does get his hands on the trophy, it necessitates a betrayal of a trusted sidekick. Ralph, after getting and then losing his medal, is in the position to get it back, but his new friend Vanellope thinks it's at the cost of selling her out. (It's more complicated than that, but Ralph does feel some guilt over the arrangement.) Meanwhile, the Pirate Captain is bribed by the queen with the kind of booty that will surely win him Pirate of the Year, but he has to relinquish his beloved "parrot" Polly, actually revealed to be a dodo.

Realizing his culpability in what has transpired and the fact that there were unintended consequences to his actions, both Ralph and the Pirate Captain lead daring third-act rescues that will assert once and for all their true capacity for good, while risking everything they have. And since I don't need to also spoil the end of these movies, I will leave off this comparison there.

I guess good story structure isn't that different the world over, but it's still good -- I really liked both films.

Wreck-It Ralph is the best animated movie I've seen since Tangled, pure and simple. I guess it's not such a coincidence that these are both Disney ventures under the watchful eye of Pixar founder John Lasseter. Lasseter simply knows a good story and knows how to tell it. I place this slightly below Tangled in terms of the immediate sense of joy it created in me, but only slightly. Wreck-It Ralph is an unqualified home run.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits is not by any means at that level, but it's miles ahead of the previous foray into CG from Aardman Animation that I saw: the terrible Flushed Away. I still prefer when Aardman uses claymation, but I also understand this is an extremely laborious approach to animation, and the animators managed to make the images feel more tactile here than they felt in Flushed Away. Plus, the details of the pirate world are wonderful, the script is smart, and the movie has a couple classic Aardman chase scenes.

Now, off to vanquish several rival bloggers in my impossible quest for Blogger of the Year.