I think it’s fairly well known that Bart Simpson is voiced by a woman – Nancy Cartwright. IIRC, Cartwright also voices a couple of minor male characters on The Simpsons – Ralph Wiggum, either Rod or Todd Flanders, and some others.
I just recently learned that Bobby Hill was also voiced by a woman, Pamela Adlon.
On Bob’s Burgers, two female characters are actually voiced by men. Tina Belcher is voiced by Dan Mintz, and Linda Belcher is voiced by John Roberts.
So that got me wondering just how common it is for an animated character to be voiced by an actor who is not the same gender as the character they’re portraying. And is it more common for women to provide the voiced for male characters, or vice versa? My wild guess is that it is, just because it seems more likely that a woman could convincingly sound like a young boy, but less likely the other way around.
Has modern audio plug-in technology affected any of this? Today, all it takes to make a voice sound male or female, young or old, is the turning of a knob up or down.
Traditionally, it’s been much more common for female vocal performers to do the voices of male characters (particularly for pre-teen boy characters), than it has been for male vocal performers to provide the voices of female characters, generally.
Look at the voice cast for the 1990s animated series Rugrats. The main original characters were three little boys – Tommy Pickles, Chuckie Finster, and Phil DeVille – and two little girls – Lil DeVille and Angela Pickles – and all of them were voiced by women (Kath Soucie voiced both of the twins, Phil and Lil).
There was a character on South Park called Ms. Choksondik who was voiced by Trey Parker, but you could clearly tell it was a man voicing a female character for humorous effect. Several other minor female characters have also been voiced by Parker and Matt Stone on the show.
By manipulaing the position of the lips, larynx, jaw, and tongue actors or singers can raise or lower specific vocal formants to some extent. My guess would be, the natural voices of both adult men and adult women are lower than children’s voices, but women are closer so imitating a child’s voice would be less of a stretch.
Apparently, in South Park, they use actual kids (children of the production team) for voices of the really little kids, like Kyle’s little brother Ike.
Boo in Monsters Inc was voiced by Mary Gibbs, the five year old daughter of one of the movie’s artists.
Catbug on Bravest Warriors is voiced by Sam Lavagnino, who was six years old when the series started. Lavagnino has also voiced Rolly on Puppy Dog Pals, starting when he was eleven.
Mel Blanc was the original voice of Woody Woodpecker. He also originated Woody’s iconic laugh, which he previously used for Happy Rabbit, a precursor of Bugs Bunny.
This is just me, but outside of gender-bending (effeminate, cross-dressing, being trans, etc.), I think male characters 13 and older should be voiced by actual guys. Good thins there is the mute button for that when watching subbed anime.
In The Gummi Bears the character of Cubbi Gummi, the young boy bear, was voiced by Noelle North (who also voiced Princess Calla). Most other characters were played by actors of the same gender, aside from some fantasy creatures of indeterminate sex.
Avatar: The Last Airbender was unusual in that most of the young principals were close to their characters’ ages, at least at first. The story spanned about nine months while the three seasons were three years.
The two biggest exceptions were Grey DeLisle (Azula) and Dante Basco (Zuko), both in their early 30s while their characters were 15 and 16 respectively. Perhaps evil sounds older.