Who is that one voice actor who seems to do every spiky-haired anime hero’s voice? They made Stinkoman from the Homestar Runner web cartoons sound like him. He might be Goku from Dragon Ball Z, but he pretty much shows up in every dubbed anime.
Some other cartoons still fall back on insiders to do the voices. Creator Seth McFarlane does the voices of Peter, Stewie, and Brian (the closest to his own voice) on Family Guy, and co-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone still do the majority of voices on South Park.
Justice League Unlimited seems to have a blend of solid voice-actors and bigger-name talent (including several Joss Whedon regulars) doing voices. In recent seasons, they’ve featured Michael Rosenbaum as Flash AND Deadshot, Jeffrey Combs as The Question, Amy Acker as Huntress, Morena Baccarin as Black Canary, Nathan Fillion as Vigilante, Adam Baldwin as Rick Flagg AND Jonah Hex, Dennis Farina as Wildcat, Jason Hervey and Fred Savage (quarreling brothers from The Wonder Years) as quarreling brothers Hawk and Dove, George Eads as Captain Atom, John C. McGinley as the Atom, Tom Everett Scott as Booster Gold, CCH Pounder as Amanda Waller, J.K. Simmons as General Eiling, Jason Bateman as Hermes… this in edition to the carryovers from the Batman and Superman cartoons like Kevin Conroy as Batman and Clancy Brown as Lex Luthor.
Not sure who you mean - Christopher Sabat was the voice of Goku (and many of the male characters on Dragonball Z) for most of its run, and he’s done a lot of other stuff. Probably him.
I get the feeling (though I’d be delighted if someone “in the know” could correct me here) that voice actors – that is to say actors whose performances are heard but never seen – are somewhat low on the Hollywood totem pole. Unless, of course, they’re someone like Mel Blanc or Daws Butler or Paul Frees, all of whom were in the industry for decades. Or the cast of The Simpsons, most of whom (remarkably talented though they be) owe their recogonition factor to the show’s longevity. While every now and then a well-known actor might deign to provide his or her voice for an animated feature, there was seldom much publicity about it. In most Disney features, for example, the voice cast is not listed in the opening credits. And may be difficult to decipher in the closing credits.
One interesting exception was Disney’s Robin Hood, which not only had some recognizable names in the cast (Phil Harris, Peter Ustinov, Terry-Thomas, Andy Devine, Roger Miller) but listed them in the opening credits.
If I could pinpoint one movie that turned this whole trend around, it would be Toy Story. I recall hearing the Billy Crystal was asked if he would audition for it, and he expressed the opinion that voicework was far beneath him. After the movie came out he regretted his decision, and begged Pixar to sign him up for their next production.
Of course, now that voice acting is “cool” with screen actors, it means that a lot of new features will have all-star casts and leave the hard-working voice acting professionals out in the cold. C’est la guerre.
I always consider The Jungle Book as the first Disney film to really capitalize on its casting. In addition to Harris, it had an Oscar-winner (George Sanders), an actor with a hit TV series (Sebastian Cabot), a jazz legend (Louis Prima), as well as the regular Disney stable (most noticably Sterling Holloway).
I think Aladdin might have been the start of the “get a star to be a voice-actor” trend. Robin Williams, as fantastic as he was, was not, AFAIK, a voice actor. It was a few years before Toy Story came out, but Aladdin was the first animated movie I remember as touting itself on the merits of the star doing voice work.
Voice actors in Japan (called seiyuu, which translates literally to “superb sound”) are celebrities in their own right. Of course, a lot of them are typecast (Megumi Hayashibara, most prolific female seiyuu, has a long career of playing hypergenkikawaii characters, but she’s also very convincing as whoever she plays), but a lot more of them really put themselves in the role in a way that sounds realistic.
Maybe I’m a little biased, but I’ve always found dubs to be earbleedingly bad. The voice actors are either flat or melodramatic. (One exception, though, is Amelia of Slayers. I think the dub version sounds more true to her personality.)
Don’t forget the excellent animated series Gargoyles, which besides Keith David (who also voiced the title character for Spawn), also featured Ed Asner, John Rhys-Davies, Frank Welker, and the great Tim Curry. Famously, lots of other characters were voiced by Star Trek veterans: Martina Sirtis (Deanna Troi) as Demona, Jonathan Frakes (Riker) as Xanatos, Kate Mulgrew (Janeway) as Titania, Brent Spiner (Data) as Puck, Michael Dorn (Worf) as Coldstone, Avery Brooks (Sisko) as Nokkar, Nichelle Nichols (Uhuru) as Diane Maza, among many many more. Full list available here .
Ian Corlett? He gets this sort of role quite often, and was Goku in early episodes. He was also Megaman, I think he did a voice on transformers, as well as quite a few other characters.
I watch current cartoons, and there is one actress that I can pretty much always tell that it is her doing the voice - Grey DeLisle (I did have to look up her name).
I also had a hard time with John Di Maggio as Brother Blood on Teen Titans because I was so used to him playing an incompetent villain on Kim Possible.
The ironic part is that the only reason Pixar got Hanks and Allen for Toy Story at all was because they were relatively unknowns when they were first signed, and therefore available for cheap.
As to the OP, any voice actor whose voice derails my suspension of disbelief away from the story is a no-no in my book. Sarah Vowell in The Incredibles is a perfect (counter)example; you’re too wrapped up in her portrayal of an insecure teen girl that you don’t know (nor care) if her voice is famous outside of the movie.
An animation can succeed without any dialogue or voice acting at all. If the acting sucks, no dialogue might have been better. But, if your animation is limited or simply bad, voice acting may be the main way of getting characterization and emotion across. This is why it’s a shame that anime dubs often put so little work into voice acting. These are the same shows that are often limited and rely on the pose and the voice to get everything across. It’s amazing how much better the acting is on Spongebob Squarepants than One Piece. Not sure why that is, although I’m sure quite a bit of it is the fault of the voice director and limited time, since I’ve seen the same voice actors do amazing and lousy jobs, depending on whether a project is a tv show or a movie.
This can’t be right. By the ime Toy Story came out Hanks was a major star. Even if they worked on it for ten year, he already had Splash and The Ma with One Re Shoe out by 1985. Running up to the 1985 release of Toy Story you had Big (1988), **Bonfire of the Vanities **(1990), a League of Theit=r Own (1992), Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994).
Tim Allen had been in Home Improvement since 1991.
They cast Tom Hanks while he was making Philadelphia, so that was before his first Oscar and before he became a superstar in Forrest Gump, even though they both came out before Toy Story was completed. He was a known star, but not the heavyweight he has become, so in that sense he was a) easy to get in touch with, and b) had medium level salary expectations.
Christ, no one’s mentioned Kath Soucie, yet? Never thought I’d see the day…
And the wikipedia article on voice actors notes that the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformers:_The_MovieTransformers movie did feature the voice of Orson Welles back in 1986, though I don’t know how hard they were marketing that point. (My guess: not a whole lot.) The other “name” actors who did some of the voices might be a different story, however.
It will of course depend on how very much the voice actor sucks of course (for instance, I could only stand watching the English redubbing of Vampire Miyu for a few seconds before hitting eject.) But if everyone is “okay” it doesn’t make a big difference so long as the story is a fairly simple, strong story. But, for instance, the movie The Wings of Honeamise and the OAV Macross Plus I didn’t like until I saw the Japanese versions. Both of those feature characters who, presented wrong, become easy to dislike or not care about and the stories are such that it’s fairly easy to dislike if the presentation is bad.
Having watched the Japanese dub of Mulan in the theaters here, I can definitely say that I have no desire to watch the American version.
“Neither Hanks nor Tim Allen (who was cast as macho superhero Buzz Lightyear during the second season of Home Improvement) made Toy Story for the money. They were paid slightly more than voice-over union scale by the day.”
– “‘Toy’ Wonder”, Entertainment Weekly, 12/8/1995