I wouldn’t trust him if I were you. I haven’t seen Princess Monoke but Fantastic Mr. Fox was indeed fantastic, one of my favorite films from last year. You may or may not like it, but judge for yourself.
Exactly. Wes Anderson directed the voices and they were perfect, absolutely perfect for the characters. I’m sorry for the OP that he let whatever his problem was ruin a wonderful film for him, but it was his problem, not the voices or actors or direction.
No actor ever seens the animation their voice goes with. Animation is always done later, so as to let the performance be as natural and uninhibited as possible at the beginning of production. Trying to synch dialogue after-the-fact is the best way to get a limited and uninspired performance. Though they may not rattle off their lines like Krusty, virtually all voiceover performances consist of the actor in isolation with a script and a recording booth.
And for the record, I couldn’t disagree more with you about the fantastic Fantastic Mr. Fox. All the performances were dry, wry, and lovely.
Don’t forget The Kurrrgan and Sergeant Zim!
Let me take a crack at this by way of example.
Here’s a voice acting tour de force with Pat Carroll as Ursula in the Little Mermaid singing Poor Unfortunate Souls
for our purposes, you can probably get more from just the audio alone.
Here every note is hit perfectly from both dialogue and song and not one inflection or nuance is missed. Since the scene and the character both call for and equal sense of bravado and menace, I can’t imagine too many others pulling this off as triumphantly.
And this is why I thought Fantastic Mr. Fox sucked since the voice talent demonstrated none of these. I echoed the same sentiments as the OP in the thread devoted to reviews of the film that I am too lazy to find and repost here.
Good lord…that’s practically the modern VO pantheon right there…How’d you get that job? Why?
You’re comparing classic Disney with Wes Anderson. They both may be animated, but it’s still apples and oranges. I love both movies, but they’re in very different styles (and I don’t mean animation styles).
When it comes to Fanastic Mr. Foc, you really ought to see the “behind the scenes” DVD feature. The voice acting was anything *but *standard studio recordings. The actors were outside, running around, spitting things, eating, yelling, all in character. In one scene where Mr Fox has a conversation with his lawyer, George Clooney and Bill Murray acted the scene in a makeshift office. The end result is something that is very Wes Anderson and coherent with the rest of his movies.
As for the whole voice actors vs actors discussion, I think there has definitely been instances during the past years where actors were brought to a movie simply because they were big names, rather than appropriate talents for the job. The quintessential example of this would be Shark Tale, which indeed was a horrible movie from start to finish.
Movies like the ones weve seen from Pixar, typically involve actors that are so good at what they do that they can work with a different medium. But I think even then, it might be more attractive to lure in an actor like Ian Holm for merits and recognition than an unknown voice actor of comparable calibre.
Uh, o.k. then. The OP cites Fantastic Mr. Fox (apples) and then Pixar’s Shrek (oranges) so I’m not sure where you’re going with this.
If we’re evaluating just the vocal performance –as others have stated- it is shortsighted for filmmakers to think that if they can get Meryl Streep, Bill Murray!, GEORGE CLOONEY!!, then they have a can’t-miss success on their hands. I mean these guys can do anything, right? Where some no-name schlub like Pat Carroll isn’t even considered, I mean, who the hell is Pat Carroll?
As to determining what others like and don’t like, that is indeed comparing the tastes of apples and oranges.
Maybe that was a bad idea. None of the physical acting the performers were doing was going to show up on the screen. Anderson might have been better off putting them in front of a microphone and having them concentrate on giving the performances with just their voices.
A nitpick, but the Shrek series is made by Dreamworks not Pixar.
I’m a game designer at Sony. I work with external teams developing titles for the PS3 and PSP. Sometimes that involves casting or directing voice sessions.
We recorded Tara Strong and Tom Kane for the roles of the princess and the king in Fat Princess. Both were a pleasure to work with and extremely talented. Tara had to record all her dialog four times since the princess has four different weight states ranging from tiny to enormous – not an easy task for an actor to pull off. Imagine doing several hundred lines in character, then doing the same several hundred lines again in the same character but “slightly fatter”.
I once spent an excruciating two days in the studio with a “name” actor who hadn’t done voice work before. Oh, my God, what a nightmare! Sitting there in the booth all by himself with no one to play off, he couldn’t get into character to save his life. Every line would run into double digit takes and there was hardly any variation from take to take – they were all crappy in the same way, meaning that we couldn’t even cobble together a performance in post. We eventually had to rerecord his entire role with a professional voice actor.
I’ve mentioned him before but one person whose voice work impresses me is Dave Willis. He was one of the producers of Aqua Teen Hunger Force but he also did the voices of Meatwad, Carl, and Ignignokt the Mooninite - three completely distinct voices.
Except in the case of Anime, which is always animated first and voiced after, even by Miazaki. I’ve been baffled why they can’t use the technique pioneered on Steamboat Willy.
That’s really cool! Also why be coy? Who’s the “name actor”??