Would you spend money to see an animated movie starring Nicole Jaffe and Henry Corden? Probably not, because you’ve never heard of either of them.
Oh, but you’ve heard them.
Jaffe voiced Velma on Scooby Doo, while Corden vocalized for Fred Flintstone. Their voices are familiar, but not well-known enough for the producers of most of today’s big budget cartoons.
“If they were doing a half-hour Flintstone show today, they’d still go with me,” said Corden in 1999, “but for a motion picture, even an animated one, they’d go with a celebrity to play Fred, because they need to sell the picture.”
It boils down to bucks —George Clooney as the Fantastic Mr. Fox will put more bums in seats than Henry Corden. “I hate it but I understand it,” Corden said.
Luckily marquee actors like voice work— the hours are good and you don’t have to shave.
Marlon Brando was so taken with the easy money of voice acting he suggested doing the role of Superman’s Jor-El in voice-over, with his onscreen character portrayed as a glowing, levitating green bagel. That one didn’t pan out but he took further audio-only roles, including his final gig performing an old lady voice in the unreleased Big Bug Man.
Other star turns haven’t been so ignoble. Orson Welles thrilled a generation of tweens as the voice of planet-gobbler Unicron in Transformers: The Movie and Angela Lansbury was Mrs. Potts , the perkiest teapot ever in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
In the old days, Disney frequently used celebrity voices to augment their cartoons — remember Bob Newhart in The Rescuers?—but the trend kicked into overdrive when Robin Williams’s hyperkinetic jabbering stole the show in Aladdin.
It was a tour de force performance and Williams’s star power helped push the box office past $200,000,000, an animated film first. Since then Disney has made a habit of regularly hiring well known actors to voice their characters—“They properly recognized that you couldn’t send an animated character out there to Entertainment Tonight to promote your movie,” said animation producer Fred Seibert–but sometimes big name talent can work against the part they’re playing. Can you hear James Earl Jones as Mufasa without thinking of Darth Vader? Me neither.
Perhaps that’s why the House of Mouse went a different way with The Princess and the Frog, premiering this month on The Movie Network. They kept things fresh by casting Keith David, Bruno Campos and Anika Noni Rose.
“I was so wanting to be a Disney voice my entire life,” says Rose, the voice of Disney’s first African-American princess in The Princess and the Frog, “and I would have been more than happy to play anything. Is there a blade of grass? Do you need it to whistle? Because I’ve got that.”
She’s a good actor, but hardly a household name and that lack of familiarity allowed her character to live and breathe and not simply be an extension of an already well-known celebrity persona.
In animation circles the debate rages on about the pros and cons of casting big name actors versus voice only performers, but there is one thing everyone agrees on. “It’s not just about the voice, it’s about the character under the role,” says voiceover actor M.J. Lallo.
“It’s not just standing in the studio doing funny voices, it’s acting,” adds casting director Michael Hack. “It’s more realistic CG animation and more realistic voices. You need to be trained and have instincts for real acting. If you don’t bring anything as an actor, the animation suffers.”
Voxography: Ten Great Voice Actors
1. The Man of a Thousand Voices Mel Blanc was best known as the voice behind Bugs Bunny, but he also vocalized for Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety & Sylvester and Yosemite Sam. He supplied so many voices in films that Jack Benny once joked, “There are only five real people in Hollywood. Everybody else is Mel Blanc.”
2. June Foray, best known for voicing Rocket “Rocky” J. Squirrel, was praised by animation kingpin Chuck Jones who said, “Mel Blanc is the male June Foray.”
3. Andy Serkis says he used the sound of his three cats clearing fur balls out of their throats to develop the inspired voices he produced for Gollum and Smeagol in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
4. Paul Lynde played off his irascible personality to play Templeton the Rat in Charlotte’s Web. Tony Randall was originally cast in the role, but when the director asked him to sound more “nasal” Randall suggested they get Paul Lynde instead.
5. Ben Burtt in WALL-E makes the list for creating the blips and beeps that make Pixar’s Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, or WALL-E character, such a charmer.
6. Despite an acting career that spans almost 70 years Peter Sallis is best known as the Yorkshire accented voice of eccentric inventor Wallace in the Wallace & Gromit films.
7. Named a Disney Legend in 1991 Sterling Holloway voiced dozens of characters for the Mouse House including the endearingly raspy voiced Winnie the Pooh. Ironically the actor best known for his distinctive voice made his silver screen debut in silent movies.
8. As the know-it-all Judith in Where the Wild Things Are Catherine O’Hara left behind her mimicry skills—remember her turn as Katharine Hepburn on SCTV?—to deliver a pure and lovely unaffected performance in her own voice.
9. As the swashbuckling Puss in Boots in the Shrek series Antonio Banderas is a scene stealer. He’s flirty—“I don’t know you,” he says to one comely cat, “but I’d like to.”—and daring with a flair for the dramatic.
10. In addition to writing and directing The Incredibles Brad Bird also cast himself in one of the film’s most memorable roles, the superhero costume designer and Edith Head look-a-like Edna “E” Mode.
It’s one thing to feel cut off from other people. It’s another thing to be alone thousands of miles above the earth.
A new film from Children of Men director Alfonso Cuarón does a great job of showing the isolation felt by two cosmonauts who, in the words of David Bowie, are “sitting in a tin can, far above the world.”
Gravity stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts who get pelted by a debris storm, comprised of bits and pieces of old satellites. With their space shuttle disabled and their communications offline and they are forced to become Space MacGyvers in order to survive.
Bullock and Clooney aren’t the first movienauts to be cut adrift in space. From animated films like WALL-E to epics like 2001: A Space Odyssey Hollywood has mined the vastness of space in some unforgettable movies.
In the film Moon Sam Rockwell is astronaut Sam Bell, a Lunar Industries employee living and working on a space station on a three year contract.
His job is to tend to machines that are “harvesting solar energy from the dark side of the moon” and providing almost 70% of earth with power. His only companion is a robot / cup holder named Gerty (voiced by the appropriately named Kevin Spacey) although he can receive taped messages from his wife Tess (Dominique McElligott). The loneliness of the job is broken, however, when he discovers that he may not be truly alone.
The comparisons to 2001 are obvious, made even more apparent by Spacey’s HAL-like delivery of his robot lines, but director Duncan Jones has simply used Kubrick’s film as a visual reference on his way to creating a unique and fascinating film. Another thing he borrowed from Kubrick and many other sci-fi films of the 60s and 70s is his emphasis on ideas rather than special effects. Michael Bay this ain’t.
One of the earliest alone-in-space movies came in 1950. Destination Moon is noted as the first Hollywood movie to contain scientific representations of space travel. The story involves a two-man journey to the fifth largest moon in the Solar System and the difficult decision to leave one behind. Heralded at the time for its realism, through today’s eyes it looks somewhat corny. For example: “I know one thing,” says a spacesick General Thayer (Tom Powers), “unless these pills work, space travel isn’t going to be… popular.”
Will and Jaden Smith are not only the stars of After Earth, the upcoming sci fi adventure film, they’re also Metro’s special Earth Day guests. On Monday April 22 the father and son will sit for an exclusive Q&A with Metro to discuss the earth’s future, the impact on the environment and advances in technology, transport and the media.
In the meantime, here’s a look at our future, as seen through the movie camera lens.
1.) Idiocracy takes place in a world ruled by advertising and commercialism where the average IQ has dropped into the low twenties. Private Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson), an average American frozen for 500 years as part of an experiment, is thawed and released into the year 2505. The world has changed, and now he’s the smartest man in earth.
Best future earth line?: “I’m Secretary of State, brought to you by Carl’s Jr.”
2.) John Ritter and Meatloaf star in Americathon, a 1979 film set twenty years in the future. The USA is bankrupt and everyone gets around on bikes and roller skates because there’s no gas. To pay off a $400 million debt the president tries many things, including filling the Statue of Liberty with jellybeans for a “Guess How Many” contest before staging a wild telethon.
Best future earth line?: “Everyone all across the country was watching the telethon. From what was left of New York, to the first all-gay state, North Dakota. All eyes were glued to their sets…”
3.) In WALL-E, set in the year 2700, Earth is now a dystopian world rendered uninhabitable by wasteful and excessive humans who exited the planet centuries ago. A waste removal robot named WALL-E loves alone, until a search robot named EVE changes his life.
Best future earth line?: “Too much garbage in your face? There’s plenty of space out in space!”
4.) Silent Running is the story of the man (Bruce Dern) who tends all that is left of earth’s plant life in large interplanetary greenhouses. When he is ordered to destroy the foliage and return to earth, he takes another, deadly but more eco-friendly path.
Best future earth line?: “On Earth, everywhere you go, the temperature is 75 degrees. Everything is the same; all the people are exactly the same. Now what kind of life is that?”
5.) Children of Men takes place in 2027 after twenty years of human infertility has left society on the brink of collapse. Clive Owen plays a civil servant who helps a pregnant West African refugee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) escape the chaos and possibly save the world.
Best future earth line?: “Your baby is the miracle the whole world has been waiting for.”
WALL-E, the new movie from the animation wizards at Pixar, is the first art film for kids I have ever seen. The story of a lonely robot who inadvertently gives humankind a second chance is aimed at kids but doesn’t look like any other kid’s movie you’ve seen. If you’re expecting the same-old from Pixar—maybe Finding Nemo 2: That Darned Fish or Toy Story Three: This Time It’s Personal—think again. WALL-E is an ambitious and beautiful stand alone film. It’s 2001: A Space Odyssey for children.
Set in the year 2700, Earth is now a dystopian world rendered uninhabitable by wasteful and excessive humans who exited the planet centuries ago. For seven-hundred years WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) has lived alone (save for a friendly cockroach named Hal) compacting the heaps of trash and collecting trinkets left behind when the exodus from Earth happened.
The monotony of his lonely life is interrupted by a search robot named EVE who thinks one of WALL-E’s discoveries is the key to repopulating the planet. When she heads back to the mother ship to pass along the news WALL-E tags along, unwilling to lose the only friend he’s ever had.
WALL-E is one of the most unique children’s films I have ever seen. Despite its relatively simple story, it’s risky filmmaking that has more to do with the great science fiction films of the 1970s than family friendly fare like Nemo. The world director Andrew Stanton has created here is a dark one, where Earth is a wasteland (with tones of The Andromeda Strain and The Omega Man) and overly pampered humankind has reverted back to an almost child-like state.
Add to that the fact that there is no dialogue at all for the first 30 minutes and only sporadic chit chat after that, and you are left with a film that can only be described as a brave and adventurous outing in the formulaic world of kid’s entertainment.
This is a kid’s film that doesn’t pander to kids; that assumes they can use their imaginations to fill in the blanks left by the lack of talk. Most kid’s flicks entertain the eye but don’t give their minds much of a workout. WALL-E does both. It’s the evolution of children’s films; after this the wisecracking animals and toilet jokes of Madagascar and the like will look like relics, as current as Steamboat Willie.
A few famous names pop up on the cast list—Jeff Garland, Sigourney Weaver—but Stanton doesn’t rely on them to sell the movie. Nor does he use current pop culture references to earn cheap laughs à la Shrek. Instead he relies on the most old fashioned of devices—good storytelling—to tell his futuristic story.
Coupled with the good story is spectacular animation from the computer nerds at Pixar whose great achievement here is to give WALL-E and EVE, two inanimate objects, complex emotions while staying true to the characters without stooping to cheap manipulation.
Director Stanton’s great achievement is to fill every frame with a sense of wonder and provide the viewer with one of the most unique and satisfying movie experiences of the summer.
Would you spend money to see an animated movie starring Nicole Jaffe and Henry Corden? Probably not, because you’ve never heard of either of them.
