Robin Williams, It's All Your Fault!

I have now officially entered the stage of parenting where I will be seeing lots and lots of kids movies.  This isn't really a complaint - after all I am a lover of films in all forms and I have no problem encouraging that in Anabelle and (eventually) Charlotte.  However, there are times where it is a lot more fun than others.  The Muppets, Finding Nemo, and Winnie the Pooh?  Fun.  Hotel Transylvania?  Not so much.

While I was sitting in the theater Sunday counting down the minutes until Hotel Transylvania ended (like an inmate awaiting parole) I started thinking about an interview I heard last year.  Kevin Pollack was interviewing Billy West on his podcast.  If you don't recognize the name, Billy West is a voice actor best known for doing the voices of Ren and Stimpy as well as Fry in Futurama.  During the interview, Billy was lamenting how his profession is being eliminated.  Modern-day animated features just don't employ true professional voice actors for anything more than bit parts anymore - choosing instead to give all the main roles to established screen actors.

From a pure business standpoint, I understand why this is the case.  As animated films have become increasingly sophisticated and expensive, studios want "star power" to help ensure that they have big names to put on the posters and commercials, and faces to do the talk circuits and promote it.  But something is lost artistically.  In its simplest terms, I think that the skill of a screen actor is the way in which they inhabit a character while the skill of a voice actor lies in the creation of a character.  In other words, when an actor appears onscreen, there are a whole range of things he can do to communicate to the audience in ways both subtle and not subtle.  In addition to the voice, he can use gestures, facial expressions (in both speaking and reacting), and blocking.  In animation, all you have is the voice because the rest is out of your control.  So everything needs to be laser-focused and channeled into that.  That's just not something a screen or stage actor excels at.

Need an example?  Just try imagining an exchange between Elmer Fudd and Bugs Bunny with different voices.  It's almost impossible.  Now as a counterpoint, try imagining Woody and Buzz from Toy Story with someone other than Tom Hanks and Tim Allen doing the voices.  I don't know about you, but I find that a lot easier to do.

So that led me to thinking about when this shift occurred.  And if you have made the connection to the title, you have the answer I came up with  - Aladdin in 1992.  I remember seeing Aladdin in theatres (random fun fact: it was the first movie Christy and I saw together), which was a big deal because at age 13 most teens are trying to prove how much they've outgrown "kiddy" stuff.  But the big talk was of how awesome Robin Williams' portrayal of the Genie was.  There was even talk that he'd garner an Oscar nomination for it (he didn't, but did snag a "Special Award" at the Golden Globes).  It was (and still is) a fantastic performance and he deserved all of the praise he received.  But I think it had some unfortunate consequences.

I think the period of 1989 to 1994 was a seminal period in the history of animation.  Starting with The Little Mermaid, then through Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and culminating with The Lion King  - this is when studios started thinking about animated movies in terms of blockbusters that might even have award potential instead of just cheap movies that could be counted on to turn a small but dependable profit in the kid market.   Looking at the casts of these films reveals this shift pretty clearly.  The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast have barely any recognizable names - the "big" star in Little Mermaid is Buddy Hackett and in Beauty and the Beast it's Angela Lansbury.  Then Aladdin comes along with the first true blockbuster star in Robin Williams - although Gilbert Gottfried also has what is probably his most memorable role as Jafar's parrot.  Then by Lion King it's pretty much all stars for the big parts - Jonathan Taylor Thomas (who is nobody now but was big due to Home Improvement at the time), Matthew Broderick, James Earl Jones, Jeremy Irons, and Nathan Lane.  From that point on, nearly every animated film from a major studio has utilized established screen actors for almost all the major roles.  Heck, even Wall-E (which is 75% of the way to being a silent film) felt the need to use Jeff Garlin, Fred Willard, Sigourney Weaver, and John Ratzenberger (although technically Fred Willard is actually screen acting since you see him via live action shots).

Now, I'm certainly not saying that animated films as a whole are worse now than they were prior to 1992.  There's a reason why 75% of the animated films I own are Pixar.  It's just unfortunate that just as this particular genre of film started to really take off and achieve huge financial success, the individuals that worked so hard their whole lives to contribute towards that success - actors that most people have never heard of precisely because they were so adept at concealing their identities behind the characters they created - have largely been left out in the cold.  I hope that down the road studios will realize that the reason animated films have gotten so much better was due to the focus on better writing, augmented by the technological advances, and that they have been succeeding in spite of employing screen actors, not because of them.

In the meantime, at least we still have The Simpsons.