Voice Acting vs. Regular Acting

Name your favorite cartoon character. Now your favorite Muppet. Easy to do, right? But, name a few people who breathe life into those characters—not so easy anymore, is it? Voice acting is an art in itself that few people understand, and even fewer do. There are a few differences between acting with your voice, and acting with your entire being. For one, you are not seen. The character you are bringing to life is though, and depending on how good you are depends on how memorable your character is, and sometimes how memorable you become as well (Mel Blanc as Bugs Bunny for instance). As a result of this, your voice has to do all the expression that maybe your face or body would be doing. If you watch someone like John Goodman (James Sullivan in Monsters Inc) record for his character, you’ll watch him do extreme things with his body and face to make his voice bigger or smaller, depending on what’s called for. Some voice actors need to even change their voice to adapt to a different accent, or voice range for their character (such as Hank Azaria when he plays Apu in The Simpsons). Due to all of this, it’s very hard to get into voice acting and you almost have to know someone who’s already doing it just to get in at the ground level. And, voice acting is different than doing voice overs, which are heard in commercials and rarely call for the actor to do anything extreme to their voice except for clear annunciation. Acting where you can be seen is a bit easier (not that acting is easy, please don’t think I’m saying that). Acting is a different craft, and a different art form all together, and for the most part, if you put a seasoned voice actor onstage they probably wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. Voice acting is a special craft, unlike just acting in front of an audience, they need to make their whole bodies come through their voice in order to bring life to characters. While onstage, the actor needs to breathe life into a character on a page, the voice actor needs to make the audience believe and invest in a cartoon, puppet, or graphic onscreen. Who’s your favorite voice actor? Your favorite cartoon character?