Voice actor



Voice actors (or voice actresses for females) are people who provided voices for characters in animated films, animated television series, video games, dubbed foreign language films, audio dramas, etc. In movie trailers and television and radio commercials, voice actors are often recruited through voice acting agencies. This article focuses on voice actors in animation and dubbing.

In the United States
A common practice in animation and dubbing is to cast a woman to play the role of a young boy.[citation needed] Casting adult women for these parts can be especially useful if an ad campaign or a developed series is expected to run for several years, for while the vocal characteristics of a male child actor would change over time, the voice of an adult female will not. On the downside, a woman would require a higher wage than a child actor.

Notable exceptions to using women to voice young boy characters are the Peanuts animated specials and films, in which boys were actually cast to read the boys' lines (e.g., Charlie Brown, Linus, Schroeder). Pixar Animation Studios also casts boys instead of women to voice young male characters. As of 2018, all male roles in their full-length films have been played by male voice actors.[citation needed]

Rise in use of film actors for voice roles
For much of the history of North American animation, voice actors had a low profile as performers, with Mel Blanc, the chief voice behind the Looney Tunes characters, as the major exception. Over time, many movie stars began voice acting in films. Aladdin was marketed with a noted emphasis on Robin Williams' role, against the actor's own wishes. The success of the film eventually spurred the idea of highlighting the voice actors as stars of a film, this becoming the norm in film marketing, with a greater focus on hiring Hollywood celebrities for name power, rather than performers with most experience in voice acting.[citation needed] Using anime voice actors as a box office draw was developed far earlier in Japan.[citation needed]

Some voice actors, such as Billy West, are highly critical of using movie stars for voice roles in animated feature films. A particular point of contention is the practice of bringing on veteran voice actors (who are generally capable of greatly altering their voices and inflections in order to create personalities for characters) to read for a part, and then use the recording of the professional voice actor as a guide for the movie star, even though the actual character creation work is being done by the unpaid voice actor. West struck back at this practice in Comic Book: The Movie, in which the entire main cast comprises voice actors.[citation needed]

Dubbing
Much of the Japanese anime are dubbed into English. The voice actors involved are usually different from those in Western animation, although some voice actors have performed in both Western animation and anime dubbing. (i.e. Kari Wahlgren, Zeno Robinson)