7 Tweets 5 reads Aug 14, 2023
Voice Acting for Animation, as a distinct subcategory of Acting, was originally something born out of the Golden Age of Radio and Vaudeville where ppl like Mel Blanc, June Foray, Paul Frees & Daws Butler got their starts, often as impressionists. 🧡
You were expected to be able to imitate dozens of distinct voices. After those training grounds were gone, there were only a few new guys like Frank Welker or Billy West or Charlie Adler with that level of versatility. They're extremely rare.
There's many voice actors with basically one unique sounding voice which you can always identify, but which they just do variations on, like Maurice Lamarche or Jim Cummings, but at least they're distinctive, & that's a rare talent, too.
There are also lots of live-action actors with unique, distinct voices, often comic actors or comedians, & those are good for animation too, like Phil Hartman, Bill Burr, Eddie Deezen or Gilbert Gottfried. But even performers like those are still pretty rare.
This is all to say: most "Voice Actors" now are either people with totally unremarkable voices, or whose "funny" voices they put on are just extremely annoying, & neither type has versatility. The modern would-be VA tends to be someone who just badly imitates other cartoon voices
Animation Voice Acting can never really be a whole "field" because what little talent is out there can't even get properly trained anymore. If I were casting animation voices I'd just hold an open audition & try to find ppl who sound unique / distinctive, which is hard enough
But, if you look at the filmography of Ralph Bakshi for instance, you find lots of actors cast for unique voices who didn't necessarily go on to have animation VA careers, but whose voices were still really memorable because of what they brought as actors, ie. Richard Romanus /🧡

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