Footnote #53 - Star Voices
The Fantasy/Animation podcast takes listeners on a journey through the intersection between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Available via Apple Podcasts, Spotify and many of your favourite podcast hosting platforms!
The Fantasy/Animation Footnotes return with this reflection on the star voice as both an industrial trend within contemporary animation production and as an object of critique often assumed to nothing more than novelty leaned on too heavily to ‘sell’ animation as an entertainment medium. Chris takes the lead for this discussion of the potency and power of star sound, with topics including the longstanding history of star voicework across popular animated film and television, and the forceful emergence of the celebrity voice within the landscape of 1990s animation; the authenticating properties of the star and their possible function as a legitimising force; questions of labour and the relationship between the star and the trained voice artist; and how animators can tap into a star persona through character design to enhance or subvert their otherwise hidden vocal presence.
**Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo**
**As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts**
Suggested Readings
Bevilacqua, Joe. 1999. “Celebrity Voice Actors: The New Sound of Animation.” Animation World Magazine (April 1999), available at: https://www.awn.com/mag/issue4.01/4.01pages/bevilacquaceleb.php3.
Denison, Rayna. 2008. “Star-Spangled Ghibli: Star Voices in the American Versions of Hayao Miyazaki’s Films.” animation: an interdisciplinary journal 3, no. 2: 129-146.
Drake, Philip. 2004. “Jim Carrey: The Cultural Politics of Dumbing Down.” In Film stars: Hollywood and Beyond, ed. Andy Willis, 71-88. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press.
Holliday, Christopher. 2018. The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.