The 10 laziest voiceover performances you’ll ever hear
Animation works best when actors with voiceover experience are hired.
Any film student will be keen to explain that animation is a medium, not a genre, but it is often that animated projects are seen as family-friendly based on the ones that succeed at the global box office. Even though a studio like Pixar tends to make films that appeal to both adults and children, their rivals at DreamWorks, Illumination, Sony Pictures Animation, and Netflix seem to cater to very young audiences that don’t know how to determine quality.
It’s fairly surprising to see just how much Western animation has declined recently; while Pixar films like Up and Toy Story 3 were ‘Best Picture’ nominees that ranked among the most well-received of their respective years, the youth of today is subjected to The Super Mario Galaxy Movie and an endless array of Minions sequels.
The commercialisation of animation has led to an influx of celebrity voices that are brought in to voice major characters, even though it would be better to hire someone with more specific experience. There’s a plethora of actors with experience in vocal acting who work on Cartoon Network and Adult Swim, but more often than not, studios seek out someone famous who can help promote the film, regardless of whether they can deliver a good performance.
There’s obviously examples when the actor cast goes above and beyond with their commitment, such as Robin Williams in Aladdin, Eddie Murphy in Shrek, or Tom Hanks in Toy Story. However, the use of famous voices can also be a sign of laziness.
The 10 laziest voiceover performances you’ll ever hear:
Chris Pratt – ‘The Super Mario Bros Movie’
Chris Pratt has ironically had more success voicing animated characters than with live-action roles, as most of his films outside of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise have been critically derided. Pratt was perfect as the “average” worker in The LEGO Movie, a clumsy older brother in Pixar’s Onward, and even did a half-decent job voicing the lazy, lasagna-obsessed cat in The Garfield Movie. However, Pratt wasn’t even halfway trying to do an Italian accent in The Super Mario Bros Movie, which is one of the few essential elements of the character that needed to be lifted from the game.
Pratt’s inability to do anything but his own voice sticks out like a sore thumb, especially since Jack Black overcommitted to doing something interesting with his performance as the villain Bowser, and even Charlie Day added something unique to his part as Luigi.
Taylor Swift – ‘The Lorax’
Taylor Swift is simply not an actor, and no amount of her success selling out shows has made a difference in that regard. While Swift may have thought that doing voiceover work would be easier than appearing in a live-action film (her subsequent performance in David O Russell’s Amsterdam proved she was not competent at doing that), The Lorax indicated how bland and lifeless she was when given an actual script. The Lorax is by no means a great animated movie, but Danny DeVito’s performance as the titular character is a lot of fun.
While actors like Zac Efron and Ed Helms may have been hired for their celebrity, they at least bring personable to the roles, and commit to the over-the-top style of a Dr Seuss adaptation. Swift’s involvement in a film with an environmentalist message is fairly ironic considering her frequent use of private jets.
John Goodman – ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’
John Goodman is an admirably honest actor who has been perhaps a little bit too self-critical in describing his past work, as he is almost always giving a good performance. Transformers: Age of Extinction is perhaps the only exception to that trend, because Goodman seemingly put no effort into voicing Hound, a new member of the Autobots who is styled after a World War II commando.
Amidst all the faults of the Transformers films, the voiceover acting is generally pretty good, and Peter Cullen’s work as Optimus Prime is almost powerful enough to redeem the tin-eared dialogue in the scripts. Comparatively, Goodman’s appearance in the fourth instalment in the series sounded like he was just warming up his voice, as even the cheaply made Transformers cartoon shows from the 1980s featured vocal performances that at least sounded like fleshed-out, individual characters.
Johnny Knoxville – ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’
Johnny Knoxville is so beloved for the Jackass franchise that it becomes pretty distracting to hear his voice anywhere else, especially if it’s not in a comedy – the 2014 reboot of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles immediately got off on the wrong foot when it was revealed that it changed core aspects of the characters’ origins, but it felt even less authentic because the actors doing the motion-capture performances on set were not the same ones doing the voices.
The discrepancy was notable, especially given how many great motion-capture performances there have been (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes came out the same summer), and Knoxville is also completely ill-suited for the role of Leonardo, who is the oldest and most mature of the Turtles – he would have been much better cast as a goofball like Michelangelo, who is mostly used for comedic relief.
John Oliver – ‘The Lion King’
The Lion King is one of the greatest animated films of all-time, and it was because it was without flaws that Disney tried to remake it by making as few changes as possible, and while the remake of The Lion King can’t be called “live-action” because it has no humans in it, it did use the photorealistic animation style that director Jon Favreau has perfected with The Jungle Book.
The new voices are dramatically inferior in comparison to their predecessors, especially since they were seemingly hired to just do impersonations, rather than develop new takes of the characters. The most glaring miscasting in 2019’s The Lion King is John Oliver, whose obnoxious screeching does no justice to the work done by Rowan Atkinson in the original; he’s also not a good singer, which is a pretty significant issue for a musical.
Samuel L Jackson – ‘The Garfield Movie’
Samuel L Jackson has been in more franchises than any other actor, and works so frequently that he usually appears in several movies each year, and has now even started popping up on more television shows. The Garfield Movie was already one of the laziest animated films of the past decade, as it’s little more than a generic animal slapstick adventure comedy that has none of the satire within the original comic strips.
An unusual twist on the material had Pratt’s version of Garfield searching for his father, played by Samuel L Jackson. It’s not convincing in the slightest that Jackson is Pratt’s father, and while none of the voiceover performances in The Garfield Movie is particularly strong (with the exception of Nicholas Hoult, who does a decent job as Jon), Jackson doesn’t even pretend to be doing anything but his typical schtick.
Katy Perry – ‘The Smurfs’
Katy Perry has managed to piss everyone off in one way or another, but the 2011 live-action version of The Smurfs might actually be one of her lowest moments. While The Smurfs worked as a cartoon because it took place in a self-contained universe, the 2011 film took the obnoxious blue creatures on an adventure where they went to the heart of New York City.
Granted, Smurfette isn’t necessarily one of television’s most complex characters, but Perry seems to conflate her own personality with that of the role that she was cast as. It’s unclear why Perry’s involvement was necessary, as The Smurfs was already a recognisable brand that would have sold tickets, regardless of the famous voices attached to it. Even then, her co-stars Anton Yelchin, Alan Cumming, and George Lopez at least tried to emulate the voices from the original cartoon.
Kevin James – ‘Hotel Transylvania’
Adam Sandler has a habit of casting all of his friends in any of his Happy Madison productions, but Hotel Transylvania was a legitimate film from a real director, as Genndy Tartakovsky was highly respected as the creator of Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, and Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Hotel Transylvania has a fun concept about classic monsters having to live in a hotel together; while Sandler isn’t exactly working hard with his role as Dracula, he applies a goofy Transylvanian accent that gets the job done.
The same cannot be said for Kevin James, one of those actors who ruins everything that he is in, who is inexplicably cast as Frankenstein’s monster (even if the other characters just refer to him as “Frankenstein”). There’s nothing about James that suggests he could play a tragic, flawed character, as he doesn’t even try to be scary.
Zach Braff – ‘Chicken Little’
Zach Braff is a divisive actor and creator; while there are some who are charmed by what he brought to shows like Scrubs, there are others who find him utterly repulsive. In general, Braff works best when he is given control over his own projects, which is why Garden State became such a significant cultural touchstone.
Chicken Little is perhaps the ugliest animated project that Disney ever released, and it has a story that is utterly insane; the titular chicken lives in a world of anthropomorphic animals, and is bullied because he claims that the sky is falling and isn’t believed, even though he actually caught a glimpse of an alien spaceship. This doesn’t work at all when Braff screeches, making a completely unlikable character who is impossible to sympathise with, regardless of how much the film is begging the audience to.
Zachary Levi – ‘Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget’
Zachary Levi has basically become Hollywood’s biggest laughingstock because he seems to always come up short when he’s close to success; it was after Shazam! Fury of the Gods bombed, and Levi hilariously called out critics and whined that he had been treated unfairly. Unfortunately, Levi had already landed the leading role in Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, where he was hired by Aardman to replace Mel Gibson in the role of Rocky.
Despite Gibson’s transgressions, he did a great job at voicing a silly, yet altruistic hero in the first film, whereas Levi turns him into an incompetent moron. The deepest irony is that Gibson was asked not to return because of all of his controversies, but Levi proceeded to make offensive comments of his own when he began supporting vaccination conspiracies and travelling within the circles of Robert Kennedy Jr.
