The Lost Art of Voice Acting

Without Googling it, do you know who voiced Belle in Beauty and the Beast? What about Ariel in The Little Mermaid? Perhaps Rollo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame?1 While movies prior to the mid-90s flirted with celebrity voices like Vincent Price in The Great Mouse Detective and Billy Joel in Oliver & Company, it wasn’t until Robin Williams voiced Genie in Aladdin that Hollywood, as it is wont to do, took the wrong lesson. Williams, an A-list talent, was perfect for the shape-shifting Genie, an effervescent personality where the character was crafted with Williams in mind. However, movie studios assumed that what people really wanted was the celebrity.

Celebrities are a useful business hedge. They can make for a potent lure as well as a useful scapegoat despite typically having little say over a final production (a Substack for another time is how we fail to properly understand performances in movies). This past week, the knives were already out for Chris Pratt’s voice as Mario in Illumination Entertainment’s upcoming The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Part of that is the ill-will felt towards Pratt as a celebrity (if, say, Chris Evans had been cast as Mario and the vocal performance had sounded off, people would have likely chalked it up to simple miscasting). But when people heard Pratt’s Mario voice in the film’s first trailer it sounded mostly like Pratt with the slightest of Italian inflection (the most apt comparison was to Linda from Bob’s Burgers).

Not to leap to Pratt’s defense (he’s a handsome movie star who was paid millions of dollars to voice one of the most beloved characters in history; he’ll be fine), but I don’t think he’s the key problem here. The problem is a system that undervalues voice talent, overvalues celebrity, and, in this case, woefully miscalculates how much a character like Mario needs celebrity support.

The Celebrity Voice Cast

It should be noted that while casting celebrities to voice animated movies has been typical since the mid-90s, it hasn’t always been a given. Furthermore, it’s hardly a guarantee of success. DreamWorks Animation would stack the deck with celebrity voices, but their output was hit-and-miss at the box office. Sometimes it would get you a Shark Tale, which is a bad movie, but was the 9th highest grossing film of 2004, and other times it would get you a massive flop like Turbo. Meanwhile, Pixar, which built its brand on movies that could emotionally devastate you, was fine going with guys like Patton Oswalt for Ratatouille or Ed Asner for Up or even Oscar-winning sound designer Ben Burtt for the beeps and boops of WALL-E. Pixar would sometimes cast A-listers, but mostly they just wanted who was right for the part, which would lead to interesting choices. They trusted that the Pixar name was strong enough, and they were right.

Illumination Entertainment has never had that confidence. Even though it’s the house that was essentially built by the minions—the yellow bean creatures who speak largely in gibberish—founder and CEO Chris Maledandri has always been partial to making sure that he has celebrities as part of his sales pitch. Even when the minions took center stage in their own spinoff, the rest of the cast included Sandra Bullock, Jon Hamm, Michael Keaton, Allison Janney, Steve Coogan, Jennifer Saunders, and Geoffrey Rush.

That’s not to say that any of these actors were “wrong” for their part, but they’re not really being hired because of what they can do with voice acting. They’re hired because of what the film needs after its finished, which is promotion.

There are professional voice actors out there. However, a typical person wouldn’t instantly recognize someone like Billy West or Tara Strong walking down the street. But what actors like West and Strong do is an important talent. Part of what makes them so in demand is how many different voices they can do and how well they can color each character when animation takes so much of the performance out of their hands. When you see what a professional voice actor does and how well they do it, you can see it’s not simply a matter of sauntering into a recording booth with a bottle of water while wearing sweatpants so you can speak into a microphone for hours on end. It’s a role with creative choices, but because we prioritize the “physical” actor, we diminish the hard work of another form of artistic expression. To put it another way, I don’t think Billy West could have convincingly played Star-Lord in Guardians of the Galaxy, but I’m also not convinced Chris Pratt could convincingly voice Philip J. Fry on Futurama.

Which leads us back to Mario.

The cast for the Mario movie is stacked. Not only do you have Pratt, but you have a list of famous faces including Charlie Day (Luigi), Anya Taylor-Joy (Peach), Jack Black (Bowser), Keegan-Michael Key (Toad), and Seth Rogen (Donkey Kong). And I’m sure when it comes time to promoting the movie, they’ll all do an admirable job whether it’s playing the original Mario Bros. game on Fallon or answering Mario trivia for Buzzfeed or what have you. They’re movie stars. Part of being a movie star is being charismatic and affable. The disconnect is that when it comes to doing a voice in an animated movie, we no longer ask that the performance is “good” because we’ve been conditioned to accept that any voice acting role is a gimme to a celebrity. It’s not “real” acting, and so no one should sweat it. Chris Pratt is a name. Chris Pratt is a recognizable actor. Chris Pratt will be good on Fallon.

And that’s all a bummer because it’s put the promotional machine ahead of what’s good for the movie because if you didn’t know, Mario already has a voice. His name is Charles Martinet. He’s voiced Mario for Nintendo since 1990. If you’ve heard the phrases “It’s-a-me, Mario!” or “Let’s-a-go!” in the past 25 years or so, it was likely in Martinet’s voice. But Martinet, despite putting his stamp on the character for a couple decades and change, is not Hollywood famous. If you have him walk down a red carpet, people won’t recognize him. He’s not a name or a face because he’s a voice actor, and therefore not as “bankable” as Chris Pratt.

This is not to say that Chris Pratt can’t do voice acting. I think he’s perfect in The LEGO Movie, but it helps that his character, Emmet, wasn’t pre-established. Mario, meanwhile, has been around since 1981 when he first appeared in Donkey Kong. He didn’t immediately talk, and to be fair, his cartoon and live-action iterations in the 80s and 90s tended to play him as gruffer. But as an animated character post-1996 with the release of Super Mario 64 on the Nintendo 64, it’s been the high-pitched, endearing Martinet voice. For me, this would be like twenty years of hearing Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse’s voice and saying, “Bring in Mark Wahlberg and he’ll figure it out.”

Is Mario Famous?

In some cases, I can understand (if not agree with) celebrity voice casting. If you’re making Shark Tale, a movie that is bad, and you want to sell it, you need to stack that voice cast to get those celebrities on the press circuit telling parents, “Hey, I’m Will Smith, and if you need to distract your child for a couple hours, I’m the voice of a fish.” The problem here, and one that Illumination doesn’t seem to grasp, is that Mario is already popular.

I don’t think it’s an outlandish statement to say that Mario is the most well-known video game character of all-time. Set aside statements like “most beloved” or “most popular.” Here’s a thought experiment: Think of someone in your life that doesn’t play video games. Think of perhaps an older relative who has never even picked up a controller. Now ask yourself, “Do they know who Mario is?” The answer is probably, “Yes” because he’s synonymous with Nintendo. In the same way that people who have never seen a Mickey Mouse cartoon know who he is, Mario is Nintendo’s Mickey. He’s the mascot. He will always be the mascot. Nintendo may have other popular characters like Link and Donkey Kong, but it’s the house that Mario (and really his creator, Shigeru Miyamoto) built.

So what value does Chris Pratt add here? When I see Chris Pratt, I see a studio that doesn’t have faith in their own material. People are windmill dunking on the little snippet of audio they’ve heard from the first trailer, but his worst decision wasn’t how he decided to voice Mario, but deciding to take the role in the first place because he’s going to absorb a studio’s bad decision. It’s a lot easier to simply say, “Pratt is wrong for the role,” when really any celebrity would have been wrong when Martinet (who will have some other, as-yet-unnamed role in the movie) is around.

The calculus that the studio needs Pratt to sell this movie falls apart when you understand that Mario sells himself. Some studios understand this. Shameik Moore is not a household name, but he’s perfect for Miles Morales in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and also, Spider-Man sells himself. Guys like Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland didn’t have to be household names at the time of their live-action casting because the studio knew (correctly) that people will show up for Spider-Man just like they’ll show up for the first Mario movie since the disastrous 1993 attempt starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo.

The presence of Pratt is about trusting a publicity machine more than what’s required to make the best movie possible. Furthermore, in an age where star power is questionable (look at this past weekend’s star-studded Amsterdam, which was DOA at the box office) and studios are all-in on IP anyway, why not trust that people will show up for a Mario movie? They showed up for two mediocre Sonic the Hedgehog movies and the biggest name in the cast was Jim Carrey, whose star power has waned considerably in the past decade. To cast Pratt as Mario is the height of unforced errors. Or, to put it another way…