The film Kubo and the Two Strings (2017) marks Fiennes’ third animated appearance as a villain, and I think it is here that his animated star image is consolidated – Fiennes’ voice denotes concerns of class, and his characters belong…
In this post, I want to move on from the simple evocation of a celebrity’s past roles to focus on the ‘vocal’ aspect of celebrity vocal stardom. Fiennes’ next animated villain, Lord Victor Quartermaine, would appear in 2005’s Wallace and…
It is certainly true that celebrity voice actors evoke their other roles through vocal performances and, by drawing on this wider intertext, a familiar voice helps to deepen our understanding of a character. My conception of celebrity vocal stardom necessarily…
Voice performances are technically eligible for nomination in the acting categories at the Academy Awards, but they have never been recognised. The founding of the SOVAS Voice Art Awards in 2013 was designed to rectify this because, as its chief…
The “immobile engine” behind each animated piece is the animator, which appropriates acting as an invisible force over its creation. In this sense, this process of interpretation can be understood as the manifestation of the animator’s internal intentions on an…
In preparing my presentation for June’s SAS meeting at USC, on three women who dance or perform along their animated projections, I came across an intriguing article by Teri Silvio, in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, entitled “Animation: The New…
In the beginning was the voice. The voice was that of the characters, and the very world in which animated series exist. The creators heard it, and with their pens and paintbrushes, they made the visual aspect of it real.…
Actor (2013) is a 12 minute film where a performer wanders round a space reciting the final chapter of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange[i]. His performance, guided by an unseen director, was recorded not by a film camera, but by…
A pig that doesn’t fly is just a pig. So says the eponymous Porco Rosso. I have suggested elsewhere (Pallant, 2012) the need to recognise the tension that underpins animated performance, whereby actorly and animatorly performance occupy two extremes of…
Animation, by any definition, begins with a performance. This is equally true of animation’s history as it is of any individual film’s production. Especially important was the lightning cartoon or sketch, which played a vital role in the early development…
