Animated Characters as Actors

The title of this post might make it sound like this is another “ani­ma­tors are actors with pen­cils” speech, but it’s about cast­ing char­ac­ters into roles other than who they were to begin with.

Recently I was read­ing an essay by Peter Kramer on Buster Keaton’s The Black­smith. Part of his approach was through the idea of “Come­dian Com­edy”. This is any show where the comedian’s per­sonal style is more impor­tant than the char­ac­ter he is play­ing. Mr. Kramer para­phrases Frank Krutnik:

Come­dian com­edy is char­ac­ter­ized pre­cisely by a fun­da­men­tal mis­match between the iden­tity of the performer…and the role he assumes within the fiction.

Actors like Will Fer­rell, Jim Car­rey, and Jack Black bring their own dis­tinct per­son­al­i­ties to every comic part they play. Audi­ences come to see the actor do his spe­cial thing, rather than under­stand the nature of the char­ac­ter he’s cast to play. It is a spe­cial place in per­for­mance. Krut­nik writes:

The come­dian is marked within the text as hav­ing a priv­i­leged sta­tus com­pared to the other characters/actors: he is less fic­tion­ally inte­grated and has a rel­a­tively dis­rup­tive func­tion in rela­tion to the fic­tional world.

While this is rare in ani­ma­tion, it does hap­pen. I am think­ing of Mickey Mouse in a few of his clas­sic shorts, like Gul­liver Mickey or The Brave Lit­tle Tai­lor. He played Bob Cratchit in Mickey’s Christ­mas Carol, along with Scrooge McDuck an the rest of the Dis­ney gang.  Mickey’s cast­ing as Bob Cratchit seems a nat­ural direc­tion for him, rather than a mis­match.  A more dis­rup­tive exam­ple would be Daffy Duck play­ing Robin Hood.  He’s clearly not heroic fig­ure to begin with, but that’s part of par­ody.  Car­toon char­ac­ters are great for par­ody of clas­sic work. At this point, Star Wars is a clas­sic work, and hats of to Seth Mac­Far­lane for putting his Fam­ily Guy cast into it.  Please com­ment if you can recall any other examples.

To be able to do move beyond their ori­gins, char­ac­ters can­not be too extreme, too spe­cial­ized. A toy space­man, a talk­ing car, a one eyed mon­ster, or a super­hero are made to fit into unique con­texts. It’s eas­ier to cre­ate a “Teenage mutant ninja tur­tle” than a “funny mouse.”