#voice-acting

Here is the lovely actress Marcella Lentz-Pope in an interview from earlier this year. It’s great listening for anyone who is interested in Marcella’s career and in voice-acting. From 7:51 - 9:54 she talks about voicing Jin, her love of ATLA and her appreciation for the fans. I’ve also transcribed this segment below.

Interviewer: So would one of your first like original animation experiences be on Avatar?

M L-P: Was I still in high school when I did that? No, I couldn’t have been. Maybe I was like 18 or something, I can’t remember. But I was, I feel like I was young...That was awesome, that was really fun. They had Dante and I do it together in the booth, so it was very much us playing off of each other.

And yeah, and it’s so crazy how I just did this one scene in a great tv show. I mean like, it is a great show. Avatar, it still holds up, up to today. Like, I love Avatar...And to be clear for anybody listening, this is The Last Airbender, not the James Cameron Avatar [Laughs]. 

But I was just in that one scene, that one episode. And people really fell in love with her and, and Zuko’s like relationship. And there’s so many things, memes and things on the internet, of their relationship. I love it so much. I’m like, it was just this tiny little scene, and it really, really connected with people. 

And honestly, that’s the best thing. You do so much work and you don’t hear it back about anything. And you even wonder like, did anybody like what I did? Did even the director like what I did? So when there is something where people kind of like talk back at you and be like, ‘hey, this was incredible and we really enjoyed it’ and ‘it makes me feel good’ and ‘on a bad day I like watching this’. Like I’ll get DMs like that. It’s really nice. It’s really, really nice.

When I first heard they were making a new theatrical Scooby-Doo film, I was over-joyed and enthusiastic, especially at the prospect of it being Scooby’s first animated theatrical film. Very slight dismay came over me as I heard the title was Scoob, which is kind of stupid to me, and the fact it was CG which I felt both excited and bummed out about in all honesty.

Every year, Pixar, Dreamworks, and a slew of other studies fill our theaters with 3D animated films, some good, some bad, but all CGI, with the very few exceptions of adaptations of popular animated shows, (MLP, SpongeBob (I wrote this bit in before the trailer debuted), and TTG). While risking the prospect of sounding like an anger-filled, nostalgia-blinded boy, I do miss the traditionally animated films. We do have television and most of Japanese produced animation, which consistently animates traditionally, and that’s great that it is exposed to people every day and keeps it from being a forgotten art, but an American television budget only goes so far. Animation cycles repeat, inconsistencies are abrupt and apparent, there are huge disadvantages to having a television or a direct-to-video budget, and to me, a show that is the pinnacle of animation errors, (@scoobydoomistakes) getting a full-fledged chance to show its progress and its (insert better word than clout) would be such a great success story to me. However, Scooby-Doo never having CGI adventures outside of videogames, lego movies, and the one-off commercials allowed me to suspend my anger towards the animation industry’s seemingly permeant gravitational pull towards computer-generated products and be excited to see how the characters looked.

Seeing the characters and their movements, I feel delighted about how cute and fluid they look, I feel the art is going to be very visually pleasing, the child designs being a huge highlight. In the tradition of humanity, I tend to accentuate the negative.

For much of Scooby-Doo, there has been a two-by-two factors of the human’s and their designs. Boy/Girl and serious/goofy looking. If you doubt this take a look at the Mook animated films and see how Shaggy and Velma look nearly the same just glossier versions, while Fred and Daphne look like anime-refugees. I am not a huge fan of this type of divide, but I like it much better than having Shaggy as an odd-man out which the upcoming movie does. I also feel that Velma’s design is much too cute, her hair is too bright, and her racial status thus far is too ambiguous. I also don’t have any problem with Fred’s design, which I know almost everybody hates but I think it’s fine.

The next piece of information I heard was the idea of this being the beginning a Hanna-Barbera Cinematic Universe, which is, not going to happen I bet. I love Hanna-Barbera and I would love to see it re-enter the American consciousness, but this trend has only worked for Marvel and the phrase is just cringe inducing in all honesty. I am perfectly fine with just a plain, huge crossover, but the term is a little saddening and reminds too much of my ideas on how to fix the DC universe (a WHOLE another thing their). Also Hanna-Barbera filled with such complicated properties, such diversity from talking animals to teen detectives to little village people to time-displaced fifties-styled families, yet for every show you have at least four clones of it, that a universe is just a little hard to market and think of.

I am alright with a big huge crossover, but it is fairly odd with what they have chosen to use with Hanna-Barbera’s other huge property seemingly ignored (The Flintstones) along with most of their action shows like Space Ghost and Johnny Quest, not to mention the funny animal erasure that built Hanna-Barbera. Also with Hanna-Barbera being synonymous with television animation, not to mention their previous flaws with theatrical releases, I would like to build their roots of a universe in a television set.

The next information I heard of was the cast and this at first was fine with me. I know this isn’t a permeant fix, the regular cast is still going to be in shows and DTV movies. I do largely hate the idea of using celebrity actors as voice actors in general it’s an annoying marketing gimmick and it’s obnoxious when you have a perfectly fine cast which put it much more in the negative category for me, but I could accept the change as I do want people to see the movie and this isn’t the first time abrupt cast changes in Scooby-Doo have happened. I also feel there is a big difference between Scooby-Doo getting a new cast for a theatrical release and another property like Teen Titans Go! which got to keep their cast. It is not like there is a long lasting series or animation style that would make a theatrical film have a strong basis; Scooby-Doo is constantly changing which makes it much more flexible in terms of casting.

Then Matthew Lillard tweeted his anger and not even being told about the change, which made a lot of people angry, including me. I did not feel that sympathetic to him in all honesty, if only because of a teensy-little incident he got into where a fan at a meetup asked him to perform Shaggy’s voice; he refused and proceeded to call them childish on twitter and the fact he has stated shame on doing the movies at times. I still feel angered at the animation industry as a whole for prioritizing celebrities. Grey Griffin, a forefront voice of millions of children, one of the most diverse voices ever, has only been in eight theatrical films, while Scarlett Johansson has voice-acted in five theatrical films. I hate this and wish, people would wise up and not feel excitement about seeing hearing a celebrity since there are very few that are actually that good at voice acting in general.

The plot form what I gathered from the trailer, which in all honesty wasn’t a lot, it seems to be fine, the only problem I have is with Shaggy’s separation from Fred, Daphne, and Velma in terms of plot wise. It’s very much used to make Scooby and Shaggy have a divide between them and the rest of the gang, but I just don’t like it. I understand most children will like it that way, and the movie’s main focus will be a boy and his dog relationship, but in all honesty I would prefer Shaggy to have deeper relationships with the human member of the gang.