Celebrity voiceovers for animations in Bollywood may not work the way they do in Hollywood.
When Shah Rukh Khan turned Mr Incredible for the dubbed version of the Dreamworks animation (his son Aryan also lent his voice as his screen son), his voice resonated with the audience far more than the theme by itself. More recently, Jugal Hansraj’s directorial efforts at an Indian animation had star couple Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor’s voiceovers, enough to garner some curiosity.
Similarly, upcoming film Jumbo has Akshay Kumar and family dubbing for the movie. Such star performances are rumoured to have pushed forward over 200 screen actors who offered their famous voices in projects lined up for the next couple of years in the Hindi film industry.
“It is a marketing tool which takes a film to a higher level of visibility,” says Sunil Doshi, film critic and director, NDTV Lumière. “It serves as a hook for the audience. If Shah Rukh Khan’s voice has been used in a film, they can add his visual image to the poster which is enough to lure viewers. The image may not add or take away anything from the core of the film/animation as such. What it is, certainly, is a hard-core safety net. Marketing costs a lot more in animations because that is how much more it takes to market a product that doesn’t have faces.”
More so in India, he points out, we are not used to a comic-book culture, perhaps with the exception of Amar Chitra Katha and a few other such. In the West, comics through childhood have been more natural, a part of the “syllabus of life”. “The Indian audiences’ affinity to a comic-book representation is far lower and thus the need to rope in famous voices,” adds Doshi.
By and large aimed at a varied audience, such marketing can run the risk of actors overshadowing the animated characters, taking the juice out of cartoon nuances. “Marketing can overkill,” agrees Doshi. But what is now a done thing to do here, roping in friends and fellow actors to fill in, is merely an offshoot of what began in Hollywood a number of years ago with considerable success. Michael J Fox’s endearing voice as Stuart Little charmed, and the Ben Stiller-Chris Rock-David Schwimmer (of Friends) trio return heartily to screen with the sequel to Madagascar, Escape 2 Africa.
What a voiceover seeks to do is to become one with the character. And, if it’s a familiar voice that makes it even better. This can be best noticed in the animation industry, only over a certain period of time. Stretching the Shrek series to three films worked perhaps because we have known Shrek as Mike Myers, Fiona as Cameron Diaz and Donkey as Eddie Murphy since 2001. With every sequel, we return to the same comic tone immortalised by these famous actors.
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But have screen actors always also been effective behind the scene? In Bollywood, if you take Roadside Romeo, for example, critics pointed out that the Saif-Kareena pair failed to fall into character-play. A classic case of picking marketing over quality, if you heed the argument of career voice actors that they go through specific training, voice acting and mike techniques that screen actors cannot claim to possess.
“Using celebrity voices in Bollywood currently works on a certain film industry rapport,” says Sunil Doshi. “Roadside Romeo was a Yashraj production, therefore Kareena and Saif were roped in for it. No one is really exploring new territory as yet, we’re in the me-too syndrome right now. This trend also eventually falls back to the same old story of how true talent never gets recognised. Take Manoj Bajpai, for instance. He’s such a fine actor, yet...”
While in India voiceovers in the animation industry are admittedly not an openly controversial matter at the moment, overseas, studies and research reviews have indicated that they have been the subject of some debate. On the matter of competition, famous actors hogging the limelight decreases the demand for career voiceover actors, says a 2007 issue of Animation World magazine. The nature of remuneration offered to celebrities has also often been challenged on account of the few working hours and relatively low effort they spend recording, as compared to skilled voice talent.
Working on a platform of famous voices backing cartoon characters, there is also the skill in picking the voices that will work. Shares American voiceover artist Chuck Brown, via email, “I can’t say that I think they are worth the effort unless they are very distinct voices. What’s the point of paying someone for their celebrity status as a contribution to a project, and then not identifying them as such? Some actors eventually retire from screen acting and only do voiceovers. Gene Hackman would be an example. He is now doing voiceovers and working as an author, but says he is done with the movies.”
Veteran Sean Connery, for example, is known to have a baritone that instantly clicks with the audience. “When you buy the services of Sean Connery you’re getting your money’s worth. He’s almost instantly recognisable,” corroborates Brown. The visual elements of an actor’s performances that we will always remember them for — whether it’s Amitabh Bachchan’s brooding persona or Aamir Khan’s intense glare that can burn holes — are as good as lost in the animation format. Brown says of George Clooney, “I think George is a very visual actor... the whole smirking, cock-of-the-head thing. And that works well for me. But I don’t think he delivers the goods in voiceover — so far, that is.”
One-off efforts to popularise documentaries by layering them with voices of the likes of Amitabh Bachchan (March of the Penguins), meanwhile, may not take off in a big way. A number of documentary filmmakers, currently, are looking for a format that completely does away with narration.
“In this day and age, we are trying to move away from voiceovers in such films. Like in the 1970s and 1980s, narrators were sort of considered like the ‘voice of god’, telling the audience, ‘Oh, this is XYZ,’” says a Delhi-based documentary filmmaker who prefers not to be named. “We prefer to let the subjects do the talking.”
