A number of folks have written to ask that I comment on this article, How Celebrities Took Over Cartoon Voice Acting. Okay, I will: I don't think it's a very good article.
Its author's main thesis is that Robin Williams playing the genie in Aladdin rocked this world and changed the game. I think that's arbitrarily picking one instance when he could have cited dozens of others before, going back to Mr. Disney employing Bing Crosby, Jerry Colonna, Ed Wynn, George Sanders, etc. When UPA made Gay Purr-ee in 1962 with Judy Garland, Robert Goulet and Red Buttons (hiring Mr. Buttons right after he won the Oscar for Sayonara), how was that different from casting celebs in movies today? In 1977, long before Aladdin, Disney didn't cast full-time voice actors for the leads in The Rescuers. They hired Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor. There are plenty of other examples.
Yes, it is maddening to those who are primarily voice actors that they are often considered second-tier options when the big animated films are being cast…though I don't think the voice actors mentioned in that article (like Billy West, Dan Castellaneta and Frank Welker) are hurting for employment. In a sense, the article ignores the voice actors who don't work quite as much…the same "crime" the casting folks for those movies commit.
But there's a problem with dividing actors into these two categories — "real" voice actors and actors who are hired only for their marquee value. First off, many of the latter are really good. Ed Asner's performance in Up was universally praised. So were Mike Meyers and Eddie Murphy in the Shrek movies. Secondly, you have folks like Mark Hamill who are obviously not out of place among other "pure" cartoon voice actors. They just happen to have on-camera careers, as well. If you look back at the Golden Age of Animation, so did Hans Conried. So did Jim Backus. So did Hal Smith. So did Arnold Stang. Moving into the sixties, so did Howard Morris. So did (and still does) Chuck McCann.
I'm a big supporter of the kind of actor who doesn't have an on-camera career. I occasionally hire the other kind because a particular casting seems right but I turn down an awful lot of "stars" who are offered to me by agents. It's amazing who you can get these days for scale. Those guest roles on The Simpsons have especially made it not unfashionable for an actor who might otherwise have looked on a cartoon job as slumming to pick up a day's pay and have some fun. I'd usually rather work with the kind of actor who puts "on-camera" second…but then I'm not trying to arrange financing or pre-sales for a feature. I'm just doing a pre-sold cartoon show that only has to sound good.
I think voice actors shouldn't get as upset about the trend to celebrities as some do. Yes, a lot more "Movie Stars" are being cast in animated features than ever before. That's partly because a lot more animated features are being made than ever before. Eighteen movies are up for the Best Animated Feature category in the 2011 Oscars. Back in the alleged Good Old Days, there were four or five a year.
To the extent it is an injustice, it's a more complicated problem than the article describes. It also has a lot to do with animation producers and directors who simply would rather tell their friends and family, "I'm doing a movie with Tom Hanks" than "I'm doing a movie with people you probably never heard of." Years ago, a friend of mine who should have known better was about to produce a cartoon series for television and he said, as a way of praising his own writing, "This show requires real actors, not cartoon voice actors." That kind of thinking is something cartoon voice actors should get pissed about.
And by the way: This show employed "name" on-camera actors for many of its key roles and some of them were quite good. But in many cases, the producers found it necessary to throw away the voice tracks that a celebrity did and to bring in a largely-unknown voice actor to redo the part.