Cartoon Character Voices

Having a range of distinctive voices is important in any production, whether it be on stage, in the cinema or on the television. With cartoon characters it can be even more important – as the faces are less expressive than real ones so it can be less obvious who is speaking from visual clues alone – which I suspect is why there tends to be a broad mix of accents in a lot of cartoons, both modern and those made years ago.

For example, in Chuggington, Dunbar is Scottish, Speedy McAllister a Northerner (voiced by Warren Clarke) and the Great Frostini (the ice cream chugger) is, naturally enough, Italian.

My favourite voice comes from Octonauts, though, that of the delightful engineer named Tweak, whose deep Southern American voice always makes me smile.

One day I'm going to answer a request someone makes of me in Tweak's manner and voice, with a "You got it, Cap'n!"

Tweak doesn't tend to feature all that strongly in most episodes, so if you cough or sneeze at 3 mins 30 secs in this video you might miss her, and again a few seconds later for that immortal line as above...



One disappointment for me is that some such programmes – including the two I have mentioned here – don't give a full cast list in the end-of-programme credits, just a list of (mostly unknown to me) names, so I don't know who plays which character.

I am currently involved in a probably long-term exercise to work it all out for Chuggington, by matching repeating names that correspond to the same voice across two or more episodes. Guest appearances for single or occasional episodes can result in a "can't see the wood" situation (though it was interesting to see that Anthony Valentine, no less, plays Mr Mysterioso the magician) but it's all starting to take shape. The three main characters' voices are credited specifically to each character elsewhere, and appear top of the list in the end credits, but none of the rest of them is identified to a character.

The success of this project of mine depends to quite an extent on the completeness and accuracy of the voice actor lists at the end of each programme, and could be hindered if substitutes have voiced characters in particular episodes, which I think might have happened occasionally. Still, it's working out better than the Chuggington Wiki authors who have tried the same thing – and got it wrong at least twice that I have found already.