The studio crew in Procen, Japan, recording The Magic Sword, better known to U.S. audiences as Quest For Camelot. Jacques is on the far right.

I have spent the last five years travelling all over the world for Warner Bros. As a creative executive responsible for the casting of all of our animated product worldwide, I have the great privilege and opportunity to work with a wide variety of actors of all nationalities.

Of course, this has not always been an easy ride and I've had a few surprises. I remember one amazing mix session for Space Jam in Beijing, where I learned that the concepts of time and space are quite different in the West and the Far East -- it was the fastest mix for the world's biggest audience. Then there was the recording session in Bangkok, where I had to change the voice director because he couldn't ask the actors to redo a line. He was younger and owed respect to the older actors!

Besides the humorous stories, I realized very soon that I needed to bring some sense of organization and common references to the dubbing world, if I wanted to succeed in my quest to protect the integrity of Warner Bros.' animated celebrities by maintaining the consistency among the many international language voices of these animated icons. The first observation I made during my travels was that all the artists were taking different approaches in trying to reach this goal. One would think that most actors use more or less the same techniques to work with their voices. This, in fact, is not the case; the actors' different approaches results in inconsistencies in character.

In this article, we will talk about the voice characterization (the art of creating a non-human voice) used in animation. What do actors from different countries do to re-create classic animated voices in their language and how can we help them to do this? Our role is to explain voice placement techniques to actors who do not have this training. To do so, we need a common vocabulary to describe these techniques. As I mentioned earlier, up until this point, there haven't been common references, but this new vocabulary will guarantee the same approaches to characterization worldwide, and consequently, the consistency of animated character voices.

A Void to Fill
First, we need to define the two essential parameters of voice characterization. They are the voice placement and the voice effect that can be created by working with the mouth, throat, etc.

1. Voice placement indicates in which area the actor places his voice. Later, I'll discuss the different areas where the voice can be placed and all the sounds we obtain from those areas.

2. The voice effect defines the way of working with the throat, nose and mouth, which will help in creating a great variety of sounds.