Voice Actors Still Act, You Know

Voice actors are like the untouchables of the acting world.  There's an unspoken class system to acting, with movie actors at the top, followed by TV actors, then stage actors, with voice actors at the very bottom.  Whenever people talk about acting in cartoons or video games, they do so with a smirk and maybe a dismissive gesture.  I remember one time where I was talking to a friend about Up and I asked him, "So, who was the main character?  Someone famous, right?"  And he responded with, "Yeah, Ed Asner played him...I mean, did the voice for him," and scoffed to himself.  Or another time when a different friend and I were playing a game where we came up with really bad actors who would play us in movies about our lives.  Laughing, my friend said, "You know who should play you?  Haley Joel Osment."

"Um, you mean the guy who got nominated for an Oscar as a kid?"

"Yeah, nominated, and what's he doing now?"

"I think he's the main character in Kingdom Hearts."

"Yeah.  Voice acting!"

So, why exactly is voice acting less legitimate than any other kind?  You're still playing a character, aren't you?  You're still portraying a person with their own thoughts, feelings, goals, wants, needs, and experiences, aren't you?  But for some reason, no one cares about it.  Not even the people who hire voice actors, generally.  I mean, you can usually count on quality acting from big budget productions like Disney or Pixar movies; or, on the television side, there's Family Guy, which has great voice acting, regardless of how shitty the show itself is.  But in something like, say, Avatar: The Last Airbender, the acting just....isn't good.  All the actors, main and supporting, are flat and stilted, and the title character in particular has a bad case of the mushmouth.  Now, the show itself is pretty fantastic, and the actors do get better as they go, but it isn't nearly the level of quality of something like Family Guy.

It's focused on even less in video games.  Voice acting is usually the very last step in the game-making process.  The game is worked on for months, maybe years, and then they shuttle a couple actors in a dark studio, have them recite the lines for two days, and they're done.  This is why in most games the characters' mouth movements don't match the words being said. 

Translated games are the absolute worst.  They don't even try sometimes.  I mean, obviously something is bound to get lost in the translation, but if you've ever watched a Hayao Miyazaki movie in English then you know that quality acting can still be taken from a dubbed work.  The most horrifying example is Final Fantasy X, an otherwise fantastic game that was almost ruined by how shitty the voicework was.  Take this, the most infamous scene of the game, for example.

The whole game is like that.

Or how about this, from the original Resident Evil?

But I digress.  So, why is voice acting such a disrespected branch of the craft?  The only real reason I can think of is that since we're such visual creatures, there's a certain disconnect that occurs when we hear a voice, but we aren't seeing the speaker.  When we think of iconic cartoon or game characters, the first thing we go to is what they look like.  If I were to go up to you and say, "Winnie-the-Pooh," the first thing that'd pop into your head wouldn't be one of his trademark phrases, like, "Oh, bother," or, "Think-think-think-think," but rather a silent image of the Disney icon. 

But the memorable image isn't the only thing that makes him an icon.  It's his raspy voice, the way he speaks, the inflections he makes, the way he interacts with the people and animals around him.  Dug from Up isn't remembered simply because he's a talking dog.  It's the lovable, dumb-guy delivery of every line that makes him so very quotable. 

Would Gollum have made such a lasting impression if his voice wasn't the wet, gravelly, throat-killing snarl it was?

Would Mark Hamill's Joker from Batman: The Animated Series have scared the shit out of us as kids if his laugh wasn't the insane giggle it was?

Voice actors have the same job that all actors do: to play the part, and play it well.  To make a memorable experience for the audience and to stick in people's minds long after the movie's ended.  In a way, voice actors need to draw on even more skill than most since they must maintain good chemistry and interaction with the other characters while never actually speaking to or even seeing them.  And it's not like voice acting is populated only by people who weren't lucky enough to make it in Hollywood; celebrities have also given their voices, including Christian Bale, David Spade, Patrick Stewart, and Ed Asner.  Is Christian Bale less of an actor because he was in Howl's Moving Castle?  Is David Spade less respectable because he appeared in the Spyro games?

Actually, don't answer that last one.