I like Chris Rock, but I’ve never quite managed to forgive him for saying that voice work is easy. It is, if all you’re doing is voicing a character basically based off yourself. Real voice work is hard, especially if one of the things you’re doing is taking over one of the best-loved characters in animation. One whose voice everyone recognizes and can tell if it’s off in some way. There are several voice actors whose job Chris Rock couldn’t even pretend to do, and one of the first to come to mind is Jim Cummings.

I don’t know what his real voice sounds like. He sounds like Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, Pete, Darkwing Duck, the Tasmanian Devil, Shocker and Thanos. And “additional voices.” So very many “additional voices.” He sang an underappreciated love song in the underappreciated Princess and the Frog. (And if Chris Rock thinks voice acting is easy, he should try singing in someone else’s voice.) When previous honoree Jeremy Irons couldn’t hit his notes in “Be Prepared,” it was Jim Cummings who filled in.

There’s something impressive about being able to sound so flawlessly like someone else. I can’t do it. I can fake an accent or two, goodness knows, and there’s my world famous Sirkian Melodrama Voice. But no one is ever going to confuse me for anyone other than me. Certainly you’d never pick me to take over a character. But he was the third voice of Winnie the Pooh, after Sterling Holloway and Hal Smith. And then in 1989, he started sharing voice duties for Tigger with Paul Winchell—and that’s even harder than just doing it alone, I think, because surely it would be easy for those familiar with the character to know who was voicing him when.

There are a few fields where my admiration boils down to “because I can’t do it myself,” and this is definitely on that list. Oh, as I say, I’ve dabbled a bit—which is why I know this is hard work and admire people who do it better than I do. It bothers me that the Academy doesn’t either consider it real acting or else institute a category for Best Voice Performance. Not even the Golden Globes, presumably because they aren’t as interested in getting Jim Cummings to show up to the Golden Globes.

I’ll be honest—there’s also the factor that he just looks like such a friendly guy. Who wouldn’t want to spend time with Jim Cummings? He’d have a lot of fun Hollywood stories, and to lighten them up, he can do them in the voice of Darkwing Duck or Hondo Ohnaka or whoever. He even did Orson Welles on an episode of Animaniacs, which seems a bit like unnecessary duplication of effort, but there we are. Maybe he’d explain that, if you asked.

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