Animated Inflection

Dylan Pickle, the gnarly new baby on Nickelodeon’s long-running animated series “Rugrats,” is actress Tara Charendoff’s brother-pummeling, toy-grabbing, up-spitting bundle of joy.

She supplied Dylan’s cries in “The Rugrats Movie” and she’ll be with him next February when he crawls, cooing and gurgling, into the small screen to join the gang of preschoolers in new episodes of the No. 1-rated prime-time children’s series.

Charendoff is considered a rising star among the newest wave of voice-over actors, a fraternity long regarded as Hollywood’s carnival sideshow--the ones who laid the goofy Goofy soundtracks on slapstick cartoons. But with animated shows sprouting like kudzu, and reflecting costlier production values and better writing, voice-over work has become a hip thing. Even TV and film stars clamor for guest spots on children’s shows.

Her babbling, giggling Baby Dil performance--from the first starkly moving delivery room cries in the “Rugrats” feature film--have made her a top choice of Hollywood casting directors. And her peers now consider Charendoff a major new talent among those actors following in the footsteps of the late Mel (Bugs Bunny) Blanc.

But “Rugrats” is only one of the series that Charendoff is on this fall. The petite, 23-year-old Toronto native also plays Spot, a neurotic hen in “Disney’s 101 Dalmatians”; Bubbles, one of the “Powerpuff Girls” on Cartoon Network; and she’s lined up a parade of guest spots.

While Charendoff is usually only heard, not seen, her ability to act is as important as her voice.

“After all, Blanc was a great actor, he had great timing, comedic gifts. He didn’t just do a Brooklyn accent, he became those characters,” said Maurice LaMarche, who recently won an animation Annie Award for his performance as the Brain on Warner Bros.’ lab mouse buddy series “Pinky & the Brain.”

“When I do the Brain, people tell me I hunch over and cock an eyebrow--I become the Brain,” said LaMarche, a comedy club impersonator tapped to perform Chief Quimby 13 years ago on “Inspector Gadget.”

Now he regularly bumps into Charendoff at recording sessions.

“I’m working with these actors I grew up with--and it’s so much fun,” said Charendoff, whose long, casual hair and enormous dark eyes make her look vaguely like a grown-up Rugrat.

Voice actors--take an old hand like Frank Welker, for instance--are normal-looking people who undergo an amazing transformation once they’re in a recording studio. They make weird, wild, wonderful sounds--as if they were possessed by zany or bizarre characters.

“I tend to do a lot of goofy, crazy stuff. Chairs, dogs, cars, motorcycles, all kinds of animals,” Welker said after a recent recording session near Warner Bros. Widely regarded as one of the foremost talents in the field, he has hundreds of credits over the past two decades, working steadily in children’s animated shows. He is Santa’s Little Helper in “The Simpsons” and Freddie Jones in “Scooby Doo.” He played a dog that explodes on an episode of “The X-Files.” In feature films, he was Khan in “Mulan” and the murderous female alien Sil in “Species.”

Welker and other voice actors create the characters that are later given final form by animation artists and, by all measure, greeted eagerly by audiences.

More Work Is on the Horizon

Indeed, a number of network and cable outlets--notably ABC, Nickelodeon, Fox, the WB--feature wall-to-wall animated kids’ programming on Saturday mornings, and more of it on weekdays before and after school. Fox’s successful prime-time shows “The Simpsons” and “King of the Hill” have spurred the network to order the animated “Futurama” and “Family Guy,” to begin early next year. UPN will soon introduce “Dilbert” and there is talk that other networks are considering prime-time projects.

That means Hollywood animation studios are running at high gear, hiring voice specialists as well as on-camera actors who enjoy the quick sessions--no need for wardrobe, makeup and hair--and the chance to play out of type or do work their children can appreciate.

“It’s a great gig, it’s really fun, and if you’re vain and worried about the way you look, you have that on your side,” said Flea, bassist in the rock group Red Hot Chili Peppers, who plays a mute but emotively noisy 4-year-old, Donnie, in “The Wild Thornberrys,” another Nickelodeon series. It’s a role he took in large part, he said, to please his 10-year-old daughter, Clara.

“But it’s not for everybody,” he said, adding that some actors find it difficult to act if they can’t use their faces and body language.

After all, acting is the soul of the craft, even amid a dizzying array of technical advances in TV and film production, said Bob Kurtz, veteran commercial animator and governor of the animation peer group of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. The basic tool is still just a microphone.

“To put personality in a voice, to be dramatic, comedic and in a sense to hit your mark vocally, it takes quite a bit of talent,” said Kurtz, who once watched humorist Stan Freberg win over a skeptical producer by speaking lines for an animated potato.

“Animators love to get ahold of good voices,” Kurtz added. “It’s like listening to a good piece of music over and over.”

Which may explain why Carol Monroe, senior vice president of programming and development at Fox Kids, commutes to work while listening to soundtracks of the network’s upcoming series “Woody Woodpecker.”

“I sneak over and watch the recording sessions,” she said. “It’s the best show in town.”

Billy West, the new voice of Woody, said it takes hard work to stay on top.

“The best people have this endless, ever-expanding bag of tricks,” said West, another top-tier actor who has a starring role in the upcoming “Futurama,” from “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening.

“It’s all theater of the mind . . . all the worlds you create are based on the 2-inch strip of flesh in your throat,” West said. “It’s not this goofy collection of witty little voices. It’s real damn acting.”

Another world-class voice, Rob Paulsen, who plays the talking lab mouse Pinky of “Pinky & the Brain” and singing toon character Yakko on “Animaniacs,” said the executive producer of the two Saturday morning shows, Steven Spielberg, often meets the cast at Warner Bros.

“He takes the time to say, hey, Rob, I really like this, or hey, Maurice [LaMarche, Pinkie’s sidekick the Brain], I really like that. He doesn’t have to do that,” said Paulsen. “We don’t get treated like the goofy little kid actors, the stepchildren of show business who make the funny sounds.”

The ultimate tribute to the voice-over profession has come from TV and film stars, who have been flocking to the recording studios for feature roles and guest spots, a trend started by “The Simpsons.”

Sure enough, a recent “Simpsons” featured Alec Baldwin, Kim Basinger and Ron Howard in an episode about celebrities mobbed by over-eager fans. But in real life, celebrities are practically mobbing animating casting offices.

“I’m getting calls from [celebrity] agents all the time,” said Leslie Lamers, casting director at Warner Bros. Animation.

An ABC Saturday morning show, “Disney’s Hercules,” recently claimed a record in the celebrity guest-spot race with 166 stars in 65 episodes, from Jennifer Aniston (“Friends”) to Steven Weber (“Wings”). Film star James Woods has a leading role to boot.

“We’ve gotten almost everyone we asked,” said Jamie Thomasson, casting director at Disney Television Animation. Among the few notables that he has yet to corral, he said, are Clint Eastwood and President Clinton.

But regular roles require voice specialists, which is why Thomasson hired Charendoff for a key part--a neurotic hen--in “Disney’s 101 Dalmatians,” a new 65-episode TV series. He also placed her in a leading role in an upcoming Disney video feature.

“She has arrived. She is a tremendous talent,” Thomasson said. “She’s a great comedic actress, a great dramatic actress, a great singer. She does a variety of characters; she can play it subtle, straight or as broad, over the top, wacky as you like.”

Charendoff recalls practicing silly voices as a little girl. She turned professional as a 13-year-old in the title role in “Hello Kitty,” a 20-episode animated series.

Her facile vocalizations landed her roles as a villain in the video feature “Scooby Doo on Zombie Island” and Batgirl in “New Batman/Superman Adventures.” She was Molly, also an evil doll in the Halloween episode of “Sabrina the Teenage Witch.”

“Tara did a wonderful job,” said “Sabrina” executive producer Paula Hart. “It was important the doll be creepy but not creep out the little kids and make them change the channel.”

Charendoff, unlike most of her voice-over brethren, has a fair number of live-action credits, including a co-starring turn in the ABC-TV vidpic “Sabrina Goes to Rome,” playing a 17-year-old witch who gets her first kiss.

Of course the role of baby Dylan will mean she’ll be playing even younger--her dialogue is limited to the words “Mine!” and “Poopy!” but she plays it with passion.

Barbara Wright, casting director for “Rugrats” production company Klasky Csupo, said Charendoff, who Wright had heard create distinctive voices for each of five brothers, was her first choice for the part. “It was her and there wasn’t any runner-up.”

Faces Behind The Voices

You probably don’t recognize them, but the voice-over actors on the left bring to life the corresponding animated characters on the right.