Riddle me this.

I'm having a hard time remembering when exactly we started caring about who was giving voice to animated features. It seems like every time a animated film is released these days we have to know up front which celebrities are lending their voices to the characters. Now, my problem with this is two-fold:

1. I've a great respect for voiceover artists and I bet a good number of them are getting screwed out of a job just so a movie can amp up the fact that some celeb is behind the talking frog or penguin or whatever. (I'm not talking about roles where versatility is needed like Robin Williams as the genie in Aladdin, etc. I'm talking about characters that just require a nice, pleasant voice, which brings me to part 2 of the two-fold problem...)

2. Part of the point of animation is that, well, it's animated; it's illusory. We are supposed to believe in the character and not be able to picture the person behind what's been fashioned so carefully on screen. It's actually distracting.

So there ya go.



(Truth be told, I have no idea who played Ariel and I don't really need to know, but whoever she is, I hope she hasn't lost her job to Cameron Diaz.)