Voicing concerns: are big-name actors ruining animated movies?

The rumors of Chris Pratt’s badness have been greatly – well, maybe not greatly, but at least somewhat – exaggerated. When the first trailer for the upcoming Super Mario Bros Movie teased his vocal performance as the overall-clad plumber of 8-bit repute, fans began gnashing their teeth harder than a thicket of piranha plants, outraged to hear that he’d eschewed the character’s distinctive spicy-meat-a-ball accent in favor of a more dialed-back Noo Yawkah inflection. Which is fair enough, those little cries of probably would’ve gotten old after an hour or so, not to mention the inevitable backlash from Italian anti-discrimination activists. The integral Mario-ness of his performance comes and goes, to the point that most of the time, he just sounds like Chris Pratt. He’s not horrible in the role, but there’s not really anything to recommend him as the right match for this specific character, either.