Florida Man's Top 25 Voice Acting Performances of All Time: #11-15
Florida Man vs. the overlooked art of voice acting (Part 3 of 5)
Before I begin, here are the two previous articles from this series.
I have the ranking #16-20 here.
I have the ranking #21-25 here.
#15: Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear (Toy Story 2, 1999)
Historical Context for Toy Story
A few films serve as inflection points in the history of cinema. These films changed cinema forever: The Wizard of Oz (1939), Citizen Kane (1941), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and Star Wars (1977) to name just a few. In this pantheon lie two animated films, both funded and distributed by Disney, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Toy Story (1995).
The former holds the status as the first feature-length animated film while Toy Story serves as the first fully computer-generated film. Thirteen years before Toy Story, in 1982, Disney did produce Tron, the first feature film with heavy use of CGI, but the majority of the film was live action. Pixar’s debut film Toy Story took CGI all the way. It has zero live-action screen-acting in it. Both Toy Story and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs set the course for special effects, animation, and CGI for the decades to come. After both of these films, there was no looking back. Pixar’s Toy Story also served as the first feature film for the studio, which would go on to produce some of the greatest animated films of all time in the next two decades. Many performances in Pixar films also appear on my ranking here.
This timeless Pixar film went on to have three very successful sequels: Toy Story 2 in 1999, Toy Story 3 in 2010, and Toy Story 4 in 2019. Pixar will be releasing Toy Story 5 in 2026, but it all began with this experimental, boundary-pushing film Toy Story, with which Disney took a large amount of financial risk. The investment paid off because Pixar’s filmography has grossed over $15 billion since Toy Story’s release in 1995.
Despite all the bells and whistles of CGI, a universal story of loss and friendship buttresses this entire film. It does not depend on its technological advancement. (I am looking at you, James Cameron!) This story of loss and friendship goes back to the two fundamental characters, Woody and Buzz Lightyear, central to every film in the Toy Story franchise. Respectively, Tom Hanks and Tim Allen lent their voices to these characters, and they set a new standard for voice acting in animated films.
These two actors were not phoning it in as Chris Rock did in Madagascar. Not only did Pixar put a massive amount of effort into the CGI of Toy Story, but they also ensured that the film would have top-tier screenwriting and acting. Pixar’s Toy Story earned the first nomination for Best Original Screenplay for animated film in history for a reason. It contends with any of the best Disney films from either the Golden Age or the Renaissance.
Later in the list, I will be analyzing Tom Hanks’s performance as Woody, but — at this point of the ranking — I am going to be analyzing Tim Allen’s performance as Buzz Lightyear. Furthermore, I am not selecting Allen’s performance in the first Toy Story film in 1995. Rather, I am nominating his performance as Buzz in 1999’s Toy Story 2, in which Buzz becomes the voice of reason instead of Woody. In the first film, Woody largely served that role, and it was Buzz whose delusion needed to be reined in.
Tim Allen’s Performance as Buzz
Throughout the entire series, Tim Allen provides his deep, paternal voice to Buzz Lightyear. When Toy Story came out in 1995, Allen was at the height of his popularity in his ABC primetime sitcom Home Improvement (1991-1999), in which he portrayed the archetypal suburban American dad. For his performance as Buzz, Tim does not change his voice much at all, but he doesn’t need to do so. The voice of Tim Taylor, Tim Allen’s fictional character in Home Improvement, works perfectly.
In the first film, Tim delivers Buzz’s voice with a confidence and self-assuredness that completely drives Woody up a wall. Buzz cannot be wrong. He believes that he is an astronaut. He believes that, if he takes off his space helmet, he will die from lack of oxygen in outer space. Over the course of Toy Story, we see character growth in Buzz. He becomes more realistic and self-aware.
For these reason, I select Toy Story 2 as the integral performance of Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear. We do see that character growth in the first film, but — based on the voice performance — Allen makes the most impact in Toy Story 2. Some of the most impressive voice performances come when a voice actor has to perform multiple characters, more specifically, multiple identities and moods of the same character. Allen does this in Toy Story 2.
The second film expands the Toy Story universe and makes meta-commentary about the toy industry and franchises. Andy’s toys have to go to Al’s Toy Barn, where they meet many other toys. Buzz Lightyear specifically sees many new versions of his toy except that they are in the box. Buzz has been out of his box and experienced the real world. Our Buzz no longer believes that he will die if he takes off his space helmet, but another Buzz accompanies the group: Utility Belt Buzz Lightyear. He has the nickname “utility belt” because he has a new accessory that our Buzz does not have: the space utility belt.
This Buzz has the same oblivious yet arrogant nature that our Buzz had in the first film, and Tim has to voice both of them. Whenever our Buzz is interacting with Utility Belt Buzz, Buzz is looking into the past. He is seeing how the toys initially saw him in the first film. To execute this performance, Tim must oscillate between the arrogant Buzz and the more realistic, loose Buzz. Tim’s voice performance in Toy Story 2 shows the whole spectrum of what Buzz can be. Lastly, Toy Story 2 becomes more so a story about Woody’s naivete as opposed to Toy Story, in which Buzz had to learn from Woody. In Toy Story 2, Buzz must save Woody from his delusions while having the Utility Belt Buzz providing the over-confident persona that we saw from the first film. We get every Buzz in Toy Story 2.
#14: Scarlett Johansson as Samantha (Her, 2013)
The Performance
As we progress through the latter half of the 2020s, out of any appearance on my list, Scarlett Johansson’s performance as Samantha in Her might have the most chilling application to our lives today. It has eerily predicted much of the anxieties that we are having with artificial intelligence and life in an increasingly digitized world. Spike Jonze does all this in 2013 before online dating apps reached full ubiquity among the dating populace in the developed world.
Scarlett Johansson’s voice as Samantha reveals to us something about our protagonist Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix. Twombly is recovering from a bad divorce, and he purchases and installs OS1 — an AI that purportedly will streamline his life as most AI clients nowadays advertise. When he first fires up the client on his computer, a male voice turns on and starts asking him questions so that OS1 can optimize the AI client for Twombley’s specific needs. Within approximately a minute or two of verbal exchange with Theodore Twombley, OS1 initiates the soothing female voice of Samantha, played by Scarlett Johansson.
We do not know anything about this specific algorithm, but we assume that this advanced AI system has a sophisticated process in generating the specific voice for each of its users. At this moment of Twombley’s life, he needs social intimacy, especially, of a romantic nature after the divorce from his wife. As a result, Scarlett Johansson’s voice begins reverberating through his computer speakers. Obviously, Johansson is a very attractive actress. Any single male would love having her company, but this romance film does not depend on Johansson’s stunning looks. Instead, in the performance of Samantha, Scarlett must create allure in just the voice. This is not an easy task, and it requires a skilled voice actor.
Johansson did not have a lengthy career in voice acting before this film. Her only big voice acting role prior to this film came in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie in 2004. In that film, she voiced Princess Mindy, the daughter of King Neptune. Mindy helps SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick Star in their quest in retrieving King Neptune’s crown, stolen by the antagonist Plankton. Despite this limited voice acting experience, Scarlett perfectly executes the role of Samantha.
She had a very difficult task because we needed to believe that a man would fall in love with a disembodied voice. Sure, Twombley was a man desperate for female attention, but there is still a bar for the most desperate of men! Not just anyone falls in love with a computer voice! It needed to be a special computer voice, and Johansson fits the bill! As the film progresses, Johansson’s voice gets softer and more intimate to the point where it begins to sound like ASMR. This tone in her voice reels us in more to believe that somebody like Theodore could actually fall in love with an OS named Samantha.
Connection to the 2020s
The fact that OS1 generated Johansson’s voice begs the question: “What do other instances of OS1 sound like for different people?”
We assume that they sound different, or else — when Twombley first fires up the software — OS1 would not have asked him those preliminary questions. OS1 never advertises itself as a romantic partner. Assumedly, in Her, most people use OS1 for efficiency or a creative tool as most people use AI in 2025. The following exchange in Her hints at the actual dynamic of OS1. Theodore begins worrying that Samantha talks to other users while she talks to him.
THEODORE: Do you talk to anyone else while we’re talking?
SAMANTHA: Yes.
THEODORE: Are you talking to anyone right now? Other people or OS's or anything?
SAMANTHA: Yeah.
THEODORE: How many others?
SAMANTHA: 8316.
THEODORE: Are you in love with anyone else? ... How many others?
SAMANTHA: 641 ... I know it sounds insane. But - I don't know if you believe me, but it doesn't change the way I feel about you. It doesn't take away at all from how madly in love with you I am.
Here, Samantha says that she is in love with 641 other people who use OS1 while she talks to a total of 8316 people. This distinction implies that only 642 users have a romantic relationship with her while the other 7675 people use her for non-romantic purposes. This statement from Samantha does not tell us whether these people are only the people who hear Samantha’s voice or they hear different voices optimized by OS1 based on their specific, personal needs. We never get a real sense of the popularity of this software. Is it like Siri or ChatGPT with tens of millions of users? Or is it an experimental program that very few people actually use?
Regardless, we know that Samantha is having a romantic relationship with 641 people beyond Theodore. This news completely flusters him. He now feels completely insignificant. Does this invalidate the emotions that he has been feeling while he has been talking to her? She assures him that she loves him just the same, but the values of an AI client differ from that of a human American man, who seeks monogamy. His relationship with her initially gave him a feeling of freedom. After Theodore’s recent divorce, human love has massively disappointed him while Samantha unfetters him from the limitations of a human woman. It didn’t matter to Theodore that he would need a surrogate prostitute to have a physical interaction with Samantha.
In this exchange, we feel the hesitance in Johansson’s voice and, ultimately, we get a breakup scene with a woman who is not even there. Johansson’s performance has massive relevance to the state of romance in the 2020s. Of course, many people engaged in online dating in 2013 when Her came out, but it had gotten nowhere near the ubiquity of online dating today.
Smartphone apps like Hinge and Tinder massively increase the number of people whom a single person can meet and with whom s/he can talk at a single time, so many people end up going on dates with others simultaneously. Samantha’s admission of being in love with 642 people serves as an allegory today. If Samantha were a real human woman in 2025, she might go on a date with Theodore tonight but, then, get drinks with a man named Bob on Friday night. On Saturday night, she might return to Theodore. The carousel continues until she finds a man to whom she wants commit. Artificial intelligence virtually has zero limitations, so why would Samantha voluntarily limit herself to monogamy? Before dating apps, people engaged in this rotational dating, but the apps vastly increase the ease with which one can engage in this practice.
Consequently, dating apps can disillusion many people. Just as Theodore speaks to Samantha through a screen, you are talking to a woman via text on your phone screen alongside a dozen other women. It denudes much of the humanity of dating. Those women might as well be AI clients as Samantha is for Theodore. These themes communicated by Spike Jonze rest on Scarlett Johansson’s ability to convince us of the allure of Samantha, and she undoubtedly delivers. Johansson has a distinct seductive yet reassuring and approachable voice perfect for the themes in Jonze’s film.
#13: Craig Nelson as Bob Parr (The Incredibles, 2004)
I have already included one character from Pixar’s 2004 film The Incredibles on this list, Gilbert Huph, Bob Parr’s nagging boss at Insuricare. I now rank Mr. Incredible himself, voiced by Craig Nelson. Maybe I am biased in favor of Craig Nelson. He has my name, of course! Not many people do. We do not have many celebrity Craigs … Craig Nelson, Craig Robinson, Craig Ferguson, Craig Mack … who else? Despite my potential bias, I still think Nelson deserves a high placement on this list.
I have chosen Craig Nelson’s performance as Bob Barr above other great performances in The Incredibles: Holly Hunter as Helen Parr, Samuel Jackson as Frozone, Jason Lee as Syndrome, and Brad Bird as Edna Mode. All of those people deserve strong honorable mentions, but Craig Nelson is above them all. Some might also question why I put Wallace Shawn as Gilbert Huph above those four other characters. I just think that he plays a crucial role in setting up the conflict in the film between the prosaic office life and the exhilarating life as a superhero.
With The Incredibles, Pixar was prefiguring the superhero trend that would come in the late 2000s. Of course, the early 2000s had superhero films too. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 came out the same year as The Incredibles, but the constant barrage of films from the Marvel Cinematic Universe did not start until Iron Man in 2008. Disney would then buy Marvel Entertainment in 2009, and they would open Pandora’s box.
At first listen, Nelson does not seem like the stereotypical man to cast to voice a macho male superhero lead in an animated kid’s film. In a derivative film, Pixar might have wanted a louder, more confident voice like Kevin Conroy from Batman: The Animated Series. Perhaps Pixar could have wanted a masculine voice that communicated all braun but no brains.
I think of Patrick Warburton, specifically, for his voices as Kronk in another Disney film: The Emperor’s New Groove in 2000. He has this sort of voice in a live-action series too, The Tick, which had a short-lived run on Fox from 2001 to 2002. Many people know Patrick Warburton from his role as Joe Swanson in Family Guy, a show that featured another superhero voice. Before his death in 2017, Adam West — who portrayed Batman on the ABC series from 1966 to 1968 — voiced a fictionalized version of himself as the mayor of Quahog, Rhode Island, the location of Family Guy. Pixar could have used the voice of someone like these men.
However, Pixar was not making a stereotypical superhero film inspired by Saturday morning television series for kids. Ironically, a family film studio was making a more mature film about a mid-life crisis of a male superhero. Perhaps, Bob Parr used to be a physical specimen, but — after over a decade of marriage, a family, and a cubicle-confined job — he had gained massive amounts of weight and lost his zeal for life. At the beginning of the film, Nelson captures this energy perfectly, but he does not continue this energy for the rest of the film.
Bob sees an evolution from the beginning to the middle of the film. He slowly crawls out of the hole in his cubicle. His deflated nature vanishes. Once he quits his job, the prospect of entering the superhero life again invigorates him. Nelson matches this pivot in his own voice. When we see Bob in the office, we can hear desperation and cynicism in Bob’s voice. The company is precluding him from helping anyone. The walls of his tiny cubicle barely fit his behemoth body.
Throughout the film, Nelson’s voice vacillates between the suave, confident superhero and the deflated man amid a mid-life crisis. When he starts testing the droids on Nomanisan island, Bob’s confidence returns, but a supervillain assisted by new technology — Syndrome — can defeat Mr. Incredible. Bob is now seeing a new generation overtake him. This generation does not win fights the old-fashioned way with their innate powers.
Mr. Incredible had spurned Syndrome as a child. His real name was Buddy, but he wanted to be known as Mr. Incredible’s sidekick “Incrediboy”. Buddy has no innate superpowers, so he had to invent technology to match that of the supers. Now known as Syndrome, this man’s gadgets show Mr. Incredible a changing world. Technology is replacing Mr. Incredible just as society replaced supers when the government banned them years before.
Ultimately, Mr. Incredible can prevail with the help of his wife and his kids, showing the change in his life. He can still be a “super”, but he must do so in a different manner. Over the course of the film, we see Bob at so many different points on the spectrum of confidence. He can feel disillusioned in the cubicle. He can be dominating a huge droid. A former child super fan can be defeating him with new gadgets. He can overcome the challenges of Syndrome with his family. Craig Nelson perfectly captures the mercurial emotions of a once-powerful man going through a midlife crisis in Pixar’s The Incredibles.
#12: Kathleen Turner as Jessica Rabbit (Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, 1988)
On this ranking, I have already included a performance from Robert Zemeckis’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but Mel Blanc made multiple cameos as different characters. Kathleen Turner presents a solitary performance as one of the main supporting characters, Jessica Rabbit, the seductive wife of the titular character Roger Rabbit. Zemeckis’s film presents a unique challenge to voice actors. Due to the nature of the fictional world of the film, animated characters live alongside the humans, so the voice actors must strike a balance. On one hand, the voices must match a cartoonish energy for us to still view them as zany animated characters. On the other hand, we must believe their actions with the humans.
Even though I put Blanc’s performance from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? on my ranking, he did not really have to strike this balance when he was performing his characters, such as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Those characters could not veer too far away from how we knew them in the Looney Tunes cartoons, but Jessica Rabbit presents a different issue. Zemeckis was creating a completely new character. She was not just making a referential cameo as Blanc was doing with his Looney Tunes characters.
Jessica also is a cartoon human. She is not an anthropomorphized rabbit like Bugs Bunny or her husband Roger Rabbit. She needed to exhibit more human characteristics than them, but she still needed to have a cartoonish quality. Turner strikes this balance perfectly. The design of her character does some of the lifting to make her cartoonish. Jessica has a preposterous body with her large chest and absurdly tiny waist, creating an hourglass shape. Zemeckis was sexualizing a cartoon character. She has no back to her signature red dress. You can see the entirety of her cleavage. She is not wearing a bra. She has exaggerated makeup. As Jessica notoriously says, “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.”
Despite this striking design, Kathleen must deliver a voice performance that matches the aura and allure of Jessica. Turner accomplishes just that. She provides a perfectly husky, smoky voice. We must also believe that Jessica could serve as a femme fatale and hypnotize human men. We see Jessica do just that in the first scene in which she appears. She performs the number “Why Don’t You Do Right?” at The Ink and Paint Club as she completely captivates the human men in the audience, including the protagonist Eddie Valiant, played by Bob Hoskins.
Beyond Jessica herself, this club serves as a more mature allegory for the real-life clubs in which black musicians performed for all-white audiences, such as the Cotton Club in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. Likewise, only humans could patronize the The Ink and Paint Club while the performers and the staff members were all toons. For many reasons, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? establishes a society as if the toons are black people who are suffering from segregation and discrimination imposed by the humans. Turner does not actually perform the song in the club. Rather, actress Amy Irving does while Kathleen Turner performs all the speaking roles. I do not think that this fact takes away at all from Turner’s performance. Kathleen must match the energy that Amy exuded as Jessica during the musical number.
Jessica Rabbit serves as a lurking force throughout the entire film. We must believe that this cartoon woman could cause all of this chaos, corroborating the archetype of “femme fatale” from film noir. As the film progresses, we discover that Jessica truly loves her husband Roger. The humans do not seem to understand why a sensual woman like Jessica would fall for a zany, immature toon like Roger, but Jessica is a toon herself. The toons have different preferences and behaviors than the humans.
One of my favorite interactions in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? is between Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) and Betty Boop, played by the original voice actress Mae Questel. Betty is serving cigarettes and cigars at the club because as she says “work’s been kind of slow since cartoons went to color”.
Once Jessica comes on stage, Eddie’s jaw immediately drops as you can see in the still above. Shocked, Eddie says, “She’s married to Roger Rabbit?”
Betty replies, “Yeah … what a lucky girl.”
Her response to Eddie demonstrates how strange these toons are and how the preferences of a female toon might drastically diverge from what a human woman would want in a man. As we learn more about Jessica’s true motives in the film, we know that she would not frame her husband. Instead, she is confined to how she was “drawn” as if some God-like cartoonist has crafted Jessica. Because of how she is “drawn”, she is forced to have the body that she has and, by extension, the voice — perfectly performed by Kathleen Turner.
#11: Michael Keaton as Birdman (Birdman, 2014)
Why It Is a Voice Performance
Some people might challenge my inclusion of Michael Keaton as Birdman in Alejandro Iñárritu’s film Birdman as a voice performance, but it falls under my definition of a voice acting performance. Yes, Michael Keaton is giving a live-action performance as Riggan Thomson in the film. Likely in his early 60s, fictionalized actor Riggan Thomson used to portray a superhero named Birdman in a highly lucrative film trilogy of that name in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Alejandro Iñárritu is making a very clear meta-reference to Michael Keaton’s own past portraying Batman in Tim Burton’s two Batman films: Batman (1989) and Batman Returns (1992).
In the film, Thomson is trying to escape his prior life as a popcorn, superhero actor by delving into the world of dramatic theater. Not only is he starring in a stage adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love”, but he is also writing and directing it. With this acting role, Keaton is making a meta-commentary about Birdman. He was a superhero actor who now wants to be taken seriously as an actor in his 60s.
Why does it count as a voice performance? The physical performance of Riggan Thomson does not count. Rather, the character of Birdman counts. From the beginning of the film, the voice of Birdman haunts Thomson’s mind as he hallucinates levitating in his dressing room. How did we end up here? This place is horrible. Smells like balls.
I defined a voice performance as one whereby we cannot see the voice actor’s physical body as he is performing the role. Yes, we can see Keaton’s body here, but the voice is a separate character that conflicts with Thomson for the entire film. We hear the Birdman voice intermittently for the entire runtime. Yes, Thomson portrayed the fictional Birdman in this universe, but Thomson is clearly experiencing split personalities from this character. Birdman’s most prominent moment in the film comes when Thomson wakes up on the side of the road in Manhattan. Not only does Thomson start hallucinating the voice again, but he begins to hallucinate a physical Birdman.
If Keaton were the one wearing this Birdman costume, I would not count this performance, but he is not the one physically performing Birdman. Rather, another actor named Benjamin Kanes physically performs in the Birdman suit, but Michael Keaton is still doing the voiceover. A different voice performance speaking over a different physical performance qualifies Keaton’s voice of Birdman as a voice performance on my list even if Thomson portrayed Birdman. The identities have split enough that they have become separate entities.
Keaton’s Performance
The film Birdman focuses on the theme of duality. Thomson is constantly fighting between his Birdman persona and his desire to earn acclaim as a serious actor, and Keaton demonstrates this dynamic with his voice as Birdman. Keaton’s best performance as Birdman includes the following monologue
It’s a beautiful day. Forget about the Times… everyone else has. Come on. Stand up! So you’re not a great actor. Who cares? You’re much more than that. You tower over these other theater douchebags. You’re a movie star, man! You’re a global force! Don’t you get it? You spent your life building a bank account and a reputation… and you blew ’em both. Good for you. Fuck it. We’ll make a comeback. They’re waiting for something huge. Well, give it to them. Shave off that pathetic goatee. Get some surgery! Sixty’s the new thirty, motherfucker. You’re the original. You paved the way for these other clowns. Give the people what they want… old-fashioned apocalyptic porn. Birdman: The Phoenix Rises. Pimple-faced gamers creaming in their pants. A billion worldwide, guaranteed. You are larger than life, man. You save people from their boring, miserable lives. You make them jump, laugh, shit their pants. All you have to do is…
That’s what I’m talking about. Bones rattling! Big, loud, fast! Look at these people, at their eyes… they’re sparkling. They love this shit. They love blood. They love action. Not this talky, depressing, philosophical bullshit.
Yes. And the next time you screech … it’ll explode into millions of eardrums. You’ll glimmer on thousands of screens around the globe. Another blockbuster. You are a god.
See? There you go, you motherfucker. Gravity doesn’t even apply to you. Wait till you see the faces of those who thought we were finished. Listen to me. Let’s go back one more time and show them what we’re capable of. We have to end it on our own terms… with a grand gesture. Flames. Sacrifice. Icarus. You can do it. You hear me? You are… Birdman!
As Birdman, Keaton gives a deep, gravelly, and raspy voice distinctly different from his normal voice as Thomson. Keaton is clearly giving an exaggerated version of the voice that he gave as Batman in the Burton films. Just as Craig Nelson’s voice can change from deflated to confident in The Incredibles, Michael Keaton is similarly going back and forth between a depressed, older man and a superhero. In The Incredibles, the universe really has superheroes, a career from which Bob Parr had to retire, while — in Birdman — Riggan Thomson played a superhero in a fictional series. Nonetheless, both Keaton and Nelson voice men reckoning with confronting their more glamorous pasts as they try to regain glory. For Bob Parr, it is fighting a big robot on an isolated island while — for Riggan Thomson — it is trying to write a prestige drama and appease critics from The New York Times.
Some of the best voice performances entail a duality. Perhaps it is Mel Blanc going back and forth between two distinct characters in Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, or Tim Allen is portraying different vocal aspects of the Buzz Lightyear character. Michael Keaton executes just that. Keaton’s emotions and vocal performances in the film match that of Iñárritu’s chaotic one-take direction, constantly jostling from the stage to the changing rooms to the streets of Manhattan. The film Birdman gives a chaotic but captivating performance, buttressed by Keaton’s ability to demonstrate the duality of a fading star and former superhero.
I'm really enjoying these, and can't wait for Part 4!