Attention, Hollywood!

You must immediately STOP casting voice over actors for their looks. I mean now.

I just finished watching Madagascar 2. Like Madagascar 1, there were not enough penguins in this movie. It ended up being a slog through my memory banks, trying to figure out who the voice of the pompadour lion was (Alec Baldwin, though for a while I was half sure it was William Shatner), punctuated by some well-voiced Penguin scenes. The penguins are the highest-billed characters in there voiced by actual voice actors. There were a couple of scenes in there where I actually found myself thinking, "You know, I bet this is really funny for people who know who is doing the voice of that hippo/giraffe/lion and are fans of their live action work."

You must start hiring real legitimate voice actors for animated movies. Starting now. Scratch that. Fire any face stars who are currently voicing animated movies and re-record their parts with voice actors. It's not enough to get a face actor who can do funny voices. The lemurs are the second funniest part of the Madagascar franchise, in no small part because of Sascha Baron Cohen. He did some funny stuff in Madagascar 1 that almost made me want to make an exception to my plea for face actors who can do funny impressions and voices, too. Then Madagascar became a franchise and not just a one-off movie. Even voiced by Sascha Baron Cohen both times, King Julien sounded different in the second installment, to the point that Emp. Peng. and I both thought that the directors must not have been able to get him back and hired a bad sound-alike. Now that animated movies are almost de facto franchises from the start, you need to hire people to voice them who can do a character consistently even if there are years between installments. Professional voice over actors can do that. Movie stars cannot.

While we're on that subject, since it is pretty much a given now that an animated movie is going to be a franchise with several direct-to-DVD installments that won't have the budgets for the big name actors from the first movie, why do you even start the roles off with the huge names? It just makes the direct-to-DVD movie sequels seem that much more cheaply done when all the major voices change between Part 1 and Part 2. Which is a shame, because you are probably hiring real voice actors for part 2, who are probably doing a much better voice acting job than the movie stars from part 1. If we weren't spending the whole movie noticing that someone didn't quite get the celebrity voice spot on, we would probably like the sequels better than the original.