BEAR NECESSITIES
Veteran voice actor brings Winnie the Pooh to life
By most accounts, there could be as many as 400 voices floating around Jim Cummings’ head at any given moment.
Granted, the veteran voice actor hasn’t actually counted them.
“I have no idea,” says Cummings. “People are very kind who sit around counting them. I just keep them coming. I don’t even think about it in that way.”
Still, 400 tends to be the number cited in various bios of the 65-year-old Ohio native. By definition, voice actors tend to be anonymous, behind-the-scenes types, even those at the very top of the game. But thanks to Cummings’ involvement in the high-profile live-action/CGI hybrid Christopher Robin, he has been making the media rounds on behalf of the film and discussing his voice roles of iconic characters Winnie the Pooh and Tigger.
The film stars Ewan McGregor as the adult Christopher Robin. Everybody Loves Raymond’s Brad Garrett and Doctor Who’s Peter Capaldi voice Eeyore and the Rabbit, respectively. Character actor Toby Jones voices Owl, British comedian Nick Mohammed voices Piglet and Oscar-nominated actress Sophie Okonedo gives voice to Kanga the kangaroo.
While Garrett and Capaldi have both done extensive voice work in the past, Cummings is the only performer playing a major role in the film whose bread and butter has been working as a voice actor. It’s a job he has held since voicing the Brooklynese Lionel the Lion in Disney’s Dumbo’s Circus back in 1984, which was his first audition.
Thanks to his long history with Winnie the Pooh and Tigger, no auditions were necessary for Christopher Robin.
Cummings has been the voice of the two characters since the 1980s, when Disney and ABC decided to reboot the characters from A.A. Milne’s classic books of the 1920s as a Saturday morning cartoon. Cummings is one of only three actors to voice the character — the other two being U.S. character actors Sterling Holloway and Hal Smith — so it would be understandable if he were a little wary about moving the beloved bear into the modern world of live-action/CGI.
He wasn’t. In fact, Cummings says his “heart skipped a beat” the first time he saw the scene of a CGI Pooh meeting a live-action Christopher in a London park.
“Christopher is all grown up and there’s Pooh,” Cummings says. “It’s just so much fun.”
The family film is based on the age-old premise of how to find your inner child. McGregor plays the adult Christopher as a humourless workaholic who is neglecting his wife and daughter. The sense of wonder and imagination that fuelled his childhood adventures in Hundred Acre Wood with Pooh and the gang has vanished. So the honey-loving bear and his pals decide to intervene by reappearing in his life.
“I think that the biggest difference is that Christopher Robin finally gets the limelight,” Cummings says.
“He has saved the gang — Pooh and Tigger and Eeyore and Rabbit and the gang — from their trials and tribulations so many times that this time they get to turn the tables and go out and save him.”
The process for capturing Pooh in a big-budget Disney movie was a little more involved than what Cummings has been used to working on Saturday morning cartoons and straight-to-video films.
He recorded his lines upfront, and scenes were built around the audio.
In traditional animation, that would have been the end of it. But here the process was an ongoing interaction between voice acting, CGI and live actors.
“You had to go in and nip it and tuck it here, fix it there ... develop one plot line further and diminish that one,” he says. “I almost want to call it a sculpting process, where it just all comes together.”
Cummings started his artistic life singing in rock bands before deciding to break into the world of voice acting.
“I was always the kid in the classroom that made the weird sounds in the back of the room, bird calls and dolphin sounds,” he says. “I ended up being a singer in rock ’n’ roll bands for years and years and I was always in a lot of plays and you sort of synthesize that and turn monkey hour into a career.”
He has developed hundreds of characters, including super fowl Darkwing Duck, Cajun firefly Ray from The Princess and the Frog and alien pirate Hondo Ohnaka in Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
Asked if he has a method actor’s way into Winnie the Pooh, Cummings breaks into that famously lilting voice.
“Well,” he says, “a smackerel of honey doesn’t hurt.”