Niki Rants about a VA while she waits for the Mandalorian trailer:
Not to be a sap on the main (lol who am I kidding, I’m always a sap on the main) but recently I went back and started re-watching Tales of Arcadia from the beginning, and in spite of the fact that it’s only been three years since that lazy summer afternoon when I first decided to give it a try, the nostalgia is hitting me HARD. And the biggest reason for this?
I didn’t know who Anton Yelchin was when I first started Trollhunters. I’d never heard his voice before. But the moment Jim lets out that first startled yelp when his alarm goes off, I remember going: 😮
Jim’s voice was not what I was expecting. Animated teenage protagonists typically have a sort of pumped-up, borderline cocky sound to their voices. But Jim’s voice had this beautiful gentleness and vulnerability to it from the very beginning. Not only do we see his loving and tender personality from his introductory scene as he gets up early to make breakfast for his mother, we can HEAR it in his voice. His first spoken line (”Love you, Mom,”) which is said in a moment of complete emotional freedom (he’s alone with her and she’s sound asleep, so there’s no pressure to “keep up appearances” as it were) didn’t sound like a macho teen awkwardly forcing his voice to be soft for a moment of brief vulnerability. That was truly Jim, raw, unfiltered Jim, to whom gentleness and affection are as natural as breathing. And the only reason this moment worked, the only reason we could see who this boy was so clearly in just the span of a few seconds, was because of Yelchin’s performance. The only reason I remember that hazy summer afternoon so well is because of the impact Jim’s voice left on me.
Finding out afterwards that Yelchin had passed away during production hit me like a punch to the gut. Again, I had never heard of him before Trollhunters. I still don’t know anything about him beyond the ToA series. But within just 22 short minutes, he had made me fall head-over-heels in love with this sweet, scrawny teenager like no VA had ever done before. I could go on and on about how talented Yelchin was, about his amazing emotional range, the fact that you can FEEL Jim’s innocent joy when he laughs, his anguish when he cries, his rage when facing off against Gunmar in the Darklands....But I’ll cut it short.
TL;DR: Anton Yelchin is possibly the biggest reason why Jim became (and still remains) one of my absolute favorite animated protagonists. Emile Hirsch is a talented VA in his own right, and I don’t dislike his voice or performance. But in my heart, Jim is always going to have Yelchin’s voice.
