Jim Cummings Quotations

I take the work seriously. Which is why I always swing for the fences whenever I voice a character. But that said, I don't take myself all that seriously.

Sterling Holloway, the actor who had originally voiced Pooh, decided to retire in the mid-1980s. Disney decided that they wanted to continue this character with their 'New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh' TV series.

I started out doing multiple characters from day one, when I got my fist job in 'Dumbo's Circus.' I'm used to getting in an argument with myself, throwing myself off a cliff, patching myself up and brushing myself off with an arm around my shoulder.

One good thing about animation is that, if you do screw up a line, they won't use it. You can keep going until it's right.

As a kid, I just loved cartoons. And as the credits went by, I'd study those names and then try to figure how I could get hired to do what Mel Blanc and Daws Butler did. Create all of these great voices for animated characters.

As long as it comes across, the characters are well-served, the stories are good, and people like it, that's it for me. I'm a happy guy.

I loved Ray from 'The Princess and the Frog.' He was my guy. There was no Ray before me, so there's a level of satisfaction there.

By the time 'Dumbo's Circus' wrapped production of its 120 episodes, I had an agent, and I had scored my first feature film gig.

I can picture the character in my head, and the voice just comes out.

I'm usually the guy who says, 'Bruce Willis and Denzel Washington in the Siege'!

The established characters are easy to recall. I don't know why, but they come back to me instantly when I need them. It's the one-time-only characters that I don't remember where the voice I used came from.

I argue with myself, get mad at myself, throw myself around the room and then apologize to myself.

I remember as a kid watching TV and seeing Mel Blanc doing his voices and Paul Winchell doing his ventriloquism and thinking, 'Those guys are having a good time. I want to do that.'

Sometimes at drive-thrus I go into Winnie the Pooh and ask for a jar of honey.

Don Karnage-he's one of my all-time favorites. He's so brash and so bold and so arrogant-and he just doesn't know what he's doing.

I was at a restaurant and I heard this little voice at a nearby table pipe up and say, 'I believe I will have the chowder.' I got up and walked out into the middle of the restaurant. There was Sterling Holloway just sitting there being Sterling Holloway. Never in a million years would I have imagined that I'd have the honor of filling his shoes. I just regret not going up to him and saying hello.

I really have been blessed and fortunate to have accomplished what I have. I hope to do this for a long time. It's such an enjoyable job. I love to do it.

My agency tells me I am rare because I sing, do movie trailers, and do cartoons too. I like that because it gives me variety in jobs. I don't just sit and do movie trailers, and I don't just do cartoons either. I can do both, and I feel very fortunate for that.

I get to be one of the torch-bearers for a new generation.

John Fiedler's voice was kind of like the wind blowing through tall grass. It sounded homey and it sounded comforting.

I have some calls out to Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Eddie Murphy. I said, 'I won't star in any blockbuster films if you stay out of animated films.' They just won't call me back.

Mr. Bumpy from Bump in the Night was this funky little guy who lived under the bed and thought eating dust bunnies was a delicacy. He was as cool as he could be, and ate dirty socks.

I do all the better bears.

It was cool to have Mark [Hamill] ask me to do all these voices for him like he was a fan. I was like, "You're not meeting me, I'm meeting you."

I have four daughters, with the two youngest being four years old and a year and a half. When one of my older daughters was in sixth grade, a classmate brought in their talking Winnie the Pooh doll for show and tell, so the next week my daughter one upped her classmates and brought me to school in for show and tell.

I have a brand new favorite for a Disney animated feature coming out next Christmas called The Princess and the Frog. I'm Ray the singing Cajun firefly. New Orleans is my second hometown. I was a deckhand on a riverboat there when I was 18, so I have that Cajun accent down pat. Ray is a lovesick firefly who's near-sighted and falls in love with the Evening Star. Of course, Winnie the Pooh and Tigger will always be favorites of mine too.

I do very little on-camera acting, so within a phrase as a voice actor you have to know how to convey when someone is 95 years old or 19 years old. . . When I was the lead singer of the California Raisins commercials there was a traditional actor there as well and he would do all these body movements without saying anything because he was "acting." And the only acting the microphone picked up on was silence.

I think [Winnie the Pooh] just looks at the world through honey-colored glasses, and everything is honey-fied and sweet for him, and that's not a bad outlook.

Bonkers is kind of a combination of Jerry Lewis and Harpo Marx, which is very strange because Harpo never spoke!

A lot of times people will say, 'Well, gosh, you're really good; you should try acting!' And I say, 'Come on! I'm thesping my little guts out over here.'

I grew up watching all the great Disney animated films and to be able to carry that torch and know that I'm contributing to the same magic and wonder for a whole new generation is a great thing.

Everybody can identify with somebody in the Hundred Acre Wood.

I had to be on the set for 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' because my character was interacting with Bob Hoskins. It's a lot of 'hurry up and wait.' So there I was, at 2 a.m., sitting in a trailer at Griffith Park trying to stay awake. And I said to myself, 'This stinks.' The way I do it is better. I go into the studio about 10 a.m. There's no makeup to worry about. I can wear whatever I want. As soon I get there, I'm good to go. I record my stuff and go home.

Sometimes I'll have a brief window of mini-fame thanks to 'Access Hollywood.' But it only lasts a couple of days, and then no one recognizes me anymore.

Darkwing Duck and Don Karnage are the most fun to do, because they're both probably the closest to me - I kinda improvise a lot of them, kinda ad lib.

I've done so many other projects where you're in a room with a reader and you're acting your lines out: 'We have to get out of here! Any minute the building will explode!' And then the reader says: "Yes...we have to get... out of here." So it's not easy to be in the moment in that kind of situation. Reading with the entire cast in the room for The Clone Wars makes the experience much more organic and I love that.

Bonkers doesn't go by the book-he doesn't even know there is a book.