JIM CUMMINGS

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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

I do all the better bears.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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 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.