Dee Bradley Baker

Appa is a six-legged flying bison who cannot speak, and for two decades the sound he makes has told us exactly how he feels about that. The sound is Dee Bradley Baker. In Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender (2026), with every human voice recast and the story in a hurry, Baker's bison was the one thing that had not changed, and it moved us more than a script this thin had any right to. Appa has no lines. Baker gives him a point of view anyway. He has said that creature vocals are the same to him as any other acting, and on the evidence he means it.

He came to the booth sideways. Musicals, opera and stand-up as a child, a philosophy degree, improv at Disney's Epcot Center, then his first big television part as Olmec on Legends of the Hidden Temple (1993–95). By the mid-1990s he was in animation for good, with Daffy Duck and the Tasmanian Devil in Space Jam (1996) and Cow and Chicken, and through the 2000s the recurring parts settled into a speciality. Appa and Momo in Avatar (2005). Perry the Platypus in Phineas and Ferb (2007), who says nothing and is never in doubt. Klaus Heissler in American Dad (2005), a proper talking part in a prime-time sitcom, to show he could do those too.

Then Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) made him an army. Dave Filoni's film is a television pilot that wandered into cinemas and we scored it accordingly, but the clones are why its one good sequence works. Baker voices all of them and gives Captain Rex the tone of a sergeant who has done this before, so that when the walkers climb the cliff we know who is giving the orders and why anyone follows them. He kept the job across Rebels and into Star Wars: The Bad Batch (2021), where a small squad of clones each needed a voice of their own and got one, all from the same man. The trick is not the impressions. It is that identical men sound like different people.

The thing to hold against him is the thing the industry holds in his favour. He can be anything, so he is used as everything, and his credit list on some series reads like a zoo inventory; even his admirers have wondered whether a voice asked to be that many aliens can last. The two films we have reviewed him in scored 44 and 64, and in both he was the most dependable thing on the soundtrack. That is the shape of a career like his: the animals are always good, and whether anyone has built a story worth their trouble is out of his hands. When the next Star Wars cartoon marches a battalion across the screen, he will be all of them, and you will be able to tell them apart.