Parenting & Family Quote by Tom Kenny

Kenny is describing a voice the way a good actor actually finds one: by circling it, joking at it, refusing to pin it down too early. The line is a mini-manifesto for character work that doesn’t start with biography or psychology but with sound, texture, and permission to be weird. “He’s not a child but he’s childlike” sets up the crucial contradiction at the heart of so many enduring animated characters: they’re innocent without being naive, elastic without being empty. Kenny keeps toggling between categories - “not a grown up… not a kid” - because the sweet spot is the in-between, where a character can be emotionally readable to kids and still land as comedy for adults.

The “elf on helium” image is doing heavy lifting. It’s silly, sure, but it’s also technical: it points to pitch, breath, and brightness, a deliberately artificial register that signals heightened reality. Animation thrives on that slight wrongness. You want a voice that doesn’t belong to any normal human body, because the character isn’t bound by normal human limits.

Then comes the real tell: “we’ll play with it.” That’s process over perfection, a studio mindset where discovery happens through improvisation and iteration. The subtext is collaborative craft: the character isn’t fully invented in the script, or even in Kenny’s head; it’s found in the room, through experimentation, until the voice becomes a personality and the personality becomes a cultural object.