How Making The Bob's Burgers Movie Was The 'Total Opposite' Of The Series

2022 saw the return of theatrical cinema. From "Everything Everywhere All at Once" and "Avatar: The Way of Water" to "The Batman" and "The Fabelmans," the message Hollywood wanted to send was loud and clear: movies are back and they're really, really good. Among these many wonderful entries into the universal film catalogue was "The Bob's Burgers Movie," which cashed in on every ounce of the TV series' charm to deliver one of the many phenomenal animated stories that 2022 had to offer. 

Created by Loren Bouchard and co-written by Bouchard and Nora Smith, "The Bob's Burgers Movie" saw almost the entire main voice cast of the TV series return for the silver screen, including H. Jon Benjamin, who voices Bob Belcher, the titular restaurateur and exhausted patriarch of the Belcher family. Interestingly, while the movie sounded the same to audiences, if not more musical, it was an entirely different experience for the voice cast who were up against two new obstacles: A movie's production schedule... and a worldwide pandemic.  Here's the story, as shared by Benjamin.

In an interview with Little White Lies, H. Jon Benjamin explained how the process for recording the voice work in "The Bob's Burgers Movie" was the "total opposite" of a standard recording session for him and his cohorts, not only because they recorded separately instead of in a group, but also because the vocal recordings were completed after the animation. Specifically, Benjamin said:

"Since the beginning of the show, it's been all group sessions, even in the demo for the pilot presentation to Fox. We were all in the booth, which could be a precarious situation, because you don't want bleed-over in the audio. We used lots of partitions, but everyone did the scenes together, still do. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, we couldn't do that with the movie. This was a little more traditional, in that they backed into the audio recording which is usually done first. This time, they had to animate first, which I assume is like most animated movies. For us, total opposite."

Per Benjamin's own statement, it wasn't just the switch from small to silver screen that forced a change in their routine but also a need for more elaborate safety measures. For what it's worth, it seems that voice cast's chemistry didn't languish in solitude. "The Bob's Burgers Movie" is still sitting proudly atop an incredible Rotten Tomatoes score, which proves that audiences and critics alike adored the Belcher family's cinematic adventure.