Gloria Talks Funny
2017 · 18m · United States
Directed by Kendall Goldberg
After discovering that the iconic cartoon that catapulted her voice acting career into stardom is being revived without her, Gloria, a 50-year-old voice actress, fights to reclaim the role that is rightfully hers.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a perfectly competent midlife-crisis-in-Hollywood story that's been told a thousand times—except Goldberg somehow mines genuine pathos from the absurdity of a voice actress fighting for her cartoon legacy, which is exactly the kind of premise that shouldn't work but does.
The film understands its debt to character-driven dramedy tradition while refusing easy sentiment; there's a formal restraint in how it balances Gloria's dignity against the industry's indifference that recalls the best of independent cinema's measured humanism.
What elevates this from a familiar story is Goldberg's decision to let the voice acting itself—that strange, disembodied labor—become the emotional center, treating vocal performance as the literal site of identity and worth rather than just a plot device.