Acting Reference: John Kricfalusi as Ren Hoek

A somewhat more relevant example, since it is voice-acting. I didn't want to look at only voice-acting, because I feel that being able to act in general is more beneficial than just being able to voice-act. To put it simply, a good actor is one that act in any environment, whether that's a film set, a theatre production, or a sound booth to record voices. With that said, I wanted to look at who I feel is a perfect example of an insane character performed with such a high level of bliss and over-the-top madness, and makes it both creepy and hilarious. Ren Hoek, from The Ren & Stimpy Show, is a rather notorious character, particularly, and rather ironically, for more grown-up audiences because he is one of the most depraved cartoon characters ever. He is basically designed to work alongside Stimpy, a much nicer and dumber character. Ren's reactions to Stimpy's actions are basically due to both of their varying levels of intelligence, and Ren typically goes insane at Stimpy any time he does something blatantly stupid. It's quite a typical dynamic, really, but the writers always knew how to make the characters work on their own too, and with Ren, they really enjoyed making him go completely out of his mind to the point where he completely falls apart, mentally.

I'm going to look at how John K voiced Ren, not Billy West. That's not to say Billy West did a bad job as Ren, but John K just did that little bit better. For starters, Ren's voice in general is supposedly John K impersonating Peter Lorre, which I think adds to both the charming side of Ren's character, and also makes the moments where he is getting a bit more gritty seem very fitting, as well as comedic. The voice really suits him, perfectly. The performance, during the scenes of Ren just insanely rambling to himself is so over-the-top that, to me, they come across as hilarious and frightening. The acting of the animation also adds to this, since every pose and keyframe is given that much exaggeration that it works very well with the voice-acting. I do have a couple of damn good examples of this, but unfortunately those particular clips are not available on their own on Youtube. The scene in the episode Stimpy's Fan Club, where Ren contemplates killing Stimpy to "end the farce", as he puts it, is a very dark scene, but the way it's acted makes it far less intense and instead more funny. There's also a scene in that same episode where Ren is reading all of Stimpy's fan letters, and the entire time, the character is forced to act with just the upper-half of his body, because he is sitting at a desk. He jumps between happy and angry throughout the scene, and at the second half of the sequence, after getting told off by Stimpy, Ren appears to be happy again, but his descent into madness begins to shine through, and John K manages to portray this quite subtly.

Finally, there is this famous scene, where Ren is so mad at Stimpy that he stops screaming and instead talks quite slowly, seemingly holding back a tonne of rage. Another example of John K's great performance and the manic animation coinciding very well together.