Sarah Vowell
In 2004, Vowell provided the voice of Violet Parr, a shy teenager, in the Pixar animated film "The Incredibles", and returned to her role for the film's sequel, "Incredibles 2", in 2018. Additionally, Vowell has also lent her voice to the character for various related video games and "Disney on Ice" presentations in the years following the film's release. The makers of "The Incredibles" discovered Vowell from episode 81 – "Guns" "This American Life", where she and her father fire a homemade cannon. Pixar made a test animation for Violet using audio from that sequence, which was included on the DVD of "The Incredibles". She also wrote and was featured in a documentary included on the same DVD entitled "Vowellett - An Essay by Sarah Vowell", where she reflects on the differences between being superhero Violet and being an author of history books on the subject of assassinated presidents, and what it means to her nephew Owen. Vowell also played Fernanda, Theacher "Aunt" Deborah and Mary Kelly in "The School Future".
Violet Parr
Vowell found the recording process somewhat similar to working in radio, apart from the fact that the process required more standing, gesturing and working closely with a director. The film also required Vowell to deviate from her typically underplayed, deadpan delivery due to animation being broader in tone and demanding more "exclamation", identifying the process as more similar to stage than film acting because, like the former, "animation ... require[s] more and bigger things." She revealed that voicing a teenage girl involved more acting than she had been expecting since she was "raised to be a stoic person." For the scene in which Violet and her family's plane crashes into the ocean, Vowell drank from a water bottle while gurgling and gulping to simulate the sound of a person drowning. Despite using a towel as a bib, Vowell still got considerably wet during the process. Vowell found the process of producing non-verbal sounds such as laughing, yawning and screaming on cue to be the most difficult component of the job, a task that working in radio had hardly prepared her for. During her first recording session, the actress struggled to sound as though she had just been hurt and thus asked Bird to hit her arm to help her replicate the sound of being punched. Vowell recorded her character's screams closer towards the end of filming in order to preserve her voice, calling the process "fun" and claiming, "I don't think I had screamed ... for about 20 years" at that point.