Entertainment

Sandra Oh Gets Animated While Considering A Return To ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ As Cristina Yang

Published on: March 1, 2016 at 7:11 PM
By Amy Feinstein

Perhaps Sandra Oh has figured the best way to shake Grey’s Anatomy’ s Dr. Cristina Yang is to get animated. Really animated, and bring diversity to the world of animation in the process. Oh is voicing the brainy Frankie in the animated children’s movie Snowtime! The Nepean, Ontario, native assures fans that she knows snow.

According to The Inquisitr , fans of Grey’s Anatomy are having serious Sandra Oh withdrawal and want her back as Cristina Yang , Meredith Grey’s other half. Kevin McKidd, better known as Owen says that Cristina Yang has been back to Seattle, though many fans didn’t notice. He claims that there was a still from the set that showed Cristina Yang at McDreamy’s funeral, as a support for Meredith Grey, her person.

The Star reports that though Sandra Oh is now living in sunny California , she remembers many a cold snowy Canadian, fall, winter, and spring.

“I always slightly feel badly when I talk to anyone from Canada when it’s wintertime,” she said with a laugh.

Playing Frankie, called four eyes in the movie, she gets to anchor the story of a boy who designs and builds a snow fort in Quebec over a snowy winter break, which is the focus of an epic snowball fight. It is based on a live action film from 1984 called La guerre des tuques , and has already won awards.

Oh is loving the move into animation, where she has been featured in American Dad, Phineas and Ferb, and Robot Chicken . She is also enjoying working on children’s projects with PBS and Canadian public television. Oh says that the challenge of literally finding a character’s voice is the challenge, and this was particularly the case with Frankie and Snowtime!

“His voice is not like mine,” Oh said of Frankie’s higher-pitched kid-speak. She said the “joy of finding the voice,” was the biggest pleasure of working on Snowtime! along with being part of the animated snowbound world of the fictitious northern village.

CTV News believes that Sandra Oh is injecting a conversation about diversity into the world of animation, and that is always a good thing. Oh believes that in animation, she has been typecast as an Asian character, as much as she has been when acting in person.

“I have been more and specifically typecast, if one can say that, in animation than in anything else,” Oh said in a recent call from Los Angeles.

This puzzles the Grey’s Anatomy star, as she doesn’t think there is anything really “Asian” about her voice.

“All the characters I’ve played are specifically Asian. And I don’t particularly think that I have a specifically Asian voice.”

In Snowtime! she gets to play a Quebecois boy, who is just a nerdy kid in a snowstorm. The producer told her upfront that though Frankie might have some traditionally Asian personality traits, there was nothing specifically Asian about him. Oh thinks it is truly odd that she is generally only asked to read for clearly Asian animation roles.

“‘Why am I only going out for the Asian animated character?’ And then trying to kind of make headways into like, ‘Oh, can I be the Barbie voice? And not Barbie’s doctor or something like that?’ But no.”

With the #OscarsSoWhite controversy, Sandra Oh believes that it is a move in the right direction to aim towards diversity in all visual art, including animation. She still believes that an artist has a better chance in Canada than in the United States of telling a story about different people with a variety of people. The former Cristina Yang of Grey’s Anatomy believes though that her former boss, Shonda Rhimes, has done a great deal in terms of moving the needle for a better view of diversity on American television.

Have you seen Grey’s Anatomy’s Sandra Oh in any animated shows or movies?

[Photo by Angela Weiss/Getty Images]

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