If the animation is done first, do the actors have to remain strictly to script leaving no room for improv and also have to nail their timing?
And if the acting is done first, how do they time it? Do they have to do it blindly, only by imagination?
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From me – VFX artist whos worked on a number of animated cartoons in my day: Voice acting is done before the animation. They generally stick to the script, but it’s up to the director if they want to do multiple takes, allow for some improv etc. *Generally* speaking there is not much improv in what is said, but they can do multiple wildly different reads of the same lines (which is an art in itself).
For the animation part you’d be surprised how quickly animators are able to match the lip sync. We will animate based on the acting from the voice track. *Sometimes* we had recording of the voice actor in studio to refer to, but not *always*. Most high-budget movies will record the actor these days but it’s not always referred to.
Sometimes after the animation is done they will do a polish-pass of parts of the voice acting. We call that ADR (Though I think we use that term incorrectly). ADR is where they might want to adjust some lines once they see how the sequence looks in the edit, or to add grunts/effort/reaction noises that just add little bits to the animation. The actor will watch the cut and act/grunt/etc which being able to watch the latest cut on a screen.
Full disclosure: I work in post production (VFX) and haven’t worked in animation in 15 years or so so some of the process may have changed, but this is loosely what my experience was.
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