By Mallory Sherwood,, Features Editor

Donna Ragland doesn’t have a typical college student’s job.

Instead of working on campus, at McDonald’s or at United Supermarket, she waits by the phone until someone calls to tell her to go to Dallas.

Ragland, junior art illustration major from Fort Worth, works as the voice for a cartoon character with FUNimation Productions Ltd., an animation distributing company that has worked since 1994 to redub popular Japanese cartoons and comics into English. FUNimation targets children and young adults with popular cartoons such as Dragon Ball Z, Cabbage Patch Kids, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Lupin the Third on Cartoon Network, said Jeff Dronen, public relation director for FUNimation, in an e-mail.

The shows that air on Cartoon Network compete with animated shows and other shows that are aimed at the same demographic, Dronen said. He said despite the competition, popular shows like Lupin the Third and Dragon Ball Z have pulled in greater ratings than most of the late night talk shows.

Ragland said she developed an interest in becoming a cartoon voice her freshman year when a friend mentioned her cousin worked at FUNimation in Dallas. After searching through many of the company’s Web sites, she found an administrative telephone number.

“The lady who answered the phone accidentally gave me the e-mail address for the voice director at FUNimation in Dallas,” Ragland said. “For the past two years, at least once a month, I have contacted and harassed this guy about an audition. After a year, he finally gave me his office number.”

Her persistence finally paid off.

One Thursday night in January, a man called to tell Ragland to come to Dallas the next day for an audition.

“It felt so good to finally get an audition,” she said. “When he finally called, it validated the two-year obsession I had with stalking him.”

After Ragland spent two years trying to get an audition, she realized her only obstacle was that she didn’t have a car.

“I started calling all of my friends asking if I could borrow their car for the next day,” Ragland said, and she was successful.

By 8:30 the next morning, she was headed to Dallas.

Ragland said once she was in the studio, she went into a tiny, sound-proof box, put on headphones and was handed scripts to three characters. Of the three voices, her favorite character was the hyperactive child, she said.

“I started freaking out into the microphone,” Ragland said. “I would get really excited while reading, and then whisper really quiet and then get excited again.”

It was what the company was looking for.

“I walked out of the booth, and they told me they were looking for people to do children’s voices in their next project,” Ragland said. “I was going to start training as child No. 2 in Lupin the Third, their next movie project.”

The movie has not begun production yet, and Ragland is still in training.

She said her first step in training is to learn how to sync her voice with the lips of the character, she said.

She said it is hard work, but she loves it.

“I get to make money off of sounding stupid,” Ragland said. “It is irregular work; it’s really hard to get your foot in the door, and you can’t rely on it to feed you, but it is definitely worth it.”

Ragland had never thought about acting before because she said she has no legitimate acting abilities. She has always been a cartoon lover though.

“My dad used to do the Muppet voices all the time, and I remember growing up it was cool to just listen to him do those voices,” Ragland said. “I can impersonate some things, but really I just really like to be silly and am not afraid to look stupid.”

Ragland said the majority of people who work with her are professional actors and a few local professors. She said she knows her persistence is what landed her the audition.

“It’s really whoever shows ambition and the drive for it who ends up working here,” she said. “That’s why they are all actors. They want to make a living out of this.”

She doesn’t see herself reading for characters the rest of her life, but she said she is setting goals for how far she wants to go.

“I want to be a minor character in a series before I graduate college,” Ragland said. “I don’t want to be someone normal-that takes acting skills. I want to be the oddball who contrasts the main character. I want to be Phoebe off of Friends in the cartoons.”