What’s the score? How music enhances animation

What’s the score? How music enhances animation

By Joseph Learoyd

Music has a way of moving us, making us feel and emote. The addition of this to film can enhance our enthrallment with the medium, creating empathy for our characters and allowing us to live out the scene right there with the onscreen cast. This is no different in the world of animation. The characterisation that plays out on screen can be deeply engrossing when accompanied with the right score. Let’s take a look at some examples.

For many years, Disney has created musical animations such as Snow White and the seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, the songs within them allowing us to see the emotions of the characters play out over the course of a couple of minutes. For example, the “Heigh-Ho” song from Snow White very quickly establishes the Dwarf characters, their motives and their goals. In contrast to this, the musical segment where Snow White interacts with a group of woodland creatures is one that looks at beauty in nature and draws us into the innocent world of the character, despite the hardships that have and will befall her.

Over the years, Silly Symphonies, a series of 75 animated shorts, created to accompany music were produced. These standalone adventures were Disney’s chance to experiment with animation working to music, something that, used throughout Disney shorts, would become known as Mickey Mousing. Mickey Mousing, the act of synchronizing animation to music to better enhance the piece.

By combining the two in a sort of symbiotic relationship, the audio and video combine to really highlight the principles of animation, longer notes building anticipation and short sharp notes often being used to boost squash and stretch technique. It is those earlier animated scores that paved the way for the plethora of musical scenes in Pixar films of modern times.

Pixar doesn’t just play sad music on sad scenes or happy music on happy scenes, it hits us with music that is thematically stunning, tearing at our feelings even more. It is when these two elements are contrasted, happy music on a sad scene. Monsters Inc for example takes a piece of music, uses it in a peaceful scene, then famously revisits it later in the film when Sully scares Boo. This stark contrast pulls harder on our heart strings because the subtlety of the music calls back to a vastly different scenario.

This drags us into a more emotive state, the score causing us to feel the characters on a deeper level as Sully realises what he has done. This theme comes back later on when Boo and Sully separate and again when they reunite. These scenes are so drastically different but continue to develop the relationship between the two characters.

This system of musical repetition is present in many Pixar films from Up to Toy Story. Aside from the film interactions, you can see animation appear in a number of music videos. There is something special about how the two can coexist. AHA’s Take on Me from the 1980s is a prime example of the beauty of 2D animation working to tell a story in a music video, one that is unique and has stood the test of time.

Often animation can be used in music videos to tell an overarching narrative such as Daft Punk’s music working hand in hand with Japanese anime Interstellar 5555, and the Mystery Skulls Animated series, (which famously uses Mickey Mousing to have the characters’ heads bob up and down with the beat of the music.

Finally let’s look at Warner Brothers’ cartoons, the company that birthed The Looney Tunes.  Carl Stalling, famous composer, created some of his best work while at Warner Brothers. He would use a variety of musical cues that shifted between styles and genres in order to fit with the physical comedy and motion of the high energy shorts. He developed a style that became synonymous with the animations of Warner Brothers. Looney Tunes, although vastly different from that of Disney’s shorts still incorporated those similar principles of storytelling, music and composition.

So, what is it that allows music and animation to work so seamlessly together? It is the development of gorgeous visuals, well timed symphonies and a layout of staging within the scene. That is the beauty of this relationship. The codependency between the two is what allows for animation to stand there with other forms of cinema, develop a fanbase and show that characters who aren’t alive can still emote, have complex relationships and enhance our love for the medium.

Joseph Learoyd is a recent computer animation graduate. An aspiring animator and 3D modeller, he has loved animation for as long as he can remember, always looking to create new and exciting experiences. His online animation portfolio can be found here https://www.artstation.com/josephlearoyd

His Linkedin is here https://www.linkedin.com/in/joseph-learoyd-0399a8159

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