Dark Side of the Music

MASSEYSAnimated musicals such as The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine (1968) and Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555 (2003) are in debt to the early animated cartoons of the Hollywood studio era. The fusions of animation and music date back to the Hollywood studio cartoons, which often foregrounded the audio component of film, and much like these contemporary, animated, rock–operas, delivered the music through a self-reflexive medium. Hollywood cartoons utilize many different types of distanciation effects in order to create pleasure for the viewer. Live-action can also create self-reflexive films, yet they are more textual and visually based. Cartoons, in addition to visual gags, direct address and other Brechtian techniques employ music as a major tool in their self-referentiality through synchronization. The animation that is targeted does not include the early silent films consisting of lightning hand sketches or rebellious characters, as in Fleischer’s Out of the Inkwell series. These films, by containing live-action, are already blatant in their exposure of animation as a medium. The cartoons suggested in this paper reflect the shorts that offer a supposed, enclosed diegetic space.

Before any analysis of cartoon’s reflexivity can proceed, it is more important to highlight the role of music in animation. The relation between sound and cartoon image began with Max Fleischer’s bouncing ball cartoons. These cartoons, while not providing a true, enclosed, diegetic space, did present an alternative space from the real that was later integrated with the audience to create the sing-a-long. One of these sing-a-longs was Mariutch (1933). In this short, a sequence is shown to illustrate the lyrics before the main character turns to the audience and asks them to sing along. This element of vaudeville later turned into the lyrical representation of the Betty Boop cartoons, Disney’s Silly Symphonies, and the Merrie Melodies, along with other smaller independent’s efforts, most notably Ub Iwerks.

Fleischer’s musical cartoons strove to create a harmony between sounds and images, often relying upon the lyrics of the song to dictate the content of the plot. Some cartoons that would have fallen into this category were lyrical cartoons, such as Betty Boop’s Snow White (1933) and Walter Lantz’s Scrub Me Mama With a Boogie Beat (1941). Jazz songs in cartoons acted “…simultaneously as the inspiration for the narrative and as the explicit source of the rhythm and pacing for each short” (Goldmark, 78). Max Fleischer’s cartoons perfected this style in his Betty Boop series. In Snow White (1933), Koko’s ghost transforms to visually express the lyrics of the song. Each shot would cut with each new lyric, a technique also used in the Lantz cartoons. In another short, Old Man of the Mountain (1933) the plot of the movie is a direct interpretation of Cab Calloway’s song. The use of popular songs also added to the pleasure of the spectator through their foreknowledge, exemplified in the use of the song in the cartoon of the same name, Minnie the Moocher (1932). The cartoon was also a venue for the performance and distribution of jazz in the late twenties and thirties. By working with such big artists as Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Cab Calloway, Fleischer’s studio was able to capitalize on the popular music, as the artists’ garnered exposure. “Once the Fleischer’s chose a song…, the writers constructed a story that made the performance of the song the centerpiece of the short. That the song’s title usually was borrowed for the cartoon’s title – as just one way in which such cartoons help publicize…” (Goldmark, 84). Warner Bros. studios, in comparison, featured many well known songs but these were normally traditional or classical pieces that were part of an archival collection.

Music also helped establish the environment of cartoons. Music as subject matter lasted until around 1933, when the chase cartoon was popularized (Sartin, 69). Many cartoons, before the chase, were structured around the basic narrative of an equilibrium being disrupted, creating the cause-effect chain of the plot to regain balance. This premise was especially popular in Ising and Freleng’s Merrie Melodies and some Silly Symphonies (Barrier, 327). Silly Symphonies in particular, would leave dialogue and motive out of the cartoon for an extended period at the beginning, allowing the music to become foregrounded within the medium. In Disney’s The Old Mill (1937), the opening sequence consists of five establishing shots and some shots of the animals that inhabit the mill before the frog song, and the introduction of the plot. Here, sound effects are minimal, only appearing for creatures within the frame, while the background music is quite loud. The lack of diegetic sound effects thrusts the music to the viewer’s attention. The foregrounding of music was also used in many Mickey Mouse cartoons. An obvious example is The Band Concert (1935), where the viewer is presented with a diegetic source of music that pervades throughout the cartoon. In this cartoon, the music is represented literally through Mickey’s band. In other cartoons, the mise-en-scene is utilized to create the cartoon’s music. “Often, these musical performances rely on the improvisational use of found objects” (Sartin, 79), displayed in Steamboat Willie (1929) where Mickey uses a cat’s tail as a cello, or in Fleischer’s Betty Boop and Grampy (1935) where Grampy constructs self-playing instruments out of household objects.

Warner also used sound to set the mood of a cartoon by drawing “…heavily on classical references and the studio’s catalog of copyrighted pop tunes to accentuate…” (Germain, para 17). Carl Stalling was a master of synchronizing animation to sound. Stalling was able to organize the Hollywood catalog to provide purposeful, musical accompaniments to the Warner Bros shorts. “Whenever Bugs Bunny wore red when he appeared in drag, Stalling highlighted it with stands from ‘Lady in Red’” (Germain, para 17). These snippets of songs were compiled with abstract orchestration that punctuate certain gesture and casual actions within the cartoon, or emphasized certain graceful movements. These songs added to the overall mood of the cartoon. Certain musical instruments or selections blatantly identified typographic characters to the audience in order to speed up the short’s premises or gags. Often lower toned instruments and percussions represent the villains, brass to represent the hero. and woodwinds to represent the innocent. Some cartoons even use music to identify it’s main characters, as in the prancing song of Pepe le Pew in For Scent-imental Reasons (1949) as he chases the cat, and Marvin the Martian’s high note, quick-stepping in Duck Dodgers in the 241/2 Century (1952).

This action is only slightly effective when compared to how cartoons produce self-referentiality via referencing its own medium, using direct address and commenting on other cartoon shorts and high arts. Within the medium of cartoons, there exist a subset of techniques which are self-reflexive, namely the spot gag, the presence of fictional audiences, and the chase cartoon. All of these techniques serve to distanciate the viewer from the text. Brecht’s “distanciation” desired that they audiences never forgot they were at the theatre (Dort, 237). By consistently causing the spectator to be aware of their position as a spectator, their interaction with the text, would create the true pleasure. Using Brecht’s theories, animation’s main intent should be to cause the spectator to realize that they are a person sitting in a theatre, watching an animated cartoon that was created by a team of animators and is being projected onto a screen before them. He wants to make the spectator “…attempt to understand the work…at the level of its meaning…as mediation” (Dort, 244). Animation, in contrast to most live-action film, utilizes this theory by consistently self-referencing itself. Many cartoons rely upon this notion of exposure in order to produce gags and punchlines.

Films reveal their methods of filmmaking in three ways: “…by commenting on filmmaking and the film industry and by unveiling the raw materials…, the ability to function as discourse, speaking directly to their audience… [and] to their creators” (Lindvall, 16). These methods can be seen in the ultimate self-reflexive cartoon Duck Amuck (1953). This short directly references the background, costumes and story of the cartoon. These are accompanied by references to sounds through Daffy’s altered speech, the frame, as it collapses, along with Daffy’s struggle for a close-up. The pencil that intervenes to construct Daffy’s problems, serves as the cartoon’s acknowledgment of it’s’ creator, Bugs, who finishes the cartoon with a direct reference to the audience. Direct address can also be used to construct an entire short, as in Wabbit Trouble (1941), where Bugs tortures Elmer to our delight.

Along with commenting on the medium directly, shorts can also reference its own construction by acknowledging other art forms. In Tex Avery’s 1944 Hollywood Steps Out, celebrities are referenced based on “…playfully coded references to the cultural texts of Hollywood” (Lindvall, 17). In The Rabbit of Seville (1949), as the orchestra warms up, the framing of the violin bows create a reference to one of the early abstract segments of Fantasia (1940).

Shorts can also be self-referential without exposing the medium. The chase format utilized the farcity of metamorphosis, alienating in its own right, as well motion to create humour. “The chase…displayed the machinery of animation… [as] characters were not expected to be thinking as they ran in cycle” (Klein, 165). The cycled background, while not a direct announcement of the falsity of the image, did present a fanciful moment within otherwise dialogical sequence. Hank Sartin states, "In the lexicon of modern art, [the chase] qualifies as Brechtian defamiliarization" (164).

The chase gag could also contain spot gags that can act to distanciate the viewer. A spot gag occurs when “…the colourful and imaginative aspects of the verbal fuel the surreality of the visual, rendering the literal depiction of impossible similes and metaphors amusing” (Wells, 144). Spot gags are often repeated through a sequence building in intensity at each incident. The use of such gags as a “…quick action, the repeated action, the unexpected action …will force itself on our mind and unbalance the mental equilibrium” (Munsterberg, 81). These repeated gags occur in most Warner cartoons. In Duck Dodgers in the 241/2 Century (1952), the back and forth between Daffy and Marvin works to construct the repeated gag of the disintegration and ultimatum pistols.

While cartoons utilize the theories and techniques that Bertold Brecht idealize, they all are not similar to Brecht’s desire for social change. Dana Polan discusses Brecht’s ideas and political implication with specific interest to animated cartons. Polan illustrates his arguments using Duck Amuck (1953). Polan agrees describing the cartoon as “a virtual culmination of the experimental possibilities of Hollywood cartoon. The subject of the cartoon is the nature of animation technique itself” (667). While some cartoons are intended for political purposes as in Victory through Air Power (1943), others are simply playful. “Brecht also sees a distance between art and political art. Art automatically embodies a distancing, a making strange. But there’s nothing yet political about that. To be political, art for Brecht was to be made so” (Polan, 669). Polan suggests that even though Duck Amuck (1953) is a metaphor for the fusions of life…it fails to examine [the] confusion through a political perspective. Duck Amuck closes in on itself, fiction leads to and springs from fiction” (668). This ability to contain the elements and pleasures of distanciation within the medium are the basis for the pleasure of synchronization.

The co-ordination of music with image relies upon the importance of music in cartoons, and it’s exposure of movement. Normally, music in cinema is created to accompany the image, but only in an invisible manner. It should accentuate the image, while never exposing itself. In cartoons, however, music is synchronized with the image whereby all the movement onscreen is co-ordinated with the musical notes. Synchronization is often overlooked how it can provide pleasure for the spectator. By representing itself through the movement onscreen, music can become the main attraction of a cartoon. Hugo Munsterberg’s work, “The Photoplay” A Psychological Study,” on attention and movement in cinema, can help display how music can distract the spectator from the text by exposing the craft in drawings that fundamentally serve as visualizations of notes, which inadvertently shifts the emphasis of the cartoon to the music, from the image.

Munsterbeg outlines the direction of attention as one of the main formal elements in films. “Of all internal functions that create the meaning of the world around us, the most central is the attention…” (Munsterberg, 78). Within the category of what holds our attention, there is voluntary and involuntary looking. Opposed to what we consciously accept as the target of our interest, involuntary attention is “…the events which we perceive. What is loud and shining and unusual attracts our involuntary attention” (80). This notion is directly applicable to the contrast in moving elements in the foreground and the dull economic backgrounds. “Whatever is focused by our attention wins emphasis and irradiates over the course of events” (80). Here, focus can not only apply to the idea of interested but more importantly, to the clarity of certain objects. In I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal You (1932) and Red Hot Riding Hood (1943) the main characters are differentiated from the backgrounds by the sharp outlines of the characters in comparison with the bland lines that define the background. Characters can also be separated due to the strong contrast in colours, most notable in Disney cartoons where bold colours are placed in front of pastel shading. Looney Tunes tend to separate their characters with blurred and solid toned backgrounds.

Instead of mainly focusing upon the character and the plot of the cartoon, the spectator is distracted even further by the constant movement of the character to the music. The first cartoon to fully synchronize music was Steamboat Willie (1928), where Mickey dances and whistles. Each instrument that is part of the music is presented through Mickey’s body. Mickey’s hips move to the rhythm, his lips represent the whistling, and his tapping toe provides the low notes that comprise the tempo. Another early Disney cartoon was the Silly Symphony Egyptian Melodies (1931) where two chariots race along the frescos of a temple. The percussion instruments are represented in the horses' gallop, and the remaining instruments jump in at a cut which presents cheering soldiers that stomp and cheer in tune with the brass instruments and bass drums. In contrast to these musical shorts, Wabbit Trouble (1941) contains abstract music that is joined together by samples of other songs. As Elmer is waking up from his fake nap, he walks in time with the rhythm of the song to wash his face, tossing his towel over a branch on the end note of a musical meter. He then rolls up his sleeves time with newly introduced brass instruments, and as he lathers up his face, the string section takes the lead of the song. Even as Bugs leads Elmer to the cliff, a close-up of his face shows Bugs bobbing to the beat and his ears turning on every other note. Throughout Elmer’s walking, there is no dialogue, which enforces the music as “…the absence of words brings the movements which we see to still greater prominence in our mind” (Munsterberg, 83).

The movements that display these instruments contain a self-referentiality by causing the spectator to imagine the instrument creating the music, much like how direct address causes the viewer to imagine the camera that is photographing the image. The music provided in these cartoons is carefully created in order to allow for the greatest possible synchronicity. Carl Stalling’s music was “…created to be listened to as music, as opposed to part of a larger piece of art” (Salamon, para 10). Many studios often treated the music as a key point in the production process, using music sheets that provided small storyboards in order to track key plot points or movements (Klein, 156), or to arrange differences in tempo to accompany the plot (Salamon, para 3). The awareness in the spectator of witnessing the successful fusion of image and sound, allows a greater level of pleasure to be created.

While not every cartoon contains music, such as those that consist entirely of orchestrated sound effects, the shorts that do contain music are produced and received in particular fashions. Music plays an important role in animation, by foregrounding the medium of the cartoon through synchronization. Even though it is known that music plays a large role in cartoons, its function as a distanciation effect via synchronization is still unrecognized. Hopefully by researching more information on the relationship between sound and image, synchronized cartoons can become more than a novelty in animation.
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