I have always had a soft spot for animated films. During my childhood I always found the art of the 2D animation to be beautiful. As I grew up, I still found myself drawn to these films for numerous reasons, one of which was the music. Nowadays I am working in audio and sometimes find myself deep-diving into certain topics that I find interesting. This is the case with the audio of modern animation.
You first must be aware of the relationship that sound has with the audience and the characters in the film. Diegetic sound is sound that occurs in the world of the film, this sound fulfils the audience’s voyeuristic relationship to the characters (Beauchamp, 2013, p.16). The other type is Non-diegetic sound that only the audience hears such as underscore and narration (Beauchamp, 2013, p.16). Us as the audience search for non-visual cues when it comes to the ambiguity that animation can have. This is where the audio team can guide the audience to the emotion of the scene but, Andrew Stanton does warn that a sad sound will always sway sad (Beauchamp, 2013, pp. 16, 17). This is where clarifying sound design can help the audience. We must be aware of what the audio foreground should be depending on the focus; an example of this is Toy Story where the audio is from the toys perspective during the scene crossing the road (Beauchamp, 2013, p.18). These subtle reminders help create a world in which the audience can immerse themselves in.
I found a lot of information on scoring for animation. We have to start by going back to the Golden Age that occurred when Disney first started releasing feature length films. Disney established soundtracks structured the same as 1930s film musicals in which the songs outweigh the underscoring (Richardson, Gorbman, Vernallis, 2015, p.214). These films were pre-scored and the movements were made to match up and the musical cues were not subtle, in fact they were indistinguishable from SFX (Beauchamp, 2013, pp.53, 55).
There are several terms and techniques we need to be aware of in the scoring of an animation film. First is subtext scoring which is used to show the characters emotions (Beauchamp, 2013, p.18). Another is isomorphism which is musical cues that mimic movement (Beauchamp, 2013, p.22). This is commonly shown through ascending and descending scales and pitch bending to give directionality (Beauchamp, 2013, p.22). The last main one is anempathetic which is music that contradicts the emotion of the scene to increase the audience’s empathy (Beauchamp, 2013, p.22).
One film that I find extremely effective at manipulating the audience’s emotion is Pixar’s Up. Pixar is unique due to being owned by Disney since 2006 however, they have continued to refuse to do musical to distinguish themselves (Richardson, Gorbman, Vernallis, 2015, p.215). Pixar has also hired composers established in other areas which is also different from Disney originally (Richardson, Gorbman, Vernallis, 2015, pp.214, 216). The composer for Up is Michael Giacchino who was tasked with making the audience believe that the characters Carl and Ellie were truly in love in only a montage (Richardson, Gorbman, Vernallis, 2015, p.220). The solution to this was creating a leitmotif call Ellie’s Theme. Giacchino decided to start the leitmotif as almost nothing, mimicking the simplicity of childhood, growing it into something huge before it becomes small again (Richardson, Gorbman, Vernallis, 2015, p.220). Another technique that Giacchino used was the change of the main melody instruments to convey emotions. The use of muted trumpet and violin convey happy emotions whilst the piano conveys sad (Richardson, Gorbman, Vernallis, 2015, p.221). Part of this theme's development can be heard in the video below.
xXJEashXx, 2010.Favorite Pixar's Up Scene Ever - Ellie And Carl's Relationship Through Time, Sad Scene. [video] Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2bk_9T482g> [Accessed 24 June 2020].
Pixar also change the conventions of scoring to be similar to live action in the film The Incredibles to mimic the Jazz orchestra tropes that are commonly associated with action films (Beauchamp, 2013, p.54; Richardson, Gorbman, Vernallis, 2015, p.217).
When it came to sound design, I found an article written by Randy Thom who had interesting stories from throughout his career. He spoke about three different events beginning with his work with How to Train Your Dragon in which the sound design began before character sketching did. This became an interactive work where the audio inspired the characters and characters inspired the audio (Richardson, Gorbman, Vernallis, 2015, p.228). One thing to note about the sound design of the dragon roars is that you almost always need to enhance the animal sounds with human vocalisation as most animals, raccoons in this movie, have a smaller range. The next story was about the director Henry Selick which Thom worked with on Coraline. Selick focuses on storytelling and only wants the audience to hear what you hear when you hear it and nothing more (Richardson, Gorbman, Vernallis, 2015, p.229). This means that complex background noises were avoided as it needs to be congruous with the film as a whole (Richardson, Gorbman, Vernallis, 2015, p.229). One scene in particular is the house when they move in. Thom and his team went with near silence instead of the authentic creaking of an old wooden house so that the sounds that are used punctuated the scene (Richardson, Gorbman, Vernallis, 2015, p.229). The last story was his work with the director Bob Zemeckis who has worked with mo-cap since 2004 (Richardson, Gorbman, Vernallis, 2015, p.230). Zemeckis prefers his sound design to be one to two foreground sounds at any moment with shifts in dynamic to give clarity (Richardson, Gorbman, Vernallis, 2015, p.230). These stories reminded me that animation is not real-life and therefore, it doesn’t always need to be realistic sound.
I did not find much different with dialogue and foley except an interesting fact that Anime’s dialogue is usually written when the animation is nearly finished compared to the dialogue driven animations of the west (Richardson, Gorbman, Vernallis, 2015, p.228). The other particular that I found was that the Neumann U-87 with a pop filter in omnidirectional, is a common set up for recording dialogue (Beauchamp, 2013, p.40). I also found a table that gave examples of props for foley which can be seen below, I'm sorry for the quality.
There is plenty of more information that I found about audio for animation, but I tried to keep is as streamlined as possible with information. This was so fun for me however, I know that people close to me will be annoyed about me pointing out these things in films in the future.
For more information on the ambience in soundtracks look at this website by my collegue Reuben's blog at this link below:
References
Beauchamp, R. (2013). Designing Sound for Animation (2nd ed.). Taylor and Francis. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/sae/detail.action?docID=1157737
Richardson, J., Gorbman, C. and Vernallis, C., 2015. The Oxford Handbook Of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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