Drawn to Sound: Animation Film Music and Sonicity (review)

Recent animated films have achieved significant levels of success in terms of box-office sell-outs, and of lucrative merchandising deals including DVD and OST sales. Both traditional 2D and 3D animation have received critical and industry recognition to the extent that one can see why the academy might pay attention to this genre, with films like Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, Studio Ghibli, 2001), Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (Nick Park and Steve Box, DreamWorks/Aardman, 2005), and WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, Disney/Pixar, 2008) all receiving Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature. Indeed, the screen studies community have for some time recognised the significance of animated film (see Wells 1998, 2002; Leslie 2002; Buchan 2006; as well as several animation periodicals), yet in the work of film music scholars it often appears marginalised. Why is this? One suggestion by editor Rebecca Coyle is that sound scholars in general are not as quick to embrace the musical values of animated film scores due in part to their frequent utilisation of ‘less culturally valued musical genres’ (6). Drawn to Sound is, therefore, the first anthology of its kind to cover this particular era of animated film music. Its main predecessors are Daniel Goldmark and Yuval Taylor’s The Cartoon Music Book (2002), Robin Beauchamp’s Designing Sound for Animation (2005), and Daniel Goldmark’s monograph Tunes for ’Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon(2005); and this new book successfully builds on these existing texts to encourage others in a variety of fields to consider the impact of sound and music in animated film. It presents a wide variety of academic approaches from film studies perspectives, musicological examinations, textual analyses, and corporate and economic assessments, suggesting the many possibilities of approaching the alliance of music, sound, and animation film.

This variety of approaches is one of the strengths of this volume, with each of the contributors offering their detailed and illuminating account of the varied approaches to scoring and sound for animation features. This also has its drawbacks, however, as although some of the essays flow seamlessly from one to the next, others feel more disjointed and further removed from the actual overall thematic content. To give structure to these various approaches, Drawn to Sound is divided into four sections, each situated within a slightly different perspective: ‘Scoring Animation Film’; ‘Musical Intertextuality’; ‘Music and Sonicity’; and lastly, ‘Music and Industrial Contexts’. Coyle argues that animation film and animation film music do not signify a genre, as the variety and number of chapters of this volume illustrate (2), and so each presents a different case study taken from various locations around the world (namely North America, United Kingdom, France, Australia, and Japan), based on available research being undertaken in such areas. In the ‘Introduction’ Coyle states that this volume seeks to bring together a variety of ‘field studies’ from across the world in the post-World War II period (this 60-year timescale demonstrating the expansion of animation feature productions from the traditional to the digital, encompassing the advance of new technologies (2–3)); however, this extensive post-war period is not evenly examined, with the majority of articles focusing on animated films of the past 20 years.

The decision to incorporate the term ‘sonicity’ in the volume’s subtitle is one of interest given that it relates directly to the essays in Part III, ‘Music and Sonicity’ (and arguably, the term might only really apply to the sonic discussions of chapters 8 and 10). Coyle defines the term as one borrowed from science that relates to the ‘transmission of power by periodical forces and movements’ (3). She continues by citing British sound artist Stanza’s work with the World Soundscape Project as motivation for utilising ‘sonicity’ in the volume’s subtitle, stating that the idea of a ‘shared project of sound and image’ is pertinent to the discussion of sound in animation (3). While one can agree with the importance of considering sound and image...