Even when compared to other subfields of multimedia studies, research into sound and music in animation is a relatively new area of academic interest. Drawn to Sound, the second title in Equinox's Genre, Music and Sound series, is therefore a welcome addition to the scant handful of existing books on the subject. The relative infancy of the subject is evident in the broad range of issues covered by the contributions, which extend from the creation and composition of soundtracks, through phenomenological multimedia analyses, to marketing strategies and audience reception. The variety of specific animated films under discussion is similarly wide, and includes American, British, European and Japanese productions from c1940 to the present (The most recent is Happy Feet, dir. George Miller, Warren Coleman, Judy Morris, 2006). It is unlikely that a contemporary volume on music and sound in live-action film – by now a more mature field of inquiry – would be so disparate both in subject matter and methodological focus.
Many of the individual chapters in this book take pains to emphasise how crucial the soundtrack is to any comprehensive study of animated film. The importance of sound is particularly clear where the object of study is innately musical. Yellow Submarine (dir. George Dunning, 1968), as discussed by Ian Inglis, is one example where the music was crucial to the film from its inception. The animators' appreciation of the music of The Beatles influenced their design and narrative choices, helping to shape not just the sound but the look of the film as well. It would seem that, where animated film is concerned, music plays a fundamental role in the visual and dramatic conception more often than one might expect. Another case is The Nightmare Before Christmas (dir. Henry Selick, 1993), covered by Janet K. Halfyard as part of her study on Tim Burton's musicals. Halfyard explains how the songs for this film were written before the film was shot, and were seen by the filmmakers as even more essential in forming the backbone of the story than the script (p. 30). Given the importance of music to at least some animated filmmaking processes, it is perhaps surprising that the development of a critical discipline has been so slow.
The main difficulty for writers dealing with a new subject like this one is the scarcity of pre-existing discussions with which to engage in fruitful dialogue. The contributors should be praised for not shying away from critically neglected subjects, or from those that are simply too new to have yet accumulated a tradition of significant criticism. However, the lack of existing criticism does mean that the writers have a lot of basic ground-work to cover in their single chapters, and every side issue of a technical or cultural nature must be explained rather than discharged with a simple gesture to a previous, more elaborate, discussion. The result is that each chapter covers many issues more or less in passing, causing the overall structure of the book to seem somewhat arbitrary. The thirteen chapters are divided into four parts whose titles are suggestive of discrete subjects: ‘Scoring Animation Film,’ ‘Musical Intertextuality,’ ‘Music and Sonicity’ and ‘Music and Industrial Contexts.’ But the chapters in one part inevitably tend to refer to aspects seemingly more appropriate to another. For example, readers wishing to find out about industrial contexts should not restrict themselves to part IV. If they did, they would miss descriptions of the working methods of the Disney studio in Jon Fitzgerald and Phillip Hayward's discussion of The Brave Little Toaster (dir. Jerry Rees, 1987) in part III, and Neil Lerner's exploration of the historical Hollywood studio context that inspired Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (dir. Robert Zemeckis, 1988) in part II.
Given the broad reach of the book, it is perhaps a shame that one particular scholarly or editorial decision threatens to limit its readership to musicologists, or at least to those with some musical expertise. There is no doubt that any scholar of animation would have much to gain from reading the whole, but the inclusion of many musical transcriptions, in a great many individual chapters, may prove a barrier to some potential audience. Stephen Hawking famously wrote, ‘Someone told me that each equation I included in the book would halve the sales.’ (A Brief History of Time, p. vi) Musicologists would do well to consider musical transcriptions in a similar light, particularly when working in areas inseparably intertwined with other media. Musical notation, which can only capture the barest impression of what a piece sounds like, is only really useful if it adds something beyond what can be conveyed in prose alone. Some of the transcribed examples in this volume seem rather superfluous in this light, and one in particular, Phillip Hayward's transcription of the tap-dancing rhythm in Happy Feet (p. 97, figure 5.2), is misleading. A typographical error gives the impression that this piece has five beats per bar, whereas the music from this section of the film is clearly in common time, as is necessitated by the medley of different pre-composed songs from various popular genres. By contrast, those chapters which seem most critically assured turn out (coincidentally or not) to be those that have fewer transcribed excerpts. Daniel Goldmark's discussion of Sylvain Chomet's films, for one example, manages to describe the combined impression of different musical and ‘real-life’ sound effects vividly and effectively without recourse to a single one.
Given the infancy of the subject, the most important contribution of a book like this is the openings it offers to further study. Sound and music in animation remains neglected in the scholarship, particularly in comparison to both live-action soundtracks and visual animation studies. The descriptions of production and promotion processes and strategies contained here will no doubt prove a valuable resource, as will the more critically developed analyses, as the field continues to progress towards a fully-fledged discipline.
