Animated movies sing a happy tune
Considered deeply uncool at one point, music from animated movies is back â and singing along is now not only OK for kids, itâs something adults record themselves doing on their phones and share on YouTube.
The boom in popular songs from animated movies comes after a long fallow period when the form yielded few hits in the music world, despite box-office juggernauts like the âToy Story,â âShrekâ and âIce Ageâ franchises. Though all incorporated music in their films, it was rarely the kind that had come to define the genre at Disney Animation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when it was making music-driven hits like âThe Lion King,â âBeauty and the Beastâ and âThe Little Mermaid.â
âYou had this shift ... where there were very successful animated movies but their soundtracks werenât,â said Ken Bunt, president of Disney Music Group. âTheir scores were important, but they werenât musicals and the music in them wasnât something that gets played on radio or that youâre singing in your car.â
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A sign of the shift: For the first time in 20 years, a soundtrack from an animated film has been No. 1 on the Billboard charts for 10 weeks.
This week, Disneyâs fairy tale âFrozenâ displaced 1994âs âThe Lion Kingâ to become the top-selling animated movie soundtrack of all time. Itâs not the only music from an animated film thatâs hot right now: âHappy,â Pharrell Williamsâ ubiquitous mood booster from âDespicable Me 2,â has been No. 1 on the single charts for eight weeks and appears everywhere from Fiat commercials to kidsâ choir homages.
Earlier this year, âThe Lego Movieâ popularized a catchy electronic parody song called âEverything Is Awesome,â and the just-opened âRio 2â is receiving lots of praise from critics for the quality of its eclectic, Brazil-influenced soundtrack.
In some cases, as with âFrozen,â the music helped drive the box office, as audiences started learning songs from the radio before they saw the film; in others, as in âDespicable Me 2,â the songâs hit status came well after the filmâs box-office release and evolved into a story of its own. Regardless, the cloud on animated musicals has clearly lifted.
âThere hadnât been a musical in such a long time,â said Bill Damaschke, chief creative officer of DreamWorks Animation, which has a Bollywood-style musical composed by A.R. Rahman and an Australia-set project from Tim Minchin, the composer of the Tony Award-winning show âMatilda the Musical,â in development. âA really great one came out [âFrozenâ] and it hit a nerve. Everybodyâs asking, âWhat are fresh, original ways to use music in animated movies?ââ
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One of the key features of the âFrozenâ and âHappyâ phenomena has been social media. According to Bunt, fans have uploaded more than half a million versions of the âFrozenâ empowerment ballad âLet It Goâ to YouTube. Oprah Winfrey recently brought Williams to tears by showing him a collection of fan-made âHappyâ videos from around the world.
âItâs sort of like a community singalong in the virtual town square,â said Tom Sito, a professor at USCâs School of Cinematic Arts who was an animator and storyboard artist at Disney Animation in the 1990s. âAnd it keeps the material fresh in peopleâs minds.â
Thatâs a marketing device that synergy godfather Walt Disney didnât have available when he released the first commercial movie soundtrack â animated or live action â in 1938. The collection of songs like âSome Day My Prince Will Comeâ and âWhistle While You Workâ hit record stores with the wordy name âSongs From Walt Disneyâs Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (With the Same Characters and Sound Effects as in the Film of That Title).â
Ever since, Disney animated movies have been a key part of the American Songbook, with multiple generations of children growing up on songs by such composing teams as the Sherman brothers in the 1960s and â70s and Howard Ashman and Alan Menken in the late 1980s and early â90s.
Particularly as live-action films veered away from musicals and toward realism, animation became even more important to the world of musicals, according to Sito.
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âFor a while, animation was the lifeboat of the American Broadway musical,â Sito said. âThe natural surrealism of an animated film makes a setting for a musical more gettable for a general audience. We accept characters breaking into song.â
But, as so often happens in Hollywood, Disney started giving theatergoers too much of a good thing. Sito recalled a test screening for the 1995 movie âPocahontasâ in which audience members audibly groaned as the first musical notes began to play.
âBy the late â90s you could sense the exhaustion of the audience, that the musical had overstayed its welcome,â Sito said. âWe were very sensitive to that. We were like, weâve got to cut back on the number of musicals.â
What followed was the ascendance of startup animation studios Pixar and DreamWorks, which, while they collected Oscar nominations for such songs as âYouâve Got a Friend in Meâ from âToy Storyâ and âAccidentally in Loveâ from âShrek 2,â didnât make full-on musicals or generate mainstream hits.
By the time director Carlos Saldanha pitched the first âRioâ movie to his studio, Blue Sky Animation, in 2006, it was still considered unusual to make a song-heavy animated film.
âMy pitch was, âI cannot think of Brazil without thinking of music,â â Saldanha said. âBut it was an experimentation.â That movie, which 20th Century Fox released in 2011, became a surprise hit for Fox in part on the strength of its music, which paired composer John Powell with Brazilian musician Sergio Mendes.
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On âRio 2,â which traces the path of a family of rare birds as they fly from Rio to the Amazon jungle, the studio embraced the format of a musical wholly, Saldanha said.
âRio 2âsâ 14 songs are as diverse as the country in which itâs set, including performances by R&B artist Janelle Monae, rapper B.o.B, Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth and âFlight of the Conchordsâ comic Jemaine Clement, who delivers a particularly amusing cover of âI Will Surviveâ as the movieâs villain, a sadistic, flightless cockatoo.
In addition to the Rahman and Minchin musicals it has in development, this year DreamWorks will release âHow to Train Your Dragon 2â with two songs by Jonsi, the frontman from the Icelandic rock band Sigur RĂłs, and âHome,â an alien invasion movie with a character voiced by pop singer Rihanna, who is writing a concept album for the film.
âFor us, music is a big focus right now,â Damaschke said. âIâd expect to see more and more of it.â
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