THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
Volume 1, Number 2/3, Pages 293-295
ISSN 1087-7142 Copyright © 2003
The International Film Music Society, Inc.
The Cartoon Music Book, edited by Daniel Goldmark and
Yuval Taylor
Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2002 [xvi, 320 p. ISBN 1556524730. $18.95]
ERIC HUNG
A
lthough cartoon composers
have written some of the
most memorable and
distinctive film music over the
past 75 years, their contributions
have by and large been ignored by
scholars and critics. This is something that Daniel Goldmark and
Yuval Taylor seek to change. They
have published The Cartoon Music
Book, a collection that focuses on
American cartoon music from the
1920s to the present, but also includes a short article on music in
Japanese anime. It is the editors’
“hope that these essays and interviews might inspire new work in
this area”(xvi).
This book contains a significant
number of thought-provoking
articles, and it will undoubtedly
stimulate interest in cartoon music.
Readers will be going to video
stores to rent the cartoons they
read about, and there is a good
chance that researchers will be
filling in the many gaps in cartoon
music studies and responding to
articles in the book. Having said
this, I can’t help thinking that the
editors of The Cartoon Music Book
failed to maximize the potential of
this volume.
Eclecticism is the greatest
strength and the greatest weakness
of The Cartoon Music Book. Its
twenty-nine articles, written by
twenty-four authors, include two
introductory essays, 16 critical
essays (some are quite broad and
others are detailed case studies),
four primary documents, and
seven interviews. Given that kindling interest is one of the book’s
primary goals, the diversity of
articles and viewpoints is a major
asset. Readers will come away
with an idea of the great variety of
approaches one can take in writing
music for cartoons, and of the
types of hermeneutic issues that
are raised by cartoon music.
Unfortunately, the eclectic nature of the book also makes it a
maddening read at times. On
several occasions, the same information is discussed in two or three
articles. More frustratingly (at
least from the perspective of a
teacher of film music), basic information about certain important
cartoons are sometimes scattered
in several articles. For example, in
Neil Strauss’s “Tunes for Toons,” I
found that a “streamlined and
updated” sound process was used
for The Skeleton Dance (1929), but I
had to wait until Carl Stalling’s
interview to find out that the new
sound process was the “tick” system (42-44). For information about
the genesis of The Skeleton Dance
and the Silly Symphonies series, I
had to turn to Ross Care’s “Make
Walt’s Music” (23), Carl Stalling’s
interview (39-41), and Charles L.
Granata’s “Disney, Stokowski, and
the Genius of Fantasia” (75).
If the editors decide to do a
revised edition of The Cartoon
Music Book, they can alleviate the
above problems by writing or
commissioning a series of extended overview articles.
Specifically, I am imagining four
articles—one each for the “Golden
Age” of cartoons, the early television cartoons, the 1990s
resurgence, and cartoons outside
the United States—that discuss
important compositional trends
and technological developments,
and provide background information on the most significant
cartoons. This way, readers can
treat the case studies for what they
are, and not as sources for background information.
Of the 16 critical essays included in The Cartoon Music Book,
six are relatively broad in scope:
the best of these are Ross Care’s
“Make Walt’s Music,” Daniel
Goldmark’s “Classical Music and
Hollywood Cartoons,” and Jake
Austen’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll Cartoons.”
Care traces the history of music in
Disney animation from 1928 to
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THE JOURNAL OF FILM MUSIC
1967, and provides succinct
descriptions of the styles of the
main Disney composers, such as
Carl Stalling, Frank Churchill,
Leigh Harline, and Oliver Wallace.
A particularly interesting section
focuses on Walt Disney’s involvement in deciding what music to
put in his films. From the 1930s on,
Disney’s philosophy on cartoon
music centered around carefully
balancing the popular and the
serious. At story conferences,
Disney would approve the music
only after he became convinced
that it was not only classy, but also
appealing to the public.
Goldmark focuses on cartoons
that are based upon one or more
pieces of classical music. He outlines the musical attributes that
attract animators, and discusses
common themes in classical music
cartoons. Of particular interest is
Goldmark’s analysis of how
Chuck Jones and Mike Maltese’s
What’s Up, Doc? appeals to both
fans and enemies of opera. He
writes, “Highbrows could look at
it as a witty play on opera with
many subtle in-jokes, while noninitiates could jeer at the silly,
overwrought singing and acting of
all operas as parodied by Bugs and
Elmer” (110).
Austen traces the rise-and-fall
of cartoons that are based around a
pop or rock band, such as Alvin
and the Chipmunks and the Archie
Show. Throughout the essay, he
successfully outlines the dialectic
between the wholesomeness that is
expected for children’s television
programming and the rebellious
image of rock music. With regards
to The Alvin Show (1961-65), for
example, Austen argues that,
while the show’s producers
cleaned up the scruffy sound of
early rock ‘n’ roll with “a charming fantasy version featuring clean
sounding, professional swinging
horns and the rodents chanting
‘cha cha cha,’” Alvin remains paradoxically a rebel who “never
suffered as a result of his nastiness” (176).
The fourth essay, Kevin Whitehead’s ambitious “Carl Stalling,
Improviser & Bill Lava, Acme
Minimalist,” outlines the history of
music in Warner Brothers cartoons
from the 1930s to the 1960s, and
provides overviews of the styles of
Carl Stalling, Milt Franklyn, and
Bill Lava. He also attempts to
contextualize their compositional
approaches; while Stalling’s collage style is compared with those
of Ives and George S. Cohan, Bill
Lava’s movable cues are linked to
the indeterminate music of Earle
Brown. On several occasions, however, detailed analyses are
replaced by evaluative language
and short unsatisfactory explanations. In justifying his claim that
Bill Lava’s early scores “didn’t
quite work,” Whitehead writes,
“Even at a murmur, the music
called more attention to itself than
ever,” partly because of “a heavier
reliance on brass and saxophones,”
and partly because “his climaxes
were less precisely calibrated to
the action, as if he was trying to
whip up audience interest in tired
situations” (149). It seems to me
that the first explanation is not
really true; in non-animation films,
there are many jazz scores with
plenty of brass and saxophones
that do not call attention to themselves. Moreover, the second
explanation seems to place more
blame on animators than on Lava.
In the fifth broad essay, “Merrie
Melodies: Cartoon Music’s Contemporary Resurgence,” Elisabeth
Vincentelli discusses the rebirth of
the “vaudeville/Stalling tradition
of pastiche and interpolation” in
such 1990s cartoons as The
Simpsons, Animaniacs, and Rocko
(206). Finally, Milos Miles’s “Robots, Romance, and Ronin: Music
in Japanese Anime” is essentially a
review of anime soundtracks; the
relationship between the audio
and visual aspects of these cartoons receives little attention in
this article.
The other ten critical essays in
The Cartoon Music Book are detailed
case studies. Of these, the most
provocative are the five that raise
pertinent social-cultural and aesthetic issues. Jake Austen’s “Hidey
Hidey Hidey Ho . . . Boop-Boop-A
Doop!” focuses on the Fleischer
Studio’s jazz cartoons of the early
1930s. In three of these grotesque
cartoons, monsters who pursue
Betty Boop are animated to Cab
Calloway’s voice. In another, a
flying cannibal from the jungle
morphs into the head of Louis
Armstrong. Austen provides
intriguing discussions of the disturbing racial implications of these
cartoons and the appeal they had
for contemporary audiences. He
writes, “Once again the Fleischers
introduce the idea that to enter a
black world . . . is both a perilous
endeavor and a thrilling adventure” (65). Meanwhile, both David
Wondrich’s “I Love to Hear a Minstrel Band” and Charles L.
Granata’s “Disney, Stokowski, and
the Genius of Fantasia” explore the
thin line between highbrow and
lowbrow in the world of cartoons.
While Wondrich focuses on the
battle between the William Tell
Overture and “Turkey in the
Straw” in Walt Disney’s The Band
Concert, Granata traces the production and reception history of the
much more highbrow Fantasia. He
also discusses the “music appreciation” aims of the latter film.
In “Rhapsody in Spew,” Joseph
REVIEWS
Lanza argues that underscoring
slap-stick gags with lush romantic
music gives The Ren & Stimpy Show
a sense of postmodern irony. He
writes, “Even when Ren subjects
George Liquor’s face to a slo-mo
pummel or Stimpy probes Ren’s
throat with a giant ladleful of ‘AllPurpose Icky Tasting Medicine,’
the buttery melodies are never far
behind to tempt viewers with
vague thoughts of a parallel world
free from acrimony or foul odors”
(271). Finally, John Corbett’s “A
Very Visual Kind of Music” discusses the influence of the
“cartoon music aesthetic” on
recent concert music—in particular, the music of John Zorn. The
other detailed case studies are
generally well-written and informative, but rather straightforward; they focus on Disney’s
1946 animated feature Make Mine
Music (Stuart Nicholson), Carl
Stalling’s use of Leitmotivs (Will
Friedwald), the use of Raymond
Scott’s music in animation (Irwin
Chusid), the career of Winston
Sharples (Will Friedwald), and the
music of The Simpsons (Will
Friedwald).
Some of the most valuable
articles in The Cartoon Music Book
are the four primary documents.
Edith Lang and George West’s
“Animated Cartoons and SlapStick Comedy” is an instructional
manual on how to accompany
“silent” cartoons in the 1920s.
Chuck Jones’s “Music and the
Animated Cartoon” (1946) protests
the film industry’s reaction against
“any type of cartoon except those
based on the ‘boff’ or belly laugh”
(94) and suggests six new ways of
using animation. He also complains about the overuse of
“Mickey-Mousing” and the lack of
originality in cartoon music of the
day. The last two primary documents, “Music in Cartoons” and
“Personality on the Soundtrack,”
are by Scott Bradley, a composer
for MGM Cartoons from 1934 to
1958. In these articles, he advocates the cartoon-composer
profession, stating that “this medium offers the serious composer
far more possibilities than the liveaction pictures” (119). He also
promotes the use of modernist
techniques—such as bitonality and
twelve-tone technique—in cartoon
music, and dreams of the day producers would commission an
original score and then build a
cartoon around it.
The Cartoon Music Book also
includes seven interviews with
significant composers. The earliest
of these is a 1969 interview with
Carl Stalling. In it, he details his
musical training, his use of the
“tick” system, and his career at
Disney, Iwerks Studio, and Warner
295
Brothers. In an interview with
Philip Brophy, John Zorn talks
about Carl Stalling’s influence on
his music and his film scores. The
remaining interviewees are all
active cartoon composers of the
television era. They include Hoyt
Curtin (The Flintstones, Top Cat,
and The Jetsons), Mark
Mothersbaugh (Pee-wee’s Playhouse,
Rugrats, and Beakman’s World), Alf
Clausen (The Simpsons), Maury
Laws (Santa Claus Is Comin’ to
Town, The Year Without a Santa
Claus, and The Hobbit), and the trio
of Richard Stone, Steve Bernstein,
and Julie Bernstein (Animaniacs).
The Cartoon Music Book includes a useful selected
discography and bibliography.
Given that many readers are not
familiar with the entire history of
animation, the inclusion of a time
line, a detailed filmography, an
appendix with short biographies
of major figures in the history of
cartoons, and a glossary would
have made the volume even more
valuable, especially in the classroom.
Despite these shortcomings,
The Cartoon Music Book remains a
valuable pioneering study of cartoon music. It is highly readable,
and will be an important resource
for scholars, teachers, and cartoon
enthusiasts for years to come.