Music, Film, and Cartoon “Music and art are similar concepts as they are both trying to explain and express ideas through abstract mediums” (Gilbert, 2007). The similarities of these two are that they are creative and can be understood in many different ways. Audiences need to use their imagination of feeling to understand these two. Music is influences by many arts forms and the other way around, almost all arts forms are influenced by music in many different ways. Film is one of the art forms that are influenced by music.
Music makes a film as well as an animated cartoon more interesting by ringing out audiences’ emotion, introducing and setting a tone of a movie, dictating characters’ action, misleading audiences, and creating an original soundtrack. Music can bring out the audiences’ emotion. So when using music in a film, music makes a film more significant by providing the audiences with the connection of emotion, character, and situation. Sometimes proper music in a proper situation in a movie can touch the audiences’ emotion and helps the audiences feel deeply inside that situation.
As Johnny Deep said, “music touches us emotionally, where words alone can’t” (as cited in Picador, 2013). For example, a scene of a couple who have Just been married, exiting the church uses a love song to show the feeling of the characters at that moment. The love song that is used in this scene can make the audiences feel romantic and full of happiness. If there is no song used in this scene, there would be nothing wrong but the scene may not reach its climax like what it has to be. Without the appropriate music in appropriate scene, the emotion of the audiences is “almost completely eliminated” (Bell, 2010).
As Picador (2013) states: Music does indeed touch us emotionally, that is most likely why Sarah McClellan hose a morose song to accompany her animal cruelty video. The same concept applied in commercials is valid in film. Without the proper scoring and music, a Grammar Winning film can be changed drastically only by a different song choice. For example if these scenes in Anna Karen, with Anna & Version is played with Knew You Were Trouble by Taylor Swift the message would remain relatively true to the intention of Joe Wright, however, the emotions evoked may be completely different.
Music is often used as background music in many different situations. It is used long with a scene to introduce and set a tone of a movie at the beginning stage before other dramatic things occur (Watkins, 2013). It creates an atmosphere of the time and place and tells the audiences what they are going to experience (Bell, 2010). For instance, in the first scene of a horror film, a dark and empty street scene accompanied by foreboding music appears. This scene provides audiences with frightening feeling and this can be expected that this movie will be scary.
This also lets the audiences curious to know what are going to happen. Moreover, music is used to “heighten the drama of a given scene in a film” (Watkins, 2013). For example, in a comedy scene, music used is seemed to be light, silly or funny. In contrast, in an action scene, music used must full of power and energy in order to match the scene. On the other hand, in some animated cartoons, “music is not used as a background, By souring with every movement of the characters actions which is called Mackey-amusing (coming from a technique that was often used in Mackey Mouse cartoon).
For example, when someone on a screen raises his eyebrow, there is a sound of xylophone “pilings” (Hoffmann, 2011) or when music is allegro, the characters’ actions eve faster and become livelier. In contrast, when music is pianissimo or the tempo is decreased from allegro to andante, the actions of those characters will become softer and slower Cones, 1946). This idea also happens in the Disney’s Fantasia which music influences the cartoon by carrying audiences along (Gilbert, 2007).
The Fantasia differs from the previous Disney’s animation that not the music carries audiences along, but the main characters or the plot of animation. It is because the producers of the Fantasia set eight animated segments to pieces of classical music. The plot of the Fantasia was created follow the classical music. Without classical music, the Fantasia wouldn’t have been existed. The producers of the Fantasia “relied on the music so much, that they say that without music, the animation lacks direction and purpose” (Gilbert, 2007).
How music can dictate characters in the movie can be seen in the Fantasia 2000. As mentioned earlier that the Fantasia was created based on the classical music, this version of the Fantasia was also written based on the music; it was created from a Jazz piece, “Rhapsody in Blue” by George Gershwin. All characters and scenes depended on this piece. In the beginning of the cartoon, there is a drawing of buildings which their heights rely on the high and low of musical pitch in the Rhapsody in Blue.
The next part is the sound of muted trumpet playing softly with a man sleeping in his bad scene in the Fantasia. Then the aggressive piano sound emerges with the scene of the man looking at the clock and finding that he has already late for work. Suddenly, the sound of full orchestra comes with the scene that the man springs up high from his bed and rushes to the bathroom. Another point that music can make film interesting is to mislead audiences. In thriller and horror movies musical misdirection is often used to calm audiences down before a big scary scene happens (Watkins, 2013).
The popular gag that always have been used in horror films is that a leading actress walks up the stairs as calm music plays, immediately cued by pierced of shocking music when she finds a murderer hiding behind the door. The opposite way of musical misdirection is that a leading actress walks up the stairs to find a murderer with scary music played but ends up with ending a cat instead. This makes the film unpredictable and calls attention from the audiences about what will happen next. Furthermore, musical misdirection can be used to manipulate audiences about the character in the movie (Hoffmann, 2011).
For instance, if there is a character whose appearance is a good guy but he is actually an evil, when the audiences are going to doubt and think that he is the evil guy, the music will Jump in and manipulate them into the way that against this doubt. Without this kind of music, the film must be boring and follows the logical orders that can be predicted. A movie benefits a lot from music in a form of original soundtrack. The original soundtrack can be either pre-existing hit songs or songs specifically written for a film.
Using pre-existing hit songs or specific songs for each film is a good way to promote a movie and this is also an opportunity for the actor or actress to sing and earn money actress sing the soundtrack of the movie, they interpret the screenplay and the soundtrack interprets the performance in a particular scene. One more example is about a theme song from the Pink Panther by Henry Manic, an American composer, inductor, and arranger, which became a successful soundtrack. This soundtrack also made the Pink Panther become a well-known character.
As Tioga (2008) noted, “The animated panther with the brilliant soundtrack became a star in his own right, appearing in 124 shorts, ten television shows and three prime-time television specials. ” “Music is a powerful vehicle to drive a movie forward and without proper scoring a film may lose its magical allure” (Picador’, 2013). It is absolutely true that music influences a movie and has been an essential part of a movie. It is like a magic hat creates wonderful effects in a movies and really makes a film more interesting in many different ways.
