Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Though the book focuses almost exclusively on the works of Carl Stalling and Scott Bradley, Goldmark paints a thorough picture of the workings of animation in the 1930s and 1940s. Particularly interesting to me was the different approach that each composer took in scoring animated shorts. Stalling's collage of classical, public domain, and Warner-owned themes and Bradley's own original scoring and lofty hopes for the future of music in animation. That Goldmark is a musician interested in animation and not the other way around seems to me more for the better. Texts on animation tend to focus on the same shorts or studios and get a little dry with post-modern speculation. While Goldmark does his share of that in the book, he sticks more to the facts surrounding the high-mindedness that films of the 1930's and Classical music both share.
The book's ending is rather blunt, particularly the final chapter which could have been expanded on with more contemporary examples in animation. On the whole, this was a great read, especially the jazz chapter and the chapter on "What's Opera Doc".
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In the first in-depth examination of music written for Hollywood animated cartoons of the 1930s through the 1950s, Daniel Goldmark provides a brilliant account of the enormous creative effort that went into setting cartoons to music and shows how this effort shaped the characters and stories that have become embedded in American culture. Focusing on classical music, opera, and jazz, Goldmark considers the genre and compositional style of cartoons produced by major Hollywood animation studios, including Warner Bros., MGM, Lantz, and the Fleischers. Tunes for 'Toons discusses several well-known cartoons in detail, including What's Opera, Doc?, the 1957 Warner Bros. parody of Wagner and opera that is one of the most popular cartoons ever created. Goldmark pays particular attention to the work of Carl Stalling and Scott Bradley, arguably the two most influential composers of music for theatrical cartoons. Though their musical backgrounds and approaches to scoring differed greatly, Stalling and Bradley together established a unique sound for animated comedies that has not changed in more than seventy years. Using a rich range of sources including cue sheets, scores, informal interviews, and articles from hard-to-find journals, the author evaluates how music works in an animated universe. Reminding readers of the larger context in which films are produced and viewed, this book looks at how studios employed culturally charged music to inspire their stories and explores the degree to which composers integrated stylistic elements of jazz and the classics into their scores.
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