19.Animating With Music

7/23/2019 19.Animating With Music

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Animating to Music

Often animators are called upon to do musical animation, and are frequently given

very little preparation or foreknowledge. ("Here's your scene, these are the beats.")

I am not at all musically educated, but I knows it when I hears it, and I remain fasci-

nated and inspired by the marriage of music and animation in films like Fantasia, the

Warners shorts, and John and Faith Hubley's animation to jazz. This is a particularly

difficult chapter to write without the benefit of audiovisual aid (i.e., video clips from

cartoons and movies, the rights to which I would need to refinance my house to

license), but I encourage interested parties to seek out the various films referenced

here, from both the classics and my more recent personal experiences, and see what

I'm prattling about. So here, in no particular order, are some helpful tips and ideas:

■ Hit your accents nice and hard! As in dialogue, if animating on twos, one frame

ahead won't hurt the sync if the beat falls between the twos, but bear in mind

this has a little trap: sometimes musical beats will fall oddly, say on 7's or 9's, and

animating on twos just won't work. Also, whether we're talking about a 5piececombo or an 86piece orchestra, the marvel of human error means that not all the

beats will be a consistent number of frames either you may find that the beats in

a run could go 8, 8, 7, 9, 8, 10, and your animation should work flexibly with it.



In this example X-sheet, the keys are circled for

both animation on twos and animation on ones.

Note that many of the "twos" keys fall a frameor two ahead of the beats, while the "ones" keys

can be right on the money:

A N I M A T I N G T O M U S I C 1 77



Be telegraphic with your posing and spend very little time getting to your pose

spend more time once you arrive (prime example: Freleng's hilarious Sylvester

opus, Back Alley Oproar),

Look at liveaction choreography in movie and stage musicals. Often, body lan-

guage is as stylized as a cartoon for maximum accent definition. (On the Town and

Singin' in the Rain are fantastic treasure troves of information.) Watch conductors

on the podium Riccardo Muti, for example, literally hits key poses when he con-

ducts! Ballets and moderndance productions are also good research sources.

Use one basic pose per musical phrase not all the time, but it's surprising how

snappy your animation can look through this kind of economy. Again, utilize quick

transitions, and then spend more time once you've arrived at the pose.

Vary the texture of rhythms and actions. (In The Three Caballeros' title song, the

trio frequently shifts gears from wild scrambling to contained measures in Ward

Kimball's boisterous handling.)

Allow the audience the pleasure of seeing a repeated rhythm before you break

away from it. Leave the repeated rhythm on screen for the full amount of time in

the musical phrase whenever possible. In other words, if a measure has four beats,

animate all four and then quickly transition to the next phrase and animate the

next four, instead of breaking out of the phrase only two or three beats into the

measure.

Visualize your actions to follow the tone and pace of the music. Trying a long

stretch and then a staccato movement for accent, for example, works well. In

"Bumble Boogie" from Disney's Melody Time, the bee rattling the bars of his cage

is perfectly conceived to complement the staccato piano run at the end of the

musical phrases. The same piece also uses color change for musical heightening

and accents.

Add accents to your animation where you know a sound effect will work musically,

even if it doesn't exist on the track. In the Genie's song, "Friend Like Me," I put

in visual accents that would work when the sound effects went in, even though

they weren't originally indicated on my guide track. When the Genie sings, "Some

heavy ammunition in your camp," his rocket shape VOOMS over Abu and the



A N I M A T I N G T O M U S I C 1 7 9

Magic Carpet, hitting a major (but not previously accented) beat. (In the final, it's

fleshedout with a great blare from the horn section!) When he spirals up singing,

"And I'll say (BOOM), Mister Aladdin, sir," the explosion from wispy smoke to fullyformed Genie accents the downbeat.

■ Animating little musical stings at the end of a phrase can add humor and zest. In

"One Last Hope," from Disney's Hercules, Phil uses his tail to brush the dust off

a piece of buried statuary to complement the tiny musical sting provided by Alan

Menken at the end of a particular phrase.

■ Let your characters' movements be the musical accents, instead of relying on the

scene cuts to do your work. Cutting works to a point, but accents within a scene

work best too much cutting can result in very fragmented screen rhythm.

■ Beats and counterbeats When animating a scene, you can use the main beats

for one action while using the counterbeats and melodies for another. In Rabbit of

Seville, Bugs is often animated to the insistent thumpthumpthumpthump of the

beats for rhythm, while his hand flourishes are animated to the actual notes of the

melody.

■ When animating a group of characters to the same beats, don't animate all of

them simultaneously to the exact same timings. Instead, offset some of their tim-

ings plus or minus a frame or two throughout the group, while others hit the beat

right on the money. They will all still look as if they're in unison, but the variance

from one to the next will make the animation appear more natural. The only time

I wouldn't recommend this is when you really want the characters to humorously

be in complete, exact, mechanical synchronization.

■ K n o w t h e m u s i c a l s t r u c t u r e . This is really the big one, the Great Kahuna,

the thing that really makes the animation and the music connect, and I didn't

realize this until it was patiently shown to me on Fantasia/2000. Kent Holaday, an

assistant animator by day, and expert syncmeister by night, showed me the musi-

cal structure on the Finale from Carnival o f the Animals. He sat with me for twodays doing this, before I even started storyboarding, and, through his enthusiastic

love for both music and great sync, he gave me the tools I needed to conceive

actions (and even determine the number of characters I needed) for the piece. For



80 C H A R A C T E R A N I M A T I O N C R A S H C O U R S E

example, the structure for the opening measures, as the flamingos are out walk-

ing, goes: 1, 2, 3, 4 trill 123456. Armed with this knowledge, I now knew

I needed six flamingos, who would walk in lockstep for four steps (1, 2, 3, 4), leap

and spin in the air (trill), and fall back down into the water (123456).

& Disney Enterprises, Inc



Kent showed me each time this structure was repeated throughout the piece, and

I could see where the actions should be approached in similar fashion. He went

through my entire set of Xsheets (for which he had personally read the music),

showing me not only where the beats fell, but which instruments were playing, indi-

cating visually on the sheets their individual rises and falls. He called this fabulous

technique of his "Melody Timing," in honor of the musical Disney film. Naturally,

when the time came to do Rhapsody in Blue, Kent was right there by my side again,

this time topping himself by explaining to me exactly which fingers should be hitting

which black or white piano keys in asequence where I needed to animate Gershwin

himself at the keyboard. (We had shot liveaction reference of the pianist, Ralph

Grierson, playing the piece, but whoever the cinematographer was that day managed

to burn an electronic "Hello" over the image, right in the center of the screen!) In one

scene animated by the great Andreas Deja, the beats are used to show the consistentsteam whistle of the peanut wagon and the cranking of the street organ, while the

piano countermelody is used for the monkey scrambling around stealing peanuts,

all possible due to Kent's expert dissection of the different parts of the music. Sadly,

Kent is no longer with us, but I know that his lessons will live on. Anytime I animate

to music these days, I always think, "I wish Kent were here."

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19.Animating With Music