Hearing What You See

On the syncing of music and image.

A still from Madeline (1952) by UPA

Welcome! It’s a new edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. And this one’s about animated music.

More exactly, it’s about the linking of picture with audio, and about one of the most maligned film techniques ever devised: “Mickey Mousing.”

We’ve all seen Mickey Mousing before. The term’s been in use for 85 years, and probably longer. It refers to the strict, literal sync between score and movement. A character walks, and the background music emphasizes each footfall. They startle, and the orchestra stabs. They fall, and the bass drum and cymbals explode.

It’s like music-as-sound-effects. And it’s associated with Mickey Mouse because his cartoons popularized it — both in animation and live-action films.

Yet the style quickly grew controversial. By the early ‘40s, composer Aaron Copland was attacking the “vulgarizing effect” of Mickey Mousing on live-action drama. Director Jean Cocteau said some years later, “Nothing, it seems to me, can be more vulgar than music synchronism in films.” He felt that “everything gets stuck rigid.”

Copland was fine with Mickey Mousing in animation — but that also grew controversial. By the mid-1940s, Disney’s composers knew of the stigma and claimed that their work had gotten away from this practice. Even animator Shamus Culhane, who defended Mickey Mousing, admitted that “doing a whole cartoon with the action matching the music note for note would be mechanical and annoying.”

Which was the trouble. Early cartoon scores could be robotic, unoriginal and exhausting — and the Mickey Mousing often didn’t help. Terrytoons music took heat (see a film like Harvest Time from 1940), but it wasn’t alone. Chuck Jones wrote in ‘46:

All cartoons use music as an integral element in their formats. Nearly all cartoons use it badly, confining it as they do to the hackneyed, the time-worn, the proverbial. The average cartoon musician was a theater organist during the silent era and so William Tell takes quite a beating in the average cartoon. For some reason, many cartoon musicians are more concerned with exact synchronization or “Mickey Mousing” than with the originality of their contribution or the variety of their arrangement.¹

At the same time, perfect sync can have real power that few would deny. The union of music and movement — even a close union — isn’t a crime. You can’t call Norman McLaren’s Begone Dull Care (1949) stiff or obvious, and yet lots of its animation lands on beat. Which is to say that there are layers to this dispute.