Daniel Goldmark,
Tunes for ‘Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon.
University of California Press, 2005
ISBN: 0 520 23617 3
US$40.00 (hb)
225pp
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

The upsurge of animation studies books continues apace. With Yuval Taylor, Daniel Goldmark edited the excellent Cartoon Music Book (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2002). In Tunes for ‘Toons he surveys the entire golden age of American studio cartoons from the introduction of sound to the closing of the studio animation departments in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when short film animation decamped to television.

Not surprisingly, Goldmark starts by observing that from their inception, animated films have been trivialized by critics as being for children – because they frequently use fantasy and fairy tales – and ipso facto are a single genre. Goldmark points out that cartoons are a distinctive, separate sort of film production within the live-action, mainly feature-oriented studio system, and that the cartoons took full licence to appropriate their material and styles from all the genres under the studio system umbrella. Here he makes an interesting move: he goes back to 1920s silent film practice, noting that elaborate written scores and prompt books were published for feature films, but not for shorts, which got short shrift. Some manuals for silent film accompanists (piano, organ) devoted a chapter to cartoons, classifying them as a subset of comedy shorts and, as such, an opportunity for improvisation; worth noting here that the great American piano virtuoso Thomas ‘Fats’ Waller’s early career involved playing piano and organ in silent movie theatres in Harlem, something Goldmark might have worked into his sections on jazz (Goldmark notes that as early as 1923, Pathé decided jazz was the right music for cartoons and included ‘musical effects sheets’ with each cartoon it shipped. The book is rich in details like this). Waller gets a look-in from Goldmark, but only later as a caricatured public figure in cartoons about blacks.

The book is structured around five case studies. The first two examine and compare the leading composers of animated film music: Carl Stalling (who started out accompanying silent movies, as did Waller), and Scott Bradley. The next two are thematic: jazz and swing music in cartoons; classical music in cartoons. Finally, a detailed examination of Chuck Jones’s sideways homage to Richard Wagner, What’s Opera, Doc? The book ends with a short reflection on the dismal years of cartoon music on television in the 1960s and 1970s, and then the Carl Stalling revival project and its influence on tv product such as Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, and Pinky and the Brain from the late 1980s on. Conceptually, the book is centred on: diegetic vs. referentially non-diegetic use of music in cartoons; jazz and racial representation in cartoons; and high art ideas about music vs. the popular. Regarding the last, he says “Popular culture, expressed in animation, took the most recognizable bits of both as fodder for social commentary”.

Goldmark starts his studies with Carl Stalling, who met and began working with Walt Disney in Kansas City, moving to Hollywood with him. As Goldmark says of Stalling, “…the lone person who had the greatest impact on the field.” At Disney, Stalling did groundbreaking work developing systems for synchronizing music and sound effects with animation, systems which were adopted throughout the animation industry. But Disney had no connection with the popular music industry and was as a studio economically responsible (read: a tightwad), so the range of music available to Stalling there was what he composed or whatever was in public domain: the classics, folksongs, etc. When he went to Warner Bros. in 1936, Stalling not only had access to, but was pushed hard to use, the popular (and contemporary, and topical) music titles in Warner’s subsidiary music publishing companies. Stalling developed musical referentiality into a narrative strategy and a studio style: both he and, later, Scott Bradley, wanted to establish cartoon music as a prime mover rather than as background.

Stalling’s use of the stories/meaning evoked by well-known popular song titles enabled him to frame the on-screen comedy at an entirely separate narrative level or track from the on-screen animation. So: non-diegetic referentiality, depending on the viewer’s recognition of the musical quotation, and here Tom Gunning’s cinema of attractions is invoked, paralleling prioritising of visual display over narrative action to Warner cartoons primacy of gags over story development, and music’s role in this; on this basis, Stalling is put forward as a postmodernist . From this, Goldmark examines Stalling’s next major technical development, the cue sheet for organizing a complex array of what we could call sound bites from pop music sources, and from this develops ideas about generic music and musical stereotypes. Chapter ends with a close analysis comparison of Jones’s Mouse warming and Freleng’s Bugs Bunny Rides Again.

And in this, it must be said, the book shows its best. Each chapter has a comparative close analysis, and they are all outstanding. The knowledge of music and cartoons is extensive and well applied; the analytic purpose and focus is always sharp; and Goldmark’s ability to write description is up to the challenge.

The next chapter, on Scott Bradley’s work at MGM, strongly contrasts his background, methods, objectives, and style to Stalling. If Stalling was a virtuoso of pop, Bradley was a resolute musical highbrow. If Stalling and click system synchronisation were synonymous, Bradley wanted to free cartoon music from the tyranny of synchrony. If Stalling was referentially promiscuous, Bradley wanted to write only his own original music. Bradley considered himself first a serious concert hall composer and wanted à la Fantasia to use music to lift animated film (not cartoons, please) to the status of high art. Ironically, Bradley’s best opportunities for this at MGM came in the 1940s Tom and Jerry series – cartoons with virtually no dialogue but a lot of violence, which draws Goldmark to muse about whether music is violence, or causes violence, or reflects on violence. Chapter climaxes with an analysis of two Hanna-Barbera Tom and Jerrys, Solid Serenade and Puttin’ on the Dog.

The chapter on jazz and swing music concentrates on 1930s and 1940s cartoon use of jazz as vehicle for (negative) black stereotyping – jazz as musical shorthand for the N word. Does a good job on looking at the animated sequence in Paul Whiteman’s King of Jazz film, which film suggests Paul Whiteman brought jazz to Africans (worth remembering: while PRing himself as the King of Jazz, Whiteman sent his top arranger, Ferde Grofé, composer of The Grand Canyon suite, to the Cotton Club to steal Duke Ellington’s arrangement of a reed trio bit from Mood Indigo. Grofé, it is said, couldn’t notate the harmonies). This section is good on the Fleischer Studio’s early 1930s cartoons featuring live-action footage of jazz and pop entertainers of the moment seguing into cartoon elaborations of their song narratives (Louis Armstrong, Ethel Merman. Cab Calloway, Rudy Vallee, the Mills Brothers). Moves to close analysis of Fleischer’s Betty Boop/Louis Armstrong I’ll be glad when you’re dead, you rascal you and Warner Bros./Tex Avery The Isle of Pingo-Pongo, finishing with a look at Warner’s/Friz Freleng Clean Pastures. But the familiar line on (black) racial stereotyping via jazz music makes no new points, and leaves one wanting to ask what is the relationship between (white) Betty Boop’s trademark ‘Boop-oop-a-doop’ in the early 1930s and (black) Wynonie Harris-Dizzy Gillespie’s ‘Ooh-bop-sha-bam’ in the late 1940s?

‘Corny Concertos and Silly Symphonies’ is the chapter on classical music in cartoons. Begins with a quotation: “You know, it is so sad. All your knowledge of high culture comes from Bugs Bunny cartoons”. Elaine to Jerry, in “The Opera”, Seinfeld(1992). Following this, Goldmark says of cartoons using canonical classical music: “…in mentioning the ‘canon’, I do not mean to imply that these cartoons use the music of high art. On the contrary, I believe these films subvert traditional ideas of the canon by often featuring more popular (and thus more commercial) works, both of concert music and opera. One quality of those canonic works is their timelessness. Cartoons have helped make these works even more durable, providing audiences with new contexts to attach to old standards. In fact, Carl Stalling earned the label ‘postmodernist’ precisely because he was able to juxtapose a dozen pieces from a dozen eras and make them work together, a practice that by necessity leaches much of the historical significance out of a given piece.” Or adds a new historical significance to them…

The final What’s Opera, Doc? chapter is good indeed. Recovers, in subtle ways, the issues raised about Scott Bradley’s ambitions for cartoon music, claiming for Chuck Jones’s film the status of a Gesamstkunstwerk (a total art work, what Wagner was claiming for his work) while still keeping historical research in the picture: Fritz Freleng’s Herr meets Hare as a very clear source for the Jones film.

Note appendix 1: Carl Stalling documents, and appendix 2: Scott Bradley documents. As with the best US film scholarship in recent decades, the endnotes and bibliography are abundant, precise, and unfailingly useful. Its best moments, and they are very good, are the close analyses of the films.

All reservations aside, Tunes for ‘Toons belongs on every serious Hollywood animation bookshelf, right alongside the best: Michael Barrier’s Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in the Golden Age (1999), Norman M. Klein’s 7 minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon (1993), and Paul Wells’s books.

Rick Thompson,
La Trobe University, Australia.

Created on: Thursday, 19 July 2007