The Star eCentral: Movie Reviews
The Star eCentral: Movie Reviews |
| Songs from animated films are on the right track Posted: 01 May 2014 09:00 AM PDT Movie soundtracks from animated films are booming. Considered deeply uncool at one point, music from animated movies is back – and singing along is now not only OK for kids, it's something adults record themselves doing on their phones and share on YouTube. The boom in popular songs from animated movies comes after a long fallow period when the form yielded few hits in the music world, despite box-office juggernauts like the Toy Story, Shrek and Ice Age franchises. Though all incorporated music in their films, it was rarely the kind that had come to define the genre at Disney Animation in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when it was making music-driven hits like The Lion King, Beauty And The Beast and The Little Mermaid. "You had this shift ... where there were very successful animated movies but their soundtracks weren't," said president of Disney Music Group, Ken Bunt. "Their scores were important, but they weren't musicals and the music in them wasn't something that gets played on radio or that you're singing in your car." A sign of the shift: For the first time in 20 years, a soundtrack from an animated film has been No. 1 on the Billboard charts for 11 weeks. Two weeks ago, Disney's fairy tale Frozen displaced 1994's The Lion King to become the top-selling animated movie soundtrack of all time. It's not the only music from an animated film that's hot right now: Happy, Pharrell Williams' ubiquitous mood booster from Despicable Me 2, has been No. 1 on the single charts for eight weeks and appears everywhere from Fiat commercials to kids' choir homages. Earlier this year, The Lego Movie popularised a catchy electronic parody song called Everything Is Awesome, and Rio 2 is receiving lots of praise from critics for the quality of its eclectic, Brazil-influenced soundtrack. In some cases, as with Frozen, the music helped drive the box office, as audiences started learning songs from the radio before they saw the film; in others, as in Despicable Me 2, the song's hit status came well after the film's box-office release and evolved into a story of its own. Regardless, the cloud on animated musicals has clearly lifted. "There hadn't been a musical in such a long time," said chief creative officer of DreamWorks Animation, Bill Damaschke, which has a Bollywood-style musical composed by A.R. Rahman and an Australia-set project from Tim Minchin, the composer of the Tony Award-winning show Matilda The Musical, in development. "A really great one came out (Frozen) and it hit a nerve. Everybody's asking, 'What are fresh, original ways to use music in animated movies?'" One of the key features of the Frozen and Happy phenomena has been social media. According to Bunt, fans have uploaded more than half a million versions of the Frozen empowerment ballad Let It Go to YouTube. Oprah Winfrey recently brought Williams to tears by showing him a collection of fan-made Happy videos from around the world. "It's sort of like a community singalong in the virtual town square," said Tom Sito, a professor at USC's School of Cinematic Arts who was an animator and storyboard artist at Disney Animation in the 1990s. "And it keeps the material fresh in people's minds."  Rihanna is in the midst of writing a concept album for an animated movie titled Home. She will also lend In addition to the Rahman and Minchin musicals it has in development, this year DreamWorks will release How To Train Your Dragon 2 with two songs by Jonsi, the frontman from the Icelandic rock band Sigur Ros, and Home, an alien invasion movie with a character voiced by pop singer Rihanna, who is writing a concept album for the film. "For us, music is a big focus right now," Damaschke said. "I'd expect to see more and more of it." — Los Angeles Times/McClatchy-Tribune Information Services |
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