I used to be a musical hater. Okay, well maybe not a hater, but more of a reluctant tolerator. Because whenever the music would swell and a character would bust into song, I couldn't help but find it jarringly unrealistic. If someone tried to do that in real life they would be given some stern stares, or worse, assumed to be a theater kid.
However, now as a world-weary and jaded 23-year-old, I welcome the musical genre. I haven't watched all the classics, but I no longer roll my eyes at dance numbers, "I Want" songs, or operatic solos. I get especially excited when I find a musical TV show, because somehow the six to fourteen songs they can fit in a typical movie isn't enough for me anymore. I need multi-album soundtracks. Numerous songs by extras you will never see again. More duets. Sad, romantic, and battle duets. I'll take them all.
You may chalk this sudden (and perhaps humiliating) change up to a general longing for anything hopeful and wholesome, an impulse I imagine to be pretty common among young adults growing up through these Covid-times. But as this change has been going on for a while, I think there was another reason, and it won't come as a surprise: my study of animation. To explain, let's take a not-so-brief foray into some armchair aesthetic philosophy.
At its core, animation is communication, just like any other form of art. The best animation captures a real person, idea, or experience and brings it to the viewer in a direct and interesting way. But as the majority of concert videos in my Instagram stories prove, just because a real experience is being recorded doesn't mean the viewer will actually experience what it was really like. I've generally found that when designing and animating, trying to exactly copy life won't actually produce results that look real, and never ones that look appealing. Something gets lost in translation. So to actually make something that feels believable, you have to overshoot reality - exaggerate. We have to actively work against the atrophy that comes along with the artificiality of animation. We stretch, saturate, and simplify. We're tightening our message down to what is most important, in a way that the audience can easily recognize.
Animation doesn't have to be stylized. But I think it's most delightful when it is. In a post I will reference time and time again, Nicholas Kole describes why stylization is so important when designing for animation:
"We notice, and we point people's attention to the details we love most. That's what makes stylization so alluring- we are simplifying the visual statement to direct your attention to this-kind-of-arm or that-kind-of-smile. We create patterns from our love and attention."
Animation will always be to some extent, unreal. But if we lean even harder into that unreality through stylization, we can communicate something real in a striking and direct way. And even more exciting-ly, we can communicate a very specific view of something real. We stylize out of our own personal point of view. What we love will be large, contrasting, central. What we hate will be even more corrupted. What we're apathetic about may be omitted entirely. Good stylized designs tell you what to pay attention to, and the best ones even suggest how you should feel about it.
And though I know much less about music than I do about drawing, I think songs in musicals serve the same purpose. In most musicals (but famously excepting Cats, a long rabbit trail I am happy to talk about later), song sequences are stylized ways of presenting narrative moments. And therefore, they are decidedly non-realistic and non-literal. For many people, that's enough to take them out of the narrative. So why risk a song? For the same reason we stylize. In art, we must fight to say things as clearly and as specifically as possible, and a song does just that. The limited lyrics confined in meter focuses our attention only where it needs to go. And it's impossible to beat music in its ability to inform how we should feel about something. Yip Harburg, lyricist for The Wizard of Oz, puts it this way:
I think that's incredible - in musicals, we get the chance to feel a thought. To experience a character's feelings almost as if you were them. So now, I don't mind whenever a character bursts into song, because if it's done well, we're seeing an incredible metaphor that's putting us not just into a story moment, but the very mind of the character experiencing it. I love musicals for the same reason that I love stylized characters in animation - they are fantastical, entertaining, and highly effective ways to communicate something real.
So it's maybe no surprise that a medium with a grounding in visual stylization is often paired with a genre known for its narrative stylization. That may be largely due to Disney's catalog, but I wanted to highlight a recent exceptional example since I've been obsessed with it for the past week: Netflix's Centaurworld.
I don't think Centaurworld would work without its rooting in musical theater. In fact, the show is inspired by the creator's accidental enrollment in show choir while in school. And when describing it to friends, I've said that whatever you don't like about musical theater you won't like about this show, but whatever you do like, you'll really enjoy. For example, the show is unabashedly weird and flamboyant, but the emotional moments hit much harder for all the musical reasons I spent several paragraphs just describing. The music pulls the story along on this very satisfying narrative arc. The songs grow more desperate and sad as our heroes near the end of their journey, while a chill-inducing lullaby pulls us ever closer to the final showdown with the Nowhere King. Overall, the show is one of the most cohesive and well-serialized animated shows I have ever seen, and if it wasn't so long I would easily enjoy watching it in a single sitting. It reminds me a lot of how Steven Universe transitioned into being pretty much a musical over the course of its lifespan, and how grand, serious stories aren't necessarily cheapened by the addition of songs at pivotal moments.
And thankfully in a show where singing is this important, the voice performances are fantastic, with obvious Broadway experience. It definitely falls into the trope of "cute world with a dark underbelly" we've seen in shows like Adventure Time and Pibbi, but its insistence that the fragile, kind things would be what ultimately redeems it was refreshing.
There's a lot of other things to like here too, from some of the best rigged horse animation I have ever seen (Mercury Filmworks continues to amaze in their rigs department), to a surreal and Undertale-esque sense of humor, but I always find myself coming back to the powerful (and delightfully lengthy!) soundtrack as the element that ties it all together. If you can manage to look past the giraffe man with nipples (which is difficult, I know), you'll be rewarded with a surprisingly emotional story and some new tracks to add to your showtunes playlist.
(yes, I know about that.)
(and I now have one too.)
thanks for your readership -
-dh
