How Animation Taught Me to Love Musicals (and Centaurworld)

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: 

"Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought."

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.

some wammawink fanart because her songs are SO GOOD

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

From Nashville to Kilkenny: A Love Letter to the Courage of Cartoon Saloon

ben (from the song of the sea)

I’m not someone who remembers the first time I saw a movie in the theatres, but I do remember the first time I saw a Cartoon Saloon movie. I was just beginning to take a serious interest in animation and was looking for films created outside the Disney/DreamWorks vein. While leafing through the small animation section at my library, I came across a curious DVD. Behind text announcing multiple awards and accolades, a pale face peered out from behind a veil of leaves. Its Oscar nomination and setting of Irish mythology interested me, and so I checked out this beat up copy of The Secret of Kells, Cartoon Saloon’s first feature. Perhaps this indie film would inspire me, set me down a new path, and change the course of my life.

Instead, I was thoroughly bored. This slow story about monks, punctuated by excursions into extreme stylization and visual whimsy, was practically indigestible to my adolescent mind. I returned the DVD to the library and thought no more of it. Yet in college I couldn’t escape hearing whispers about this Irish studio. A studio which bucked trends not only by drawing frames by hand, but also by animating in a boldly flat and graphic look. Concept art of the very monks I saw as a teenager surfaced as reference images during my character design classes. I may have forsaken Cartoon Saloon, but the studio’s work was too excellent to be ignored forever. Soon I had watched the studio’s full catalog of films, but this time, I found myself inspired and impressed by each one. Having grown a little older and (I hope) a little wiser, the beauty of the films opened up before me. A beauty which was most evident when held against the other films of the era. Thoughtful melancholy rather than fast-paced laughs. An abandonment of linear perspective rather than hyper-real CG renders. Uniquely Irish stories rather than generic fantasies and sequels. These were films from the heart, not Hollywood products. These were films that could only be made in Kilkenny, Ireland.

Which is kinda strange, because before Cartoon Saloon, there was no animation in Kilkenny. As I’ve been reading a number of great articles sparked by release of Wolfwalkers (Cartoon Saloon’s most recent film), I’ve discovered that Cartoon Saloon’s history has been just as unconventional as their films. While most animation professionals anticipate moving to LA at the beginning of their career, this wasn’t a given for Tom Moore and the CS team. Instead, the history of Cartoon Saloon has been one of making art where you are, even if that happens to be an ocean away from the industry center. Following the success of The Secret of Kells, any of Cartoon Saloon’s team could have easily found positions in the top American studios. They could have worked with the great artists of the medium and got regular paychecks. But in the years following The Secret of Kells, the team decided to create locally. At the heart of Cartoon Saloon is a courage to create the films they want to make where they want to make them - a risky attitude, but one that has brought us some of the best animation of the past two decades. It’s also widened the industry itself, creating a new animation hub out of a small medieval city.

I don’t know what my path will look like, or yours. I for one always imagined myself leaving Nashville to work for studios in LA or elsewhere. And I may very well do that. But it’s not just that I’m excited about the idea of living somewhere new - I’m also scared of staying here. Of making animation away from the guidance and half-security of the studio system, while inevitably working non-art jobs to support myself in the meantime. I’m scared to start something totally new and trust in my own ideas. And admittedly, I don’t want to give up the chance to work with the people and projects I’m such a big fan of. Right now, Nashville feels a lot like Kilkenny before Cartoon Saloon (just with significantly less castle).

That’s why I’ve been thinking a lot about Cartoon Saloon recently. As a teenager, I was baffled by their choices. As a college sophomore, I was inspired their films. Now as a weary college senior on the precipice of the future, I find myself guided by their bravery. A bravery to seek art wherever it is found. And a freedom not to compromise on what’s really important. The story of Cartoon Saloon has shown me that you can make art where you are, and the world will be better for it. That place may be LA, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be Nashville. It could be Kilkenny. But even in an industry as centralized as animation, there’s still room for new ideas, new studios, and new Saloons.


Thanks for your readership-

-dh