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Buzz! Boing! Bang!
Animated Sounds at the Academy
by Garrett Gilchrist
In early August, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Samuel Goldwyn Theatre in Beverly Hills presented “The Sound Behind the Image II: Now Hear This!,” an evening honoring the art of animation sound design. “People who work in animation and people who work in sound are kindred spirits,” explained participant and Skywalker Sound audio designer Randy Thom. “Partly because neither group of people gets as much respect as they should.” Hosting the evening was sound designer and thee-time Oscar nominee Mark Mangini, who led the participants through the history of sound in animation, and its pioneers.
 Foley artist John Roesch demonstrates a sound-making device at the reception preceding the "The Sound Behind the Image: Now Hear This!" presentation at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Photo by Matt Petit/©AMPAS |
In the earliest days of animation, sound had to be performed live by an orchestra on a soundstage. Drummers tended to be most adept at sound creation, carrying with them a collection of odd percussive instruments––clackers, grinders, wind whistles, etc. The late drummer Jimmy MacDonald was Disney’s master sound designer for 48 years, even taking over the voice of Mickey Mouse from Walt in 1946. “Music was always important to films,” said Mangini. “Jimmy MacDonald made sound effects important to films.” MacDonald died in 1982.
Joe Herrington, master media designer at Disney Imagineering for 28 years, demonstrated a collection of MacDonald’s props. The audience gasped in delight as strange devices made from cans, tubing, metal, wood, leather and wire suddenly croaked like frogs and buzzed like flies, creating the bizarre but familiar sounds they’d heard so many times as children. A bundle of bamboo became the sound of Bambi’s fire. A BB placed in a balloon gave a whizzing winding down sound. From the sound of a million marching ants, to making the mainspring of a clock talk in a human voice, MacDonald did it.
By the 1940s and ‘50s, clever sound editors used sound recordings found in the libraries of major studios and twisted them to serve their own purposes. The sound of a mechanical “inertia starter” became the sound of the Warner Bros. character the Tasmanian Devil.
Sound editor David E. Stone, an Oscar winner for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, then explained a clip from Chuck Jones’ Roadrunner cartoon Zoom and Bored (1957) that was screened. “The coyote is dragged over the desert and you hear car horns; he’s dragged backwards over the cactus and we hear a kookaburra, the Australian bird,” said Stone. Why? He hits three boulders in a row in just a few frames and what we’re hearing is the rapid drumming on cowbells. There’s no explaining this non sequitur, this theater of the absurd use of sound effects, except to say, “It’s [legendary sound designer] Treg Brown.”
This was sound design as comedy, and it gave the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons much of their flavor. To underline this point, Stone and Mangini decided to remove Brown’s sounds from the Roadrunner scene, replacing them with “realistic” sounds that a live action sound editor would use, including a recording of a real Roadrunner. The sound became dull and lifeless, lacking all its energy and vitality. It’s interesting to note that nearly all of today’s animated films are sound designed this way, to sound “realistic.”
Stone and Mangini also prepared a version of the scene done entirely with Hanna-Barbera sound effects. Those sound effects were specifically prepared to sound cartoony––and although effective on television, when combined with the full animation of Chuck Jones, they simply sounded limited and cheap…like the best of Hanna Barbera’s TV cartoons.
 Pictured, from left, Foley artist John Roesch, Foley artist Alyson Moore, Disney Imagineering media designer Joe Herrington, Foley mixer Mary Jo Lang, sound effects editor Mark Mangini, sound editor David Stone, sound editor Randy Thom and Tad Marburg, chairman of Public Programs and Education for the Academy Science and Technology Council. Photo by Matt Petit/©AMPAS |
It was in the late ‘80s when a new generation of Disney animators brought feature animation a new degree of mass popularity, and sound design went along with them. Said Mangini about Beauty and the Beast, “There was one central design challenge in the film, and that was, what were we going to do with the Beast’s voice? [The Beast was voiced by Robby Benson.] Robby, a great actor, fantastic performances, has an alto voice. The Beast should be bestial, a basso profundo. It just didn’t work; it was the wrong timbre. I said we should throw it all out and start from scratch. This didn’t go over very well.
I came up with a three-pronged approach,” Mangini continued. “We would pick key lines throughout the film where he needed to be more beastly, and he would in fact perform more in that fashion––growl into a line, deliver his line, and then sort of ‘outro’ the line with a growl.” Recordings of animals enhanced those growls. “We would layer animal sounds underneath Robby’s voice, and we would even separate and sneak in little pieces of lion and tiger growls and dog things in between words and syllables––it was real surgery.” The final step? “We brought it to Terry Porter, the magnificent rerecording mixer at the Disney Studios, who pitch-shifted the voice, took it down a certain range to put it in that sort of deep basso level. And he would equalize it and add low frequency to just make it sound sort of larger than life––as big as he looked onscreen.”
Foley artist John Roesch, MPSE took the stage. He has worked on 300 films over 25 years, and partnered with mixer Mary Jo Lang and Alyson Moore for 10 of them. As a scene from Beauty and the Beast played onscreen, the team made hinges squeak, blew train whistles, and brought the inventions of Belle’s father to life––live for an appreciative audience. MacDonald would’ve been proud.
“The word ‘cartoon’ is pretty much a pejorative term these days,” said Thom, two-time Academy Award winner and 14-time nominee. “One of the first things that I’m told by the director is, ‘It should not sound ‘toony.’ It’s what you might call exaggerated realism. It’s pretty rare that we use custom-made sound gadgets like those invented by Jimmy MacDonald, although some of us are intensely interested in developing new gadgets that are somewhat similar and will make a new whole set of sounds. And we also, contrary to popular belief, do very little electronic sound synthesis; we haven’t needed to. Sound is such a malleable thing. You can take an existing sound and twist it in so many different ways. You can go out and record an elephant trumpeting and combine it with a few other sounds and turn that into a T. Rex vocalization, whereas you can not go out and video a crocodile and somehow manipulate that image to turn it into a T. Rex.”
 Mark Mangini, left, and Randy Thom at the reception preceding "The Sound Behind the Image: Now Hear This!" presentation. Photo by Matt Petit/©AMPAS |
Disney producer Don Hahn was shown in an onscreen interview with Mangini, stating how the job of a sound designer is to decide which sounds are important and should be emphasized, and which shouldn’t be in the mix at all. If a mix is turned in that has a sound for every action, it becomes a noisy mess, according to Hahn. “That’s not sound design,” he said. The task, says Thom, is to “gracefully change that focus so that the audiences feel like they’re hearing everything they need to hear. The longer you work as a mixer, the less you tend to process sounds. And also the longer you work as a mixer, the more ruthless you become about discarding sounds. As Don put it so eloquently, mixing is not just about combining sounds together; it’s about deciding what sounds to focus on.”
Today, the soundtrack to an animated film is less a comedian than a major dramatic player, stunning the audience with its depth and realism. The story always comes first. “So we certainly use different sets of technology now than Jimmy did,” Thom continued. “And the storytelling styles have certainly changed. But the essence of doing sound for animated films is still about finding sounds that are fun, scary, mysterious––sometimes just reassuringly real.
“The world of sound that we create in an animated film is a little bit like a character, and our job is to attempt to give that character a voice,” he concluded.
Garrett Gilchrist is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer specializing in animation.