With characters breaking into spontaneous song and dance, musicals are among the most stylised, unrealistic of films (even backstage musicals rarely present a consistently normal picture of human activity in the theatre). But the most stylised films remain the animated shorts and features, where drawings and other inanimate objects seemingly come to life. It should not be surprising, then, that the two forms have displayed an affinity for each other since the coming of sound permitted a combination of the two forms.

Animated sequences have been incorporated into several live-action musicals, most notably in the MGM features Anchors Aweigh (1944), where Gene Kelly dances with Jerry Mouse; Dangerous When Wet (1953), where Tom and Jerry partner Esther Williams in an aquacade sequence; and Invitation to the Dance (1953), where Kelly once again danced with Hanna-Barbera cartoons in the “Sinbad the Sailor” episode. But far more often animated films, both shorts and features, have included significant musical elements to the point where they should be considered valid examples of the musical genre themselves.

Animated cartoons, of course, existed during the silent period and thus well before live-action musicals. In that silent period, however, sing-along cartoons provided a popular form of musical entertainment for film audiences. In 1924, Max Fleischer, creators of KoKo the Clown and Betty Boop, launched a series of Song Car-Tunes highlighted by the Fleischer innovation of the Bouncing Ball, which guided the audience through the lyrics of a song played by the live musicians employed by each cinema to provide musical accompaniment for the films. An animated introduction would segue into a first chorus with the lyrics printed on the screen with a bouncing ball hitting each syllable in rhythm; subsequent choruses would substitute wittily animated figures for the Bouncing Ball. (The earliest Song Car-Tunes actually did have recorded sound, using Lee DeForest’s sound on film system but were experiments without a wide distribution in their sound versions).

Once sound became a regular feature of motion pictures, animators quickly adapted their films to this new innovation, often relying more heavily on songs and music than on plot to advance the action in their films. The series titles which arose during these early sound years emphasised the musical nature of the films, beginning with Disney’s Silly Symphonies and continuing through many imitators such as the Warner Bros. Loony Tunes and Merrie Melodies and MGM’s Happy Harmonies (drawn by the felicitously named Harmon-Ising Studio of Hugh Harmon and Rudolph Ising). During the 1940s, Walter Lantz had three musically oriented series going at the same time -- Cartunes, Swing Symphonies, and Musical Miniatures, the first two devoted to contemporary music and the third to classical. Even as late as the 1950s, UPA introduced a series of cartoon shorts which each consisted of two short musical pieces, created especially for the cartoons, one with a plot and one with a purely lyrical, non-narrative content.

Warner Bros. cartoons of the early 1930s were contractually bound to employ music from the Warner Bros. music library, in part to help sales of sheet music. Various studios included contemporary performing artists, whether live, caricatured, or rotoscoped (a process whereby an animated figure was traced over live-action footage to provide more realistic movements), in their films and featured contemporary blues and jazz songs. Cab Calloway, for example, appeared both live and rotoscoped in Fleischer’s 1932 Betty Boop classic, “Minnie the Moocher,” singing the title song, his own signature lyric. Fats Waller’s music and songs, as well as a Waller caricature, show up in Bob Clampett’s 1943 Warner Bros. cartoon, “Tin Pan Alley Cats”. Throughout the 1940s, Walter Lantz, creator of Woody Woodpecker, produced cartoon shorts which imaginatively illustrated contemporary swing tunes, such as the 1941 “Scrub Me Mama with a Boogie Beat”. The incorporation of African-American stereotypes makes it hard to see many of these films today.

In feature-length animation, Disney set the pattern with his first features, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Pinocchio (1940), of including several songs and even dance numbers in the fantasy plots. Fantasia (1940) provided a different pattern, a series of unrelated vignettes, each set to its own piece of classical musical. Disney followed this with other animated musical anthologies in the 1940s which consisted of folk or popular ballads.

The Disney formula of fantasy narrative with song and dance numbers was imitated usually without success by other studios, such as the Fleischers with Gulliver’s Travels (1939) and Mr. Bug goes to Town (1941) and UPA with Gay Purr-ee (1962). After some years of only modest success in the field of animated musicals, Disney produced a phenomenal string of box office hits including The Little Mermaid (1989), The Lion King (1990), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Aladdin (1992). All of these confirmed their claims on the designation of animated musical by making subsequent moves to the stage as full-scale musical productions, The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast to Broadway and touring companies and The Little Mermaid and Aladdin to Disney theme park shows.

Other studios continue to try to emulate the Disney success formula with animated musicals consisting of fantasy narratives featuring a handful of songs and dance numbers. More interesting in this regard, though, are those productions which actually seem to be making a direct claim on the title of musical in that their subject matter centres around show business and the making of music. Ralph Bakshi’s American Pop (1981) charts the history of twentieth-century American music by following an immigrant family through four generations of various sorts of involvement in the music business. Cat Don’t Dance (1997) presents a typical sort of breaking-into-show-business story but with animals as the main characters. And Bill Plympton’s nearly one-man opus, The Tune (1992) presents the plight of a songwriter searching for a hit.

So while the potential of the live-action film musical may remain in doubt, the animated musical seems likely to preserve the genre through its even more stylised form.

Richard J. Leskosky is the Assistant Director of the Unit for Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a past president of the Society for Animation Studies.