ANIMAFEST SCANNER IX | SYMPOSIUM FOR CONTEMPORARY ANIMATION STUDIES | PANEL 3 GENDER AND DIVERSITY

Otherness in Music as Sound as Music Representation - Irena Paulus (musicology courses professor / PhD, associate professor, Umjetnička škola Franje Lučića / Franjo Lučić Art School, Zagreb, Croatia)

PANEL 3: GENDER AND DIVERSITY
TEATAR &TD
08/06 WED 14:35-15:05

The notion of Other and Otherness could be read as being different from what is familiar, expected, or what is generally accepted; as being a lost, strayed entity which resists to turn back to the ideal self. There are many examples of Other and Otherness in animated films – not only in their visuality but also in their sonic solutions. Animation encourages the possibility of transgression from music (which many times takes the role of sound) to sound (which takes the role of music) and vice versa. The play is enabled through the artificiality of the sound in animation in general – therefore, the sound/music shows highly creative in description of human (represented as animation) diversity. The presentation will take in consideration three examples. The Silly Symphony: Music Land (1935) tells the story about “eternal” fight between “popular” (jazz) and “serious” (classical) music jargon metaphorically. At the end, it gives a happy ending typical for Disney – the unification, or the marriage in the literal sense, between the two. Gerald McBoing Boing (1950) gives completely different picture of its sonicity and pushes creation of its soundtrack much further: although a young boy, the hero is Other who doesn’t fit in human society – he doesn’t speak words but produces sound effects (namely: boing boing) whenever he opens his mouths. The last example will be from the Japanese anime Macross Plus which centres around a classical story of a love triangle, but also inserts the notion of a virtual idol, a computer-generated Artificial Intelligence, called Sharon Apple. To represent the “mad computer” as the female (?), and therefore, threatening Other, Sharon Apple was given multiple voices of many different performers such as Gabriela Robin, Akino Arai, Mai Yamane, Melodie Sexton, Wuyontana and the Raiché Coutev Sisters.

Irena Paulus (1970) earned her MA in musicology from the Music Academy of the University of Zagreb, Croatia. She specialized in film music at the European Film College, Denmark, and earned her MA and PhD degrees in film studies from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb. Paulus is a tenured teacher at the Franjo Lučić Art School in Velika Gorica, Croatia. She also teaches film music courses at the Academy of Dramatic Art and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb. She is a long-time collaborator of the Croatian National Radio (currently as an author of radio show Zvukopis). She collaborates with Croatian Composers’ Society, mainly as a writer for magazine Cantus, and e-zine glazba.hr, where she publishes interviews, and reviews of classical music, works for music theatre and film. Paulus has written four books: Music from the Screen: Croatian Film Music Between 1942 and 1990, Brainstorming: Notes on Film Music, Kubrick's Musical Odyssey, and Theory of Film Music through Theory of Film Sound.