Hitting All the Universal Notes
Catching up with the composers behind some of this year’s best animated movie scores.
With the checkered flag about to be waved on the 2019 Academy Award race, the list of likelies for the Best Animated Feature category not only contains several of the usual suspects, but has some familiar sounds as well, courtesy of their musical scores. While the nominees have yet to be announced, certain films have risen above the pack as top contenders, both artistically and musically.
Not surprisingly, two big sequels top the sure-bet list: Disney/Pixar’s Incredibles 2 and Walt Disney Animation’s Ralph Breaks the Internet. Both of their predecessors, 2004’s The Incredibles and 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph, took home the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. Composer Michael Giacchino, whose jazz-infused score for the first Incredibles was felt by some to have been snubbed in that year’s Best Original Score race, has returned for the sequel. This time around, though, Giacchino made a point of not revisiting the past in terms of the music. “I wanted to take a fresh approach,” he says. “Brad [Bird] and I knew we were going to use the main theme of course, but I still wanted it to have a different vibe while it stayed in the same vein and character.”
Giacchino also had the opportunity to create more specific character themes. “I was most excited that I got to write a theme for Elastigirl because she plays a much larger role in the movie this time,” he says. “For the first film, Helen’s music came under the umbrella of the family’s theme. The other really fun part was writing the TV theme song jingles for each of the characters that will show
up in the end credits.”
Henry Jackman, who scored Wreck-It Ralph, likewise returned for Ralph Breaks the Internet. While it might seem easier to score a follow-up film, since the character motifs already exist and can be reused, Jackman points out that the opposite is true. “There’s about threeand-a-half minutes of music that is specific to the first movie,” he says, “but other than that, it’s back to the drawing board to come up with a whole new set of ideas and sound.”
Jackman expanded on the melding of traditional orchestral and electronic music used to underscore the digital characters in Wreck-
“The idea was to basically move away from what we see in animation today, in which everything is very photorealistic. Even when characters have cartoonish proportions, their textures and clothing look very realistic.” Composer Masakatsu Takagi, Mirai