Mickey Mousing

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Mickey Mousing [ ˌmɪkimaʊzɪŋ ] describes a film music technique in which events in the film are precisely accompanied by music. This often heavily accented musical elements found in this form, especially in early animated films of Walt Disney use, which is why the well of David O. Selznick established name Mickey Mousing based on Disney's cartoon character Mickey Mouse (Engl. Mickey Mouse ) prevailed. Underscoring is a weakened form of Mickey Mousing .

Borrowings from program music

The Mickey Mousing is essentially not an invention of the motion picture industry. Borrowings were recognizable in a less exaggerated form in the program music of classical music long before the film was made . This is how Joseph Haydn designed the passage in his oratorio The Creation And there was light with a sudden forte and gradually increases the pitch when describing the sunrise. In Mozart's Requiem, an ascending sequence of tones is also used in the lacrimosa to depict the resurrection of the dead. In various masses at the Crucifixus, a throbbing rhythm is supposed to symbolize the hammer blows with which Christ is nailed to the cross. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau's overture to his piece Pygmalion , the blows of a hammer with which a sculptor perfects his statue are imitated. Since the end of the 18th century, music was no longer viewed as an art of imitation, however, such illustrations have been increasingly underestimated. Beethoven declared, for example, about his Pastoral Symphony (1808) that it should be “more an expression of emotion than Mahlerey”. In entertainment theater as well as in melodrama and pantomime , however, illustrative music remained present.

Application and intention

Slapstick is to be classified between musical and noisy accompaniment , with which one acoustically amplifies actions on stage and later in silent films . In talkies , it was Max Steiner who used this technique in his music for King Kong and the White Woman in 1933 as one of the first film music composers. In the film, Kong's movements when climbing the Empire State Building are accompanied by crescendos , i.e. the music getting louder, or the steps of an Indian chief are synchronously amplified with bass instruments. Walt Disney took the film as a suggestion to further develop the new film music technology in his own films. In movies like the Silly Symphonies , Fantasia and the early full-length Disney films of the "Masterpieces" series as Pinocchio was Mickey Mousing perfected: Each jump Pinocchio is from a glissando accompanied, during a fall with a deep drumbeat is accompanied. Disney's “house composers” Paul J. Smith and Oliver Wallace in particular have developed into masters of this form of musical accentuation . Carl Stalling , who decisively shaped the film music for cartoons with his music for Looney Tunes , combined the technology with postmodern aesthetics by creating and discarding moods in a matter of seconds. The use of music tailored to the film content leads to an unconscious guidance of the viewer, which allows him to draw conclusions about new cinematic contexts with skilful background music.

See also

literature

  • Irwin Bazelon: Knowing the Score - Notes on Film Music . Arco Publishing, New York 1975, ISBN 0-668-05132-9 .
  • Fred Karlin: Listening to Movies - The Film Lover's Guide to Film Music . Schirmer Books, New York 1994, ISBN 0-02-873315-0 .
  • Literature: Mannerfeldt, Nils: Mickey mousing - och sedan då? Något om musikens roll i tidiga animerade kortfilmer från Walt Disney Studios . In: Musikologen 1992 (Uppsala: Institutions för musikvetenskap), pp. 23–29.
  • Matthias C. Hänselmann: The cartoon. An introduction to the semiotics and narratology of image animation. Schüren, Marburg, 2016. pp. 259–272. ISBN 978-3-89472-991-2 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Capitalization of both words according to § 55 (3), hyphen recommended according to § 45 E 1 , Duden , 24th edition
  2. ↑ Ludger Kaczmarek, James zu Hüningen: mickey mousing . In: Lexikon der Filmbegriffe, edited by Hans. J. Wulff and Theo Bender
  3. ^ A b Albrecht Dümling in Kino - Movie - Cinema , p. 116. Argon, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-87024-297-3 .