The Musical!

So in our animation class today we discussed music and animation and I felt it best to sort out my thoughts on this blog since we are talking about sound. I don't know why but I generally have a great deal of disregard for muscials I don't know if it's the Disney effects of having watched so many animations as a kid and all those songs from them being played everywhere but I can't stand it.
But growing and certainly working in this industry and learning about the history of cinema I've come to appreciate it more. Musicals started way back with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly and so on they helped the American public suspend thier disbelieve and really immerse themselves in something delightful rather than indulge in post world wars tragedies and all the trouble of the cold war and other wars that followed. They soon died off and were not as popular and apparant as they used to be.
Interestingly enough they did appear back in the ninties in animation, and the question that was asked in class today is why did that happen. The reasons were that a lot of the producers and people working in the Disney animation studioes at the time really believed they could revive musicals through animation and the major factor was that they were all broadway producers and had that theater background to them and moved from that industury only because it was harder to make a living out of it and chose animation.
Until today those musicals in Aladin, or Lion King or any of those Disney classics still lives on and in this case they definitely bring back memories. They really pushed the genre at the time and the musical function in several ways, it really helped add to the story and conveyed the general idea and plot and even adds to the mood of the film.
Obviously that has died down a great deal and what was brought up during class was the idea of how muscials may not function so well in America but other parts of the worlds, and what's funny is that I asked an Indian producer why Bollywood continues to and remains through out their history creating the same types of films that are heavy with musicals and his response was that they worked as an escapesed tool. People watched those to cheer themselves up and forget about the depressing and harsh lives that they lived.
So it was interesting to think about the emotional aspects of music and how it certainly adds a great deal to the visual world of cinema regardless of the medium or setting.