4 - From the Lexigraphic to the Melomanic: Accommodations to Sound in American Studio Animation

Summary

Abstract: Lexigraphic and Melomanic are concepts proposed to fine tune our understanding of American studio animation's transition to sound. In the 1910s and 1920s, animators and audiences were accustomed to following cartoon stories as a kind of reading, assisted by icons and words-in-the-image stylistics adapted from comic strips and comic books. These symbols and picture-words anticipated emoji, delivering an idea, concept, or emotion in pictorial form. Many animators employed these image-texts and picture icons imaginatively and reflexively. Led by the competitive example of the Walt Disney studio when it converted to sound, the established lexigraphic mode of production and reception gave way quickly to melomania – an obsessive preoccupation with syncing screen action to a pre-recorded soundtrack.

Keywords: animation, writing in film, film music, icons, intermedial Contexts

Lexigraphic and Melomanic – I invoke these two words to describe concepts that seldom have been used in film- or early-sound-film studies, but which may fine tune our understanding of animation history. The idea is really very simple. As I reviewed dozens of studio-made cartoons released between 1917 and 1932, I observed that their path to sound took an idiosyncratic turn. Cartoons in the silent period were a lexigraphic medium. They habitually plastered writing, graphic expressions, and picture-word precursors of emoji onto their screens as genre-defining practices. Audiences absorbed these texts as a kind of reading. After the transition to the talkies, led by innovations from the Walt Disney studio, animators gradually abandoned this mode of production and instead foregrounded novel synchronization of music- and image-tracks. The obsession with music was a melomania. Michel Chion touched on the phenomenon:

The silent cartoon began its existence well before the popularization of radio and sound film. It even had the luxury of representing sounds visually, using the same codes as comic books. […]

The result [of the introduction of audio-visual synchronism] was the sort of film […] where we see a cartoon creature sing and make music with anything, hitting this or blowing on that. The whole world becomes a wind, string, or percussion instrument creating a jazzy music that sets everyone and everything to dancing.

It is obvious that cinema and comics have drunk from the same pool of discursive devices from the “lightning sketchers” at the beginning of film until now (the Marvel franchise, etc.). Animators and their studios, however, routinely modify existing conventions, bending them to consumers’ expectations and the medium's capabilities.