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'"Everybody scream!" Tim Burton's Animated Gothic-Horror Musical-Comedies'

This chapter was written in response to a request from the editor for a contribution specifically on the collaborative relationship between Tim Burton and Danny Elfman in relation to Burton’s animated films. The essay is located in a volume dedicated to sound and music in animated film, part of the larger Film Music Genre series from Equinox. This was the first series to start examining film music in relation to genre, the ‘second generation’ of film music studies: where film music studies in the 1980s-90s tend to provide fairly broad surveys and theorizations of film music as a whole, since 2000 the emphasis has been on the examination of individual films and film genres. Halfyard’s 2004 monograph on Elfman’s score for Burton’s _Batman_ (1989) remains the only major academic text looking at Elfman’s work, although examining the animations was not a significant part of it. However, the animations are important for two reasons: firstly, because Burton’s earliest work was animated, and it has remained an area he has constantly returned to and often incorporated at some level into his live action films; and because several of the animations are musicals, meaning that Burton and Elfman’s collaborative relationship here is quite different compared to the live action films. Arguably, Elfman has a much greater creative stake in them, contributing not just underscore but songs (both music and lyrics) and his own voice: he plays at least one and sometimes several characters in the animated musicals. This essay identifies the distinct contributions of the two collaborators, and the musical and visual correspondences between the animated work and live action work.