Joshua Moshier (photo by Sally Ryan)
We owe a debt to the WB funny animals for molding generations of composers from TV-addicted kids. Porky, Daffy, Bugs and Elmer were their gateway drug when it came to their ingenious kick in the pants to the classics as Wagner’s Ring Cycle and Rossini’s “Barber of Seville” along with the rambunctious jazz of Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse,” were wrapped withing the orchestral antics of Carl Stalling. Now when it seems that Looney Tunes and their musical heritage (as practiced since by James Horner, Alan Silvestri, Bruce Broughton and Jerry Goldsmith) are being kicked to the curb, along comes the quite wonderful, traditionally animated gum-chewing alien apocalypse of Daffy, Porky and Petunia Pig trying to stop “The Day the Earth Blew Up.” In this rousingly silly salute to the iconic brand, there’s no more resounding valentine to Stalling and Company than in the lushly operatic score by Joshua Moshier. Having composed no end of live action hilarity with “Shrink,” “Baskets” and “Special,” Moshier also has no end of notes when it comes to writing the merry melodic ‘toon chases of Tom and Jerry, “Dragons: Rescue Riders” and numerous Emmy-nominated hours of Looney Tune shorts.
Now that TV-centric toon talent goes to the big, wide screen with “Day’s” epically feature-length Looney Tunes score. But whereas the the characters in that franchise tended to have dysfunctional relationships to say the least, here Porky and Daffy as true bosom buddies as they take on an alien overlord and his seemingly heinous body snatching scheme. It’s a BBF vs. outer space menace tone where chummy emotion is as important as the Ren and Stimpy-worthy facial freak outs and theremin-topped salutes to classic alien invasion scores. Joshua Moshier’s score rises to the emotionally multi-leveled 2-D animation challenge, hitting, poking, and blasting all of the iconic Looney musical signatures with feeling and fun for this vibrant, retro delight. It’s a soundtrack that works just as well for old school Tunes fans and new children alike with note-perfect merry-scary melodies that also manage to drop multiple anvils on the heartstrings.
(Photo by Sally Ryan)
Did you watch the original Looney Tunes cartoons as a kid? And did their use of classical music influence your love of music, as it did for so many fans and composers?
Yes! I was enamored by Looney Tunes throughout my childhood, and wore out my library’s copy of “Chuck Amuck,” borrowing it over and over again. My entry point was loving the drawings, learning about the animators and directors, but of course you absorb so much music through Looney Tunes. Studying the animation frame-by-frame gave me an important lens for when I began more closely studying music, as I started transcribing music the same way I’d been transcribing drawings that I watched onscreen.
Tell us about your composing career that led you to “The Day the Earth Blew Up?”
Early on I was fortunate to become busy working on live-action projects, which I love, but when I found out that Pete Browngardt was producing 1000 minutes of Looney Tunes shorts, I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of. In my mind I had always been thinking about how I would approach it if I got to be at bat, in terms of the workflow and how my sound might represent a next iteration of the tradition. So when the opportunity came to audition, I felt quite ready!
You’ve scored any number of live action comedy projects, including “Baskets” and “Documentary Now!” What particularly attracted you to humorous projects?
I love participating in making people laugh and feel the emotion of the story we’re telling, and being part of the comedy through music. Along with Looney Tunes I was voracious about watching Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, all of which are amazing melds of music and comedy. I’m a pianist, and was also checking out a lot of Count Basie in high school, and I had this epiphany that from the piano chair, Basie is essentially a comedian in dialogue with the rest of the band. So I like to imagine myself, a bit, in this way at my desk responding to the picture.
When you got the “Day” gig, did you do a crash course into the Looney Tunes cartoons and their music?
When I started on “The Day the Earth Blew Up,” I had already completed about 500 minutes of score for the Looney Tunes cartoons shorts, and I was very immersed in the history of that music. In some ways the challenge was to let go and approach the movie with fresh ears and eyes, because it needed a scale and scope that felt cinematic and bigger than a six-minute short.
Left to Right – Joshua Moshier , voice artist Eric Bauza and director Pete Browngardt (Photo by Sally Ryan)
What was your collaboration with director Peter Browngardt like?
Pete is a wonderful director who trusts and encourages his team. One of my favorite things about working with Pete is that he gives his feedback in real time, so we’re watching the work together and I get to see how he reacts hearing the score for the first time. It leads to a lot of great discoveries and conversation that might not happen strictly over email.
Where most of the classic Looney Tunes have the characters chasing each other around, Daffy and Porky are bosom buddies here. How did you want to distinguish the characters of Porky and Daffy, let alone bring emotion to their relationship?
I wanted them to have a theme that could represent the arc and stages of their friendship in the story: fondness and togetherness, tension and disagreement, tenderness and love. Whistling felt like the right way to introduce their friendship theme, and then the story and score really takes that theme through the paces!
I really loved the “Farmer Jim” origin story. Talk about scoring that sequence.
It’s one of my favorite parts too. I wanted to channel the feeling of a 1990s epic like “The English Patient” or “Legends of the Fall.” It’s a big moment that needs gravity and grounding, so the boys choir, harmonica and lush strings are all important parts of bringing that moment to life. And when paired with the way Farmer Jim is painted and animated, the bigger the better.
Another highlight is when the film’s widescreen aspect ratio changes for Daffy and Porky to stage their own Looney Tunes cartoon.
Musically, it was a way of saying, “this is classic Looney Tunes,” and then for the rest of the film, “This is how we’re approaching this as a movie.” It also introduces the melody “The Merry Go Round Broke Down” as a way of signifying Porky and Daffy working together, even if it’s not going well. That melody mostly goes away in the middle of the film as they pull apart from each other, but when they finally come back together I wanted us to feel a sense of satisfaction when that melody returns at the end.
There has to be a certain amount of scariness to the alien plot, and the sequence of Porky and Daffy fighting the gum monster is pretty intense. Were those dramatic stakes important, and were you ever worried they could get too “serious?”
If anything, in these moments, I was concerned that the music wouldn’t be serious enough! The art and design in the gum monster sequence is genuinely scary and I wanted the music to honor this. So both in visuals and music, we all really swung for the fences in those sequences.
(Photo by Sally Ryan)
“The Day the Earth Blew Up” sounds as good as any of the Carl Stalling scores. Tell us about the recording itself and how you insured that lush, symphonic polish?
Thank you! The sound is a product of our Los Angeles-based players (many of whom I’d worked with for years on the Looney Tunes Cartoons shorts), the wonderful large room at The Evergreen Stage in Burbank (where “Back to the Future” was recorded), and the masterful record and mix by Frank Wolf. It was also an honor to share conducting duties with the incredible Anthony Parnther, who set the tone from the first downbeat that we would be working with immense focus to get something really special.
What’s up ahead for you?
I’m working on scoring an interactive project with spatial audio that will be coming out later this year, and a series for Netflix that I’m excited about. I would love to do another animated feature, and keep developing surprising ways to use music to support stories with a strong emotional core.
See “The Day the Earth Blew Up” in theaters, with Joshua Moshier’s score available on WaterTower Music HERE. Visit Joshua Moshier’s website HERE
Special thanks to Rocco Carrozza at WaterTower Music
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