Poke a Bear and See if He Sings

Blogger Andrew Brinded has been busy unscrambling a very silly post by the Guardian’s Stuart Heritage. The thrust of Mr. Heritage’s argument is that characters in film musicals should just say how they feel rather than sing. He does, however, admit to liking “The Bare Necessities”, to which Andrew parries:

“I would suspect that as Baloo is a talking bear, it’s okay for him to sing”

There is much wisdom in this. Let’s poke this bear some more.

There is a notion in some quarters that cinema audiences no longer accept characters bursting into song MGM-style. What is credible on stage apparently becomes ridiculous on film. I disagree. I just think that most of today’s film musicals either skirt around the problem or aren’t quite good enough to overcome it. Let’s go back a bit.

Cabaret marked the turning point. In the stage show there are “book” numbers performed by the characters in the story and “concept” numbers performed in the Kit Kat club. For the film version they dropped the book numbers so that the only songs performed were the ones performed in the more “realistic” setting of the cabaret itself.

Post-Cabaret there followed a relatively fallow period. Then Disney brought Broadway back to the screen. Suddenly movies were singing once more. There were singing mermaids (Little Mermaid), singing prince-beasts (Beauty and the Beast) and singing lions (Lion King). Even the warthog got its own number. And clearly audiences weren’t put off by it.

Ah, but this was animation and a difference this makes. Musicals need to exist in a world of “heightened reality”. This doesn’t necessarily mean a fantastical world but there has to be some sense of “bigness”, a reason to sing rather than merely to speak. Animation, by its very nature, already exists in this world. This is where Andrew’s comment gets to the nub. For an audience member, the imaginative leap required to move from talking bear to singing bear is less than it is to move from talking human character to singing human character. But it’s essentially the same imaginative leap, the same basic need for the willing suspension of disbelief. Animation just makes the leap a little easier.

So Disney offered a way back for the film musical. But the real test came with the live-action stuff and that’s been more of a mixed bag. Two exceptions have been Oscar-laden Chicago and the box office hit Enchanted. But neither film really challenges the idea that audiences won’t accept real people bursting into song. Chicago works on a similar basis as Cabaret with the songs being presented as artificial “concept” numbers. Enchanted, although for the most part a live-action film, leaves the singing to characters transported from an animated world.

So the notion that cinema audiences won’t accept people bursting into song persists to this day. Of course it’s bunk. Audiences will accept plenty of things on film – “flying cars, wizards, dragons” as Andrew points out – so there’s no reason to think that they’d be put off by characters singing. They weren’t in MGM’s day, they wouldn’t be now. The problem is that no recent screen musical has done it successfully enough to prove the point.

In the meantime, we'll always have Baloo.