Music isn't just background noise in animation; it’s a crucial element that shapes storytelling and enhances the audience's experience. In this sound session, I sit down with animation director Tim Searle to dive into how music influences animation - and in particular for Toad & Friends, the series we worked on together - highlighting its role in accentuating moments and guiding emotional responses. We discuss the intricate process of layering sound - starting from scripts and dialogue, all the way to the final musical score. Tim shares insights on how themes for characters can provide emotional shorthand, helping the audience connect instantly with who they're watching. By the end of our conversation, we reflect on how animation, when paired with the right music, transcends mere visuals to create a rich, immersive storytelling experience that resonates deeply with viewers.

• Tim's website

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Produced by Gareth Davies at The Sound Boutique

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Animation is already heightened. A script is rewritten, dialogue is refined, movement is shaped frame by frame. Every stage pushes the story further. And then the music arrives.

Is it reinforcing what we can already see? Or is it doing something the visuals can't quite carry on their own?

In this sound session, director Tim Searle joins me to explore the role music plays inside animation storytelling.

I mean, I think it's fair to say that with every element you bring in addition to the animation, you're plusing it. It's a process whereby you work with great people to make the thing even better than you hoped it might be.

And the thing about working with the musician when you're making animation is you've got your script, you've got the dialogue, you've got the animation now and now, right? How can we make it even better and make those moments make sense even more and make it clearer for the audience?

So with comedy, it's a case of timing, isn't it? It's a case of thinking about the rhythm of the moment and allowing room for the joke to land, but then informing, hopefully.

Certainly when we worked together, Gareth on Toad and Friends, what you were doing, I thought, really successfully, is that you were allowing the young audience to enjoy the joke. So it's just like little moment of letting the joke land, but then going into a thing that sort of. It underlines the comic moment.

Music isn't simply decoration. It's another pass on the storytelling, another layer that shapes how the audience experiences the moment.

The animation could work on its own without any music, but what music does bring to the party is it underlines those moments and it accentuates the experience, and it gives the audience more of a clue as to what you're trying to say. Who's the key character talking, for example? So, you know, in that show that we worked on together, we did themes for each character.

And then depending on what's going on, that theme was put in a slightly different style or a different time signature. Different instruments were used just to underline what the moment is and what the story is and what we're meant to feel at that given time.

Themes become emotional shorthand. They tell us who we're with and how we should feel about them.

Once we've done the voice record, we bring the voice record together with the images in form of an animatic. And then we really work hard on making the timing work at animatic phase.

And at that point, editors often chuck in a bit of guide audio, you know, guide music in terms of you know, like a temporary kind of mood setter. The problem with that is that, you know, I have to use things from Star Wars and bits and bobs that they've just got to hand.

And what can happen dangerously is that you fall in love. Everyone falls in love with that temp track.

But that is put in place just to set the mood really and set the timing, give you something to play with for building the shape of the, the show. Because it is an organic process. It is a sort of, let's see, process.

You try things out, you, you give things room and then you pull it back again and everything is, in the case of that told him Friends, where everything fits into 11 minutes, which there's no negotiation on that.

Music doesn't simply follow the story. Sometimes it helps reveal what the story needs.

There was one episode where Ratty was being very poetic.

Well, it was poetic and, and it was a real kind of moment of trying to put across the emotion on the beauty of his words and what was going on with celebration of the countryside and, and all that.

It could have been horribly pious, it could have been really sanctimonious, which is something you've really got to avoid certainly when you're dealing with kids.

And I remember talking to you about that problem and we made the music really, really swing and really it was really expansive and the characters were taken by the beauty of the moment and you know, it was fall and some palava. But it gave that episode a real beauty, I thought. A real kind of integral, kind of celebration of what was going on.

Can't imagine it without the music.

Music doesn't just accompany the picture, sometimes it unlocks it.

Dad used to have an expression, he said, you don't have a dog and bark yourself. And that notion of delegation is something that I've always really sort of held on to.

It's just like you try and work with people who are better than you at their specific craft and you give them enough room to be able to do their thing, you know, and that, that's important to me.

It's just, you know, you don't want to completely frame people in and like, you know, over brief is give people enough room so that they go, right, this is a brilliant opportunity. What can I do with this?

In a long running animated series, the audience needs to know where they are and who they're with almost instantly. And one of the most powerful ways to do that is through music on Toad and Friends. Tim and I started with character themes.

Being a series, you know, one of the things you want is common moments, common motifs and common threads to locate, you know, to show, all right, who's speaking, who we're with, who's the dominant character of this moment. Early on in the production, we focused on the themes for each character, didn't we?

So one of the characters that presented the real problem for me was Ratty, because he was our grown up, our expositional character, our one that told us what was going on. And there was a real danger of him being the sensible one.

And one of the things that we were really focusing on was the idea of, no, he lives on a boat and he's free person, you know, he celebrates the outdoors and, yeah, Christopher Cross sailing, you know, he's like a hippie of the water, you know, so, you know, he's. He's a rebel in a sense. And what. What we settled was a pirate reggae, wasn't it?

It was reggae to give him the free and easy, you know, so we got there in the end, but it's that sort of, you know, trying to get those subliminal messages across to the audience and. Because it's the beauty of this stuff, well, the beauty of animation all round, really, is that it's.

You're producing beautiful stuff that gets into people's lives without it being like a big deal. And they either love it or they don't.

And one of the tools we've got to be able to pull at heartstrings and be able to locate them and make them laugh is the music. It's just. I can't imagine doing it without that.

And the other thing is the people that do the sound effects, the foley, you know, that that stuff is another brilliant level of plus in it, you know, in terms of being able to really make the whole audio experience feel real and expansive.

You know, restraint is part of the craft. Knowing when music should lead and when it should step aside, it's.

Yeah, you shouldn't just let it be like a lift music just plinking away in the background, you know, that's not a score, is it? It scores ebb and flow and they heighten the moment.

And if you don't need it, drop it for a bit, you know, because otherwise you get to the dub and then you've got competing elements or getting in the way of each other, and you have to make some really tough choices.

And, you know, if you've already had those discussions with one another and you thought about a funny boot going into squelchy mud, you know, and important that you want that to Sing for whatever word, you know.

So those moments need room and everyone needs to be able to sort of get in line, you know, so that the important things are happening and everyone gets. Every element gets its due attention when it's needed, you know, what's. What's needed.

When sometimes the music follows the picture, other times the picture follows the music.

Normally, if you got cast required to sing a song that's produced as a separate element, like, for example, in Toad and Friends, we had an opera singer singer moment, didn't we? But then we also. And. And that was recorded as a play in. But then we needed Toad Adrian Edmondson to sing, and that was quite a big deal.

And then other times, a valerious big deal, by the way. And another time you needed to get all the cast to sing in harmony, didn't you?

So you supplied stems, which were the harmonies, and we separated them off and then they could sing and match your harmony. Right. So I thought that worked a treat.

Those moments, in terms of the bits where characters were singing, they needed to be recorded at an earlier phase in that episode's audio production because we needed it to animate, too.

In those moments, the music doesn't support the animation. The animation supports the music.

When a group of people sing together, you know, you have to be wide enough to be able to enjoy the reaction shots from each other, don't you? One of the things I learned earlier on, when I was working with Rowan Atkinson, he used to say, life is a comedy in the wide, a tragedy and close up.

So that's interesting. It's like you go in close for the confirmation, but other than that, you do try and play it wide and let the performers do their thing.

And certainly it's something we tried to do with Toad and Friends because, for example, Toad used to say some quite outrageous things.

But you need to be wide enough so that you can be with the other characters, listening to his words and pulling the appropriate faces of perhaps Toad. That's not quite right. And we think something else.

Even then, the lesson was clear. Music changes how animation feels.

I can't imagine animation without the music. Animation with very rudimentary soundtrack are missing a trick, aren't they?

Because, you know, because you're doing it without that extra element that helps the audience understand what's going on in terms of what music can bring to production. It's a very essential ingredient, you know, it's a thing you need to be able to tell the story properly.

And without it, you've got one arm time behind your back.

So there we have it. Animation is built in layers. Script, voice, movement, sound, and then music. Not simply reinforcing what we see, but lifting it.

If this conversation has changed the way you hear music in animation, share it with someone who creates stories. And until next time, soundmaker, keep listening.