Gilbert and Sullivan is about as cartoony you can get- though Offenbach comes very close. I think animation probably lends itself to music that has distinctive rhythms and an interesting orchestration. The words seem to me to be less important than what is happening musically. Though of course the words tell the story. When the Disney people were animating “Fantasia”, the better animators trawled the score to identify the incidental tunes that lay under the main melody. There is a sequence in the Chinese dance in the Nutcracker where Art Babbitt has talked about “those nasty little notes underneath”. But Babbitt uses those “nasty little notes”! It is precisely this fact that makes the sequence stick out as something remarkable. Culhane references this in his book on Fantasia. It is worth looking at the dance in detail because the perspective goes all over the place and it still seems logical. In the same way, the instruments used to orchestrate a particular sequence will dictate a particular image.
Eric Goldberg animates on the beat and repeats a rhythm with the Carnival of the animals in FANTASIA 200o and Andreas Deja does it too in the same film with the barrel organ in Rhapsody in Blue. But I think Babbitt’s mushrooms still have the edge precisely because they take note of the intricacies of the orchestration and the repeated visuals (a visual ostinato) are not necessarily based on something obvious…
You can find a link to it here: (the interesting points are at.46 and the bow at the end)
and here is the flamingo scene by Goldberg:
I was playing around with the Three Little Maids from School piece at the beginning of the MIKADO.
This is the text: “Three little maids from school are we,Pert as a schoolgirl well can be,Filled to the brim with girlish glee–Three little maids from school.” David Watson has done a very clever arrangement.
I will post more on this shortly because it is an excellent example of a tune that does a great deal. The three voices (Yum yum, Pitti Sing and Peep Bo) are quite distinctive and the whole thing gallops along at quite a pace. Here are some sketches mostly of Japanese hair-styles…
Below is a page from the notebook on Trial by Jury the storyboards for which move slowly forwards…
Here in order of development: the first thoughts:
and a more restrained version (music arranged by David Watson, Kanon)
animate-tim.com 
love the idea of cartoon opera but channel 4 got there first and dird a series of (n ot very good) animated operas for children. They were reduced to aboput 30 mins. I remember one of the Rhinegold which looked like a second-rate ciopy of Spiderman, or the second patrt of the spiderman comic, the might Thor.There was a puppet version of the Baber of seville but most of that was spent trying to mocve scenery around. Is animation not always linked to children? If you could do animated opera as an adult filom then that wouldbe genuinely interesting. Disney managed animated musicals after all- the Lion king , beauty and the beast and little mermaid. even tarzan. Go for it, buddy.
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