In the 1970s, Mark Mothersbaugh helped form the band Devo with the idea that the group would satirize and comment upon the “de-evolution” of mankind in general and American society in particular. Mothersbaugh had been a student at Kent State during the National Guard killings there, and could clearly see that people were moving in the wrong direction in terms of their herd mentality and regression rather than advancement when it came to sophisticated scientific and cultural ideas.
“Devo was always about humans being the one species out of touch with nature and the planet,” Mothersbaugh told IndieWire. It probably comes as no surprise, therefore, that when Mothersbaugh got the offer to compose the score for Pixar‘s “Hoppers,” he jumped at the chance. “I think you get a good representation of that idea without being shouted at,” he said of the film‘s case for ecological balance couched in a hilarious and exciting action tale about animals (and one human posing as an animal) trying to protect their habitat from an unscrupulous developer.
Mothersbaugh has hundreds of hours of family entertainment on his resume as the composer not only of animated feature films like the “Hotel Transylvania” franchise and several “Lego” movies, but TV series including “Pee Wee’s Playhouse” and “Rugrats.” For all his experience in the world of animation, however, he had never worked with Pixar on a feature. “I feel really lucky that they picked me,” Mothersbaugh said, noting that Pixar is a company unlike any other in film.
“All the companies have their own personalities, but Pixar is unique,” Mothersbaugh said. “They’re very communicative. There are studios where you’ll walk down the hallway with a director and go past people, and they won’t acknowledge you — and the director will say, ‘Yeah, we’re having a meeting tomorrow,’ but he doesn’t even look up and say hi. Pixar is very friendly and feels like a family.”
Although Mothersbaugh and “Hoppers” director Daniel Chong had crossed paths before working on Pixar shorts, this was their first feature together, which meant they had to find a common musical language. “That’s the fun part,” Mothersbaugh said of learning to communicate with a new director. “The first time you work with a director, they’ll say, ‘I want this to be dark,’ or ‘I want this to be sad,’ and you have to guess what they mean by those words. You start giving them sketches and listen to their responses, and it always makes the second film easier because when they’re saying things like ‘make it romantic,’ or ‘make it scary,’ you know what those things mean.”
Mothersbaugh worked on the “Hoppers” score off and on for six months while touring with Devo, taking advantage of downtime between concerts. “My feeling about touring is that I love the two hours while you’re on stage, and everything else sucks,” Mothersbaugh said. “You’re just checking into your hotel or waiting to get on a plane, or you’re on a bus. But if I take my laptop and a keyboard with me and write in the room, the day goes by really fast.” Mothersbaugh says that in general composers have more time to write their scores now — but that isn’t necessarily a good thing.
“30 or 35 years ago, you’d get brought on, and they’d show you a cut of the film and say, ‘We’ve got to mix this in two months,’” Mothersbaugh said. “You’d write, you’d have a few meetings, you’d go and record the music, and they’d put it in the film. During COVID, when people weren’t coming into the studio, all of a sudden timelines got to be really long. It got to be six months, or even eight or nine on some films.” On those lengthy projects, Mothersbaugh said there was a lot more back and forth with the studio, and not always to the music’s benefit. “Sometimes it makes the films better, but sometimes you come full circle, and they go right back to the music you wrote in the beginning, and that’s what you end up putting in the film.”
It’s a far cry from Mothersbaugh’s days scoring “Pee Wee’s Playhouse,” when he would get a tape of an episode on Monday, write the music on Tuesday, record it on Wednesday, and send it to the producers on Thursday — just in time for them to put the music into the episode on Friday and then air it Saturday morning. “That was really exciting,” Mothersbaugh said of the accelerated process, which was much faster than what he was used to with Devo, spending several months out of the year writing and recording one album. “That’s what got me hooked on composing.”
When he came on board “Hoppers,” Mothersbaugh’s first task was to write themes for a couple of the main characters that he could weave into the rest of the film later on; the idea was to find something cohesive and unifying, since the temp score the director and editor had been working with worked one scene at a time but didn’t really go together. “The temp comes from a dozen different movies, so it doesn’t really hold together,” Mothersbaugh said. “Part of my job was convincing Daniel that it was a good idea to have a recurring theme throughout the film.”
Mothersbaugh’s score in “Hoppers” not only holds the movie together but brings each of the different story strands to its fullest emotional potential — this is a film with action, humor, and poignancy in equal measures, and Mothersbaugh deftly balances all of the tones in a way that gives his score incredible variety and depth. The opportunity to say so much with the music is one reason Mothersbaugh enjoys scoring animation, even though he’s equally adept at adult live-action fare like the films he scored for Wes Anderson and Miguel Arteta.
“With animation, you’re responsible for a lot more than if you’re writing music for some beautiful live action footage,” Mothersbaugh said. “If you’re looking at a tree in live action, every single leaf in that tree has some sort of slight movement to it, and things are growing, and there are little insects all over the place, even if you can’t see them. And the grass is growing and it’s moving and there are all these things that you don’t have in animation, no matter how good the animation is.” According to Mothersbaugh, the human touch often comes in through the music.
“An orchestra is really important,” Mothersbaugh said. “You have 90 or a hundred people sitting there, and they’re all playing, maybe they just got off the tube in London, and they came in, and they’re unwrapping things, they’re sitting on the floor. So every time that you have a session, it’s slightly different no matter what. People’s chairs are adjusted differently; they’re relating to the microphone differently. They’re breathing, and the notes are different, and there’s blood going through their body, and all of that brings life to animation.”
Although “Hoppers” is filled with lively, dramatic music, for Mothersbaugh one of the best examples of what he likes to do comes in a gentle scene between heroine Mabel and her grandmother. “They’re sitting on that mound looking at the glade, and it’s quiet. You hear sounds and things, and then the music comes in, and it helps bring all of that stuff to life to have those real humans playing it. I really like having that big a part in a film. It’s much more labor-intensive as a composer — but it has a nice payoff.”
“Hoppers” is in theaters now.
