Animation gives a composer something live-action rarely does: room. When a film has little dialogue and few real-world sounds, the music is not decoration laid over the story — it is one of the instruments telling it.
That changes how you write. The reflex people expect from animation is “Mickey Mousing” — catching every footstep and pratfall with a matching musical gesture. It has its place, but it is exhausting at length, and it keeps the music on the surface. On the shorts I scored with Amos Sussigan and Nikitha Mannam — Broken Wing, a wordless story of loss and rebirth, and Swan Cake, a patisserie chef who dreams of dancing — I worked the other way: building a soundscape around each character rather than each action, letting the score carry the emotional narrative while the images carried the events.
The most interesting difference is one of order. In live-action you usually write to a locked picture. In animation the picture is often still forming, and the music can shape it. The heart of Swan Cake is a dreamlike dance sequence, and we composed it alongside the animatics: I worked in the room next door while the timings were still fluid, and between us we fixed the tempo, the melody, and the climaxes together. The music wasn’t fitted to the scene afterwards; the scene and the music were built at once. That only works if everyone stays flexible — we dropped music for silence in places, right up to the final hour.
Scoring my first feature, an animated Flatland, taught me the same lesson under harder conditions: the film wasn’t finished, so I pre-composed the music for key sequences and let it guide the edit. I set a pipe organ against the orchestra to give the two-dimensional world its quasi-religious order, and let comedy run against horror where the story turned dark.
None of this is a lesser craft than scoring a prestige drama. It is simply one where the music is asked to do more of the storytelling, and is given more say in return. When the drawing and the score are made together, the seam disappears — and the audience, rightly, never thinks about how it was done.