Top 10 Cartoon Songs

10. The Uncle Song
South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut (1999)

This unprintable piece of filth, from a film that one Christian website called "sinematic cyanide", can be defended on one ground alone - it's as funny as hell. South Park comedians Terrance and Phillip ("Well, what do you expect, they're Canadian!") celebrate sex-crimes, sung to an arpeggio of bottom-burps. Other musical peaks include "Kyle's Mom's A Big Fat Bitch"; Satan's power-ballad "Up There"; and the barking mad "La Resistance", which crashes South Park head-on into Les Misérables.


9. All Together Now
Yellow Submarine (1968)

Ths Lennon-McCarteney number slips perfectly into the cartoon for which it was recorded. Like the title Yellow Submarine song, it's an innocent-sounding kids' rhyme, but with that mischievously suspect lyric, "Black, white, green, red/Can I take my friend to bed?" It's used when the Fab Four first embark on their voyage to defeat the obnoxious Blue Meanies, sailing through a DayGlo ocean that would have freaked out little Nemo. Pom-pom-pom...

8. Bright Eyes
Watership Down (1978)

Blame Terry Wogan for this one. Art Garfunkel himself disliked Bright Eyes, which he recorded for the rabbit-quest epic. It was up to the film's writer-producer-director, Martin Rosen, to take the record to Wogan's radio show and make it a hit. The song has a low-key presence in the film, drifting in and out of rabbit Fiver's haunting search for his friend Hazel. In the Wallace & Gromit film The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit, bunny-hunting Gromit accidentally tunes into the song, glowers in annoyance and clicks it straight off again.

7. Belle
Beauty And The Beast (1991)

Fairy tale meets operetta in an exquisitely staged opening number from composer Alan Menken and the late songwriter Howard Ashman. The duo adopt a vibrant tone to set up the titular heroine and her provincial world, while Paige O'Hara's strong singing marks a feistier kind of Disney heroine for the 1990s.

6. This Is Halloween
Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)

There aren't many cartoon songs that Marilyn Manson would cover. Danny Elfman's exuberant introduction to Burton land, though, is the exception. Like Elfman's iconic Simpsons theme, it's fun but almost intimidating, making you sit up from the first half-rhyme. Like the film's stop-motion, the song is spindly and unsettling - even before the denizens of Halloween Town creep from the shadows and Jack Skellington sets himself joyously alight.

5. Princess Mononoke
Princess Mononoke (1997)

The English cover of this song, on the dubbed version of Miyazaki's anime epic, is sung prettily by Sasha Lazard. You have to switch to the Japanese soundtrack for the sublime original, sung in a spine-tingling counter-tenor by Yoshikazu Mera. And yes, he's a bloke! The song plays during the hero Ashitaka's encounter with a mighty wolf-goddess, voiced by 'female impersonator' Akihiro Miwa. The music is by Miyazaki's long-term collaborator, Joe Hisaishi.

4. When She Loved Me
Toy Story 2 (1999)

Jessie, a cowgirl doll, sings forlornly of her abandonment by the little girl who outgrew her. Over to Tom Hanks, the voice of cowboy doll Woody. In the feature-length documentary The Pixar Story, Hanks remembers watching the completed Toy Story 2. "Tim Allen (the voice of Buzz Lightyear) and I watched it together, and we had an understanding of everything that goes on... But then when Jessie's song came up, we were just 40 year-old men crying our eyes out over this abandoned doll." Sarah McLachlan provided the vocals.

....really?

3. Belleville Rendez-Vous
Belleville Rendez-Vous (2003)

Disney micked France's Maurice Chevalier to sing the title song for the 1970 'toon The Aristocats, later resurrecting him as a candlestick in Beauty And The Beast. France sent a jazzy Gallic rejoinder in the shape of Belleville Rendez-Vous, with its extraordinary soundtrack by a Canadian, Benoît Charest. The title song is animated as a homage to Disney's vintage cartoon rivals, such as Tex Avery and the Fleischer brothers. There are toony caricatures of jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, sexy dancer Josephine Baker (with trademark bananas) and Fred Astaire, but no-one can beat the beat.

2. The Bare Necessitites
The Jungle Book (1967)

The loosest, breeziest, most fun cartoon song ever, The Bare Necessities is the odd tune out in The Jungle Book. While the other songs were written by Walt's favoured composers, the Sherman Brothers, The Bare Necessities was left over from a treatment by Terry Gilkyson. By one account, Walt wanted to scrap Gilkyson's work, but was begged to keep Baloo's song, sung by Phil Harris and animated by Disney legend Ollie Johnston, who died last year.

1. Heigh-Ho
Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (1937)

Frank Churchill, like his namesake, was a man for bleak times. He composed the Depression anthem Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?, then teamed with writer Larry Morey for the similarly stirring Heigh-Ho. The sight of that dwarf septet marching indomitably around the mountain is timelessly optimistic, although it's very much of a darkening era. After Pearl Harbour, it would be used to sell War Bonds.

Andrew Osmond explains his choices...
Cartoon characters have been singing their pencilled hearts out for nearly 80 years. Disney had an early mega-hit in 1933 with Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?, from its Silly Symphony short, The Three Little Pigs. A year earlier, the Fleischer Studios had turned jazz legend Cab Calloway into a phantom walrus singing Minnie The Moocher.

Disney is the king of cartoon musicals, but for this list we've cast our net wide to take in a mix of styles and tastes, ranging from the sublime to... well, South Park. As a result, we've left out many classics, including what many see as the Disney theme-tune, Pinocchio's When You Wish Upon A Star. Great as the song is, it lacks the beat of Baloo or the heft of Heigh-Ho.

Bambi's Little April Shower is another heinous Disney omission, while we've also passed over the end-title theme of Miyazaki's My Neighbour Totoro, as well as David Bowie's doom-laden warble, When The Wind Blows (from the cheery film about Blighty getting nuked).

Have cartoon songs a future? Many recent CG animations have shunned them as passé, though it's heartening that Pixar's WALL-E had humans being saved by a sentimental showtune. Disney's Enchanted extended the tradition, with its maddeningly catchy That's How You Know, but everything may hinge on its next hand-drawn musical, The Princess And The Frog, due in 2010...

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