Postscoring in the Predawn of Talkie

Abstract

The use of postscoring in the sound recording has been considered as a characteristic of Japanese animation. For the reason, various discussions have developed about postscoring.The following was mainly assumed as three premises. (1) The opposite of postscoring is prescoring, (2) postscoring is commonly used in Japanese animation, and (3) postscoring refers only to the recording of speech, while the recording of music and sound effect is not included.These premises are, however, only historically constructed and hence, do not work in general. In this essay, I investigate this issue by referring to the relevant discourses of the movie magazines of the 1930s when sound was used for animation. The term, postscoring, was born in the live-action film industry, originally as opposite to synchronous recording (1). Also, as postscoring was likely to be critically discussed in the discourse of animators such as Yasuji Murata, Takao Nakano, KenzoMasaoka, it was not used in general (2). Finally, sound recording including postscoring at that time was made mainly for music, subsequently with dialog and sound effect added. In this sense, postscoring did not necessarily refer to the recording of speech (3).