The 2022 Trailaurality Awards

Another year has passed, and with it, well over four dozen trailers written up at Trailaurality as part of our weekly review. Film trailers continue to be a fascinating showcase for audiovisual editing techniques that, partly as a result of the genre’s short form and advertorial purpose, strive for memorability and notability. This can be achieved in a variety of ways: some offer remarkable instrumentation; some involve a particularly striking edit. In addition to library and original music, trailers are often the domain of some truly unique cover songs and rearrangements. This latter trend is in particular a hallmark of more recent trailers, with a choral arrangement of Radiohead’s “Creep” for The Social Network (2010) often referred to as a watershed moment. Here are a few trailers released in 2021 that we think are particularly worth a second listen, as this small format continues to advance the craft of editing in measurable ways.

Best Musical Tie-In: King Richard

The trailer for King Richard—the story of Serena and Venus Williams’ father—was also the debut for Beyoncé’s latest single, “Be Alive”. As such, the song and narrative both lend emotional weight to each other. (Beyoncé is no stranger to expanding on the power of visuals beyond the music video, either, having released several visual albums). While it’s not enough to call it a trend, this kind of cross-promotional practice is clearly successful and something to look out for going forward.

Best Sonic Design: Everything Everywhere All at Once

Music and sound can be an effective way to render the ineffable as something visceral; the otherworldly sounds of Everything Everywhere All at Once communicates the notion of an otherwise average Chinese American woman, Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), who just so happens to have access to the multiverse, which she stumbles through. The sounds are truly instrumental in communicating the multiverse concept, whether it’s the wobbling, warped synth at 0:32, or Wang’s multi-pitched scream in a way that seems to self-organize by pitch at 0:49, or the cue at 1:13 of glass, presaging the action a moment later. While later we also hear David Bowie’s “Time”, it’s arguably the sound design that ultimately immerses the audioviewer in the concept and does the heavy lifting of making that initial appeal in the first minute.

Best Musical Biopic: Tina

The musical biopic continued to be quite popular in 2021, continuing a trend in recent years; while there were many to choose from, Tina stands out for the way this trailer plays with the fourth wall and with its own musical diegesis. One of her signature songs, “Proud Mary”, is used, but not in a straightforward manner: the arrangement of the song builds, with a regular and an orchestral version used to help signify and bridge the gap between Turner’s life on and off-stage. Moreover, the trailer’s edit helps us understand Turner’s perspective, pairing her voice with the overwhelming spectacle of a stadium audience. Good trailers for musical biopics do far more than simply play the hits, and Tina takes the standard to another level.

Best Musical: West Side Story

While there were certainly intriguing competitors in Dear Evan Hansen and Schmigadoon!, nostalgia is a powerful drug when wielded well. Spielberg is a deft hand at this, leaning into our memories of the iconic melody for “Somewhere” and the iconic tri-tone whistle signalling the rival gangs are near. Despite rave reviews, it ultimately bombed at the box office (with the pandemic arguably having at least something to do with it). Nevertheless, there’s no denying the trailer showed ample promise in reimagining the Sharks and the Jets all over again, in ways that maintain their separate identities while eschewing the stereotypes and expertly pulling on our musical memories. It’s an exercise in restraint, where less can really be more.

These are just a few of the trailers that we found to be particular standouts over the past year. Sometimes this year’s trailers have highlighted original music (as in King Richard), and sometimes they dig into a cultural consciousness (as in West Side Story). Sometimes they lean on the power of an ever-evolving musical arrangement to guide a narrative (as in Tina); sometimes a trailer barely relies on pitched music but rather on the potency of memorable sonic design (as in Everything Everywhere All at Once). What marked the trailers of 2021 most of all—for many of the most interesting ones, anyway—is an overall shift away from the “Inception sound” and well-worn epic music tropes, and more towards a variety of techniques that acknowledge and even aid the particular aesthetics and narrative of the particular trailer. In a world—reference intended—that competes for and seeks after the audioviewer’s attention more than ever, audiovisual edits that—in one way or another—are truly bespoke to the particular film and trailer are those that succeed.

— Curtis Perry