The 2024 Trailaurality Awards

It’s been an eventful year for film trailers, and 2023 had much to offer on the order of trailer music that’s original, incisive, and thought-provoking. Here are a few trailers and overall campaigns that we feel are particularly noteworthy.

Most Unique Score: Poor Things

For Poor Things, director Yorgos Lanthimos opted very specifically for the unconventional when it came time to consider the soundtrack. With this goal in mind, he recruited English musician Jerskin Fendrix (the stage name for Joscelin Dent-Pooley) to compose what would be his first outing for film. His 2020 album “Winterreise” was what compelled Lanthimos to ask Fendrix to collaborate. The result is undeniably unique. According to Fendrix, 95% of the film score was conjured entirely from the film’s script and concept art. In the trailer, we hear sustained tones in the high vocals coupled with a seemingly random assortment of tones in arpeggiated synthesizers, with a few chromatic tones thrown in; the overall feeling is somewhat manic, reflecting the protagonist Bella’s interior world. Later on, we hear organ and strings dominate the proceedings. Throughout, the bespoke score offers a rich complement to the unique visuals of the trailer, while also offering an insight into the internal monologue of its protagonist. It never feels different for its own sake, but rather, for the sake of serving the film.

Best Music Biopic or Music Documentary: ENNIO

Cinema’s fascination with the lives of musicians continues this year. In 2023 alone our blog looked at trailers for films about Joseph Boulogne, Bob Marley, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Leonard Bernstein, Syd Barrett and Ennio Morricone. Among this embarrassment of riches, we’ve chosen to award this year’s Best Music Biopic or Music Documentary to ENNIO. Not only does its trailer treat us to glimpses of many iconic scenes that this master composer scored during his career, it also manages to highlight the breadth of Morricone’s compositional skill. Moreover it features multiple clever transitions between his compositions, which are placed in this trailer so that the emotion of each musical cue aligns not only with the film clips but also with the passion and message of the all-star interviewees—from John Williams to Bruce Springsteen--who help tell the story of this man’s life and art.

Best Musical: The Color Purple

There are films that are musicals - Frozen for example. There are films that are musicals that end up on Broadway – The Lion King, for example. This year we want to give a shout out to a film that began as a book, became a film, then was adapted into a Broadway musical, and ended up a musical film. Throw in a production team with skill sets as diverse as Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones and Steven Spielberg, and you get The Color Purple (as of this writing, still in theatres, go check it out!). Now after the world witnessed Hamilton, the bar has been set stratospherically high for any subsequent Broadway musical period drama about African American stories. But based on The Color Purple’s powerfully effective second Official Trailer, it is clear this film will deliver. The use of synch points, integration of hits from the Broadway musical, and cleverly trailerized blues riffs all make this a powerhouse of a trailer.

Spoiler-Free Award: The Boy and the Heron

One thing you can never blame acclaimed Japanese animation director Hayao Miyazaki for is giving too much away. For The Boy and the Heron (or How Do You Live?, as it’s titled in Japan), we only receive a minute-long teaser and scant, if any, details regarding the plot. Sure enough, there’s a boy and a heron involved—and some magical scenarios in the midst of WWII-era Japan. But it's longtime collaborator Joe Hisaishi’s score that takes the spotlight here to help convey through melody what we’re lacking in dialogue. Clearly, the film visually plays on elements of the fantastical and spiritual, and Hisaishi’s score, replete with wordless choir, supports this well. In a culture where audiences have come to expect the trailer to give away much of the plot—even many key moments—it can be a breath of fresh air to willfully withhold such things for the theatrical experience. In such a situation, the music arguably only becomes more important.

Best Musical Tie-In: The Marvels and Napoleon

It seemed fitting to have a tie for the Best Musical Tie-In this year. When trailers feature a recognizable song—either the original or a reimagined cover version—this has the potential to instantly capture the audioviewer’s attention. The art of this is in the creative linkages that the trailer creators can conjure between the lyrics, mood, and context of the song and the content of the trailer’s visual narrative. Two of the trailers we reviewed this year used this approach expertly. Our first winner is the Teaser Trailer for The Marvels_, _which makes subtle yet effective use of an edited version of Beastie Boys’ 1998 hit song “Intergalactic.” Here, a song whose lyric hook is the phrase “intergalactic planetary” is used as the sonic backdrop for previewing a film in which three heroes’ superpowers become mysteriously interconnected as they travel through space. The heroes are trading places, instantaneously teleporting from one dimension to another as we hear the repeated lyric “another dimension, another dimension.”

Our second winner this year for Best Musical Tie-In is Napoleon’s Official Trailer. This trailer integrated a slowcore cover version of Radiohead’s 2000 song “The National Anthem.” The lyrically minimalist Radiohead original has a total of 13 words. The cover in this trailer uses these lyrics only: “Everyone around here. Everyone is so near. Everyone is holding on.” But oh my goodness does it ever make each of those words count. In our blog, we gave special mention to the trailer’s exceptional treatment of the phrase “Everyone is holding on.” Both of these trailers managed to tie-in their song choices in such a way that the songs’ lyrics and emotion are impeccably aligned with the story told on-screen—the music reinforcing and enhancing the visuals without stealing any of the spotlight.

Best Overall Campaign: Barbie and Oppenheimer

Yes, we’ve opted for a double feature in this category. The “Barbenheimer” phenomenon was so unique last summer, we can’t think of another instance of such organic and synergistic marketing. Warner Bros. President of global marketing Josh Goldstine commented to Variety that Barbie’s first teaser trailer, which was an explicit sendup of 2001: A Space Odyssey, was part of an effort to make something “thought-provoking”. As it turns out, appealing directly to an audience—almost certainly skewing older—that would appreciate such a parody was precisely the right signal to provide for a take on Barbie that proved to be unafraid to skewer itself. There’s no doubt that the film’s director, Greta Gerwig, would also hail such a direction, but that trailer underlined the point. Trailers that followed would then feature music such as Dua Lipa’s exclusive single associated with the film, “Dance the Night”—this one-two approach of eliciting intrigue and then delivering a compelling song proved to be a hit, with views for the first teaser at 15 million, the second teaser at 24 million, and the official trailer at 80 million on the main Warner Bros. Pictures YouTube page as of this writing.

If Barbie is the key attraction for Barbie and Greta Gerwig and Dua Lipa realized the brand in a way that resonates with today’s mass popular audience, Oppenheimer is more the product of Christopher Nolan, perhaps today’s most solid example of the idea of the auteur in cinema. When you’re told a film is being directed by Nolan, there’s a clear aesthetic and style that comes to mind, and Oppenheimer’s trailer delivers. Ethereal, gripping synths accompany a recurring scene of a nuclear explosion, with harmonic twists providing satisfying emotional release. The campaign really did provide a counterpoint to Barbie’s trailer—where Gerwig is humorous, tongue-in-cheek, and colourful to an extreme, Nolan’s world for Oppenheimer is understandably staid, dour, and quite simply serious. It’s not only the perfect complement to a summer of Barbie, but a unique series of trailers in its own right, with a style undeniably its own.

— Curtis Perry and Jack Hui Litster