Film: Scott Pilgrim vs The World
Director: Edgar Wright
Year of production: 2010
Origin: United States
Genre: Comedy

Scott Pilgrim vs The World is a crazy concept of movie. It is the story of a 22 year old bass player and his love troubles. He meets “the girl”, falls in love with her, and discovers he need to kill her seven evil exes if he wants to be with her. At the beginning, everything appear near to normal. The only curious detail is the description made of each character appearing in black boxes in the screen. But as the movie and the story goes on, more and more strange details appear, such as level ups, pee bar, mac error sounds… The movie is based on Bryan O’Malley’s comics, called “Scott Pilgrim”.

The environment created around the movie makes everyone laugh. It ends up being a mix of manga style combats, with words written for the sounds of the hits, real life story and computer role playing game environment, with bonuses, weapons, characters exploding into coins when they are beaten, characters fighting as super heroes…
For the sound environment, Edgar Wright tried to recreate the environment of the comics. This was a challenge as the environment is a mix of manga and super hero comics. In order to recreate this, Wright shot the movie and afterwards added some visual effects recreating the manga style combat.
He also tried to recreate the environment the characters lived in. As the movie takes place in nowadays world, he decided to use sounds everybody was used to hear in everyday life. The particularity of his approach is that he applied those sounds to actions from the characters. There is, for example, Windows® starting sound when someone wakes up, or Mac® error sound when something goes wrong. Some people think that it makes the film interesting only for a certain niche of audience, but I felt those sounds could be perceived only as strange sounds without taking out the interest of the movie. It is true, not having the possibility to spot the subtle references to Sonic the HodgePodge ore to computer sounds or games would take out a whole layer of fun in the movie.
For the sound in itself, it must have been a blessing for the sound designer to do it, and a really funny time. Spending hours searching for the sound that would make people laugh, that people would recognise must have been particularly enjoyable. All the environment of the movie is highly sound friendly. Moreover, the sound work that have been done brings the movie to a whole new level of interest, which makes people need to come back to see it again and again to be sure they have spotted everything. Maybe the third time, I will be able to spot new sound ideas...

To conclude, it is the kind of movie that one find awesomely good, without knowing why…