A still from the opening title sequence for the Oscar-nominated film Juno. (Shadowplay Studio/Twentieth Century Fox)

What sets the movie Juno apart from the other four contenders for this year’s Best Picture Oscar? Well, aside from the fact that it’s a comedy and has a much-ballyhooed Canadian connection (Best Actress nominee Ellen Page, Best Director nominee Jason Reitman), it’s also the only one with an opening title sequence.

Atonement, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood all open “cold” — offering us nothing more than the film’s title before plunging straight into the story. They’re part of a growing trend that has seen more and more filmmakers spurn the traditional list of credits that once adorned the start of every movie. If you’re wondering who that familiar-looking actor is, or who’s responsible for that gorgeous cinematography, you’ll just have to wait until the final reel. Cynics might suspect it’s a ploy to keep audiences seated during the seemingly interminable credit roll that now ends most films. What it has succeeded in doing is to make those increasingly rare opening titles seem all the more special.

Take Juno’s opening: it’s a lo-fi animation sequence in which the teen of the title strolls pensively through her neighbourhood, chug-a-lugging a jug of SunnyD in preparation for a pregnancy test. With cut-out Xerox images of Ellen Page, hand-drawn typography and a whimsical tune by kids’ balladeer Barry Louis Polisar on the soundtrack, it immediately tells us this is going to be a sweet, funny-sad film with an indie spirit. And, of course, it is.

Juno’s is one of a handful of strikingly effective title sequences among this year’s Oscar nominees. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street signals its gleefully gruesome theme with a thick glob of blood, which makes a sinuous journey from Sweeney’s barber’s chair to the River Thames in London as the credits unfold. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, about a high-living magazine editor struck down by a rare form of paralysis, scribbles its opening titles on a grim series of X-rays as Charles Trenet’s lushly romantic La Mer washes over the soundtrack.

All three are excellent examples of what opening title sequences can do: establish a film’s tone, put the audience in the right mood and provide clues to the story that’s about to be told. The great ones are often works of art in themselves. Just ask Remco Vlaanderen, editor of Forget the Film, Watch the Titles, a website dedicated exclusively to celebrating outstanding movie credits.

Dripping blood is a motif during the title sequence of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. (Dreamworks Pictures)

“I love to see a good title sequence in the cinema,” says Vlaanderen, a visual artist, “and I’m quite sure the audience does, too.” His site, part of a Netherlands-based online network called SubmarineChannel, is building an archive of recent and classic sequences. There you can find the marvelously scruffy titles for Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or the intricate end credits for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. While Vlaanderen decries the new tendency to scrap opening titles, the art form has hardly become moribund. “There’s a lot of interesting stuff happening in the field of film title design,” he notes. “There are young designers and small design studios out there doing really amazing stuff.”

It was one of those small studios, Shadowplay, that created the Juno sequence. The six-year-old outfit, based in Los Angeles, does a variety of design work; one of its first forays into film titles was the clever cigarette-package opening for Reitman’s 2005 satire Thank You For Smoking. It’s not surprising, then, that Reitman would turn to Shadowplay again.

“Jason invited us into the [Juno] project very early on, before the film was shot,” says Shadowplay co-founder Gareth Smith, who co-designed Juno’s titles with artist Jenny Lee. “I had wanted for a long time to do an animated short created with hand-tinted Xerox cut-outs. When I read the script for Juno, I realized that it was the perfect opportunity to work in that style.” For inspiration, Smith says he studied vintage 1970s punk-rock posters (a reflection of the heroine’s retro musical tastes) as well as current street art: “There’s a lot of great, black-and-white, graphic-looking posters around Los Angeles, on the sides of buildings and on streetlight electrical switch boxes.”

Page was photographed walking on a treadmill and the images were then photocopied to get that mass-produced poster look. After that, they were hand-coloured and cut out with scissors. “We ended up doing more than 900 cut-outs,” says Smith, who recruited his parents and several friends to help with the task. The images were then scanned into a computer and compositing software was used to layer them into the background illustrations drawn by Lee. (Shadowplay has posted a step-by-step photo album of the process.) The resulting homely, handmade look captures perfectly the innocent world that Juno is about to leave as she confronts the reality of having a baby — as well as her DIY attitude, which helps her deal with it pragmatically.

The sequence is built into the film’s storyline, Page walking seamlessly from the live opening scene into the animated section and back out again when the credits are done. Few movies offer the opportunity for that organic approach. “Title sequences tend to be an afterthought for most films,” says Smith. “We prefer to develop ideas with directors early on in the filmmaking process, which we think results in a more beautiful, well-considered title sequence that enhances the storytelling of the film.”

Citizen Kane's opening credits consisted merely of actor/director Orson Welles' name and the film's title. (Keystone/Getty Images)

Opening titles have evolved slowly in the history of motion pictures. Up until the postwar era, almost all films began with static title cards, which would occasionally be decorated with cartoons or other flourishes. Orson Welles, always the innovator, was one of the few to play with the form, dispensing with all but his name and the title at the start of Citizen Kane and speaking the end credits for The Magnificent Ambersons.

Then along came designer Saul Bass, who literally set things in motion. His animated work for the films of Hollywood masters Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger showed that opening titles could make a powerful impression. Among his most famous sequences: Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, as well as Hitchcock’s Vertigo, North By Northwest and Psycho. “His influence is huge,” says Vlaanderen, “and even today he continues to inspire motion graphic designers.”

Animated sequences flourished in the 1960s, but by the end of the decade, titles superimposed over live opening scenes had become the norm. In the 1970s, George Lucas, a childhood fan of the afternoon movie serial, revived its old-school crawling titles for Star Wars — at the same time eschewing credits in favour of narrative text. But it took prolific designer Kyle Cooper, who burst on the scene in the 1990s, to once again prove the impact of a well-wrought title sequence. His supremely creepy opening for David Fincher’s Se7en is considered a masterpiece in the field.

Today, designers like Juno’s Smith and Lee, Sweeney Todd’s Richard Morrison, and Lemony Snicket’s Jamie Caliri are adding to and enriching the title sequence. Even if, in some cases, their brilliant handiwork is relegated to the end of the picture.

Smith isn’t too concerned about the cold-opening trend. “I actually don’t think every movie would benefit from an opening title sequence,” he says.

In the past, titles have often been merely functional, just a means of advertising the talent involved in the production. “Good titles need to overcome that, and set the tone and feeling of the film that follows,” says Smith. “The title sequence should serve as a hook to immediately get the audience in the right frame of mind to best enjoy the film.”

A scene from Psycho (1960). (Archive Photos/Getty)

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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