Curating cuts from just over two decades of musical work by composer Carl Stalling on (primarily) Looney Tunes cartoons, this compilation provides an informative tour through his creatively playful approach to scoring the animations.  From evocatively conveying characters and their movements through to the instruments, to riffing on standards and popular songs of the time (including the employment of ‘musical puns’, tying in a couple of bars from a song with a title that could be linked to the on-screen action), Stalling’s work is lively, innovative, and downright fun.

The inclusion of uncommon instrumentation (like the incorporation of studio sirens into musical passages, a ‘singing’ kazoo for a chicken, or rhythmically-staggered laughter) makes for even more distinctively outré arrangements, though it always feels earnestly in service of the music, rather than just being there for extra energy or weirdness. 
A few moments of background studio chatter add some sense of the recording atmosphere for the musicians and conductor,

and while some of the cues meant to evoke world regions (e.g., “Chopsticks” for China) haven’t aged as well as the rest of the music, the large majority of the scores hold up fantastically, even removed from the context of their cartoons.