22D Music has released the soundtrack for Yugly, titled Mochy in France. Annecy credits Matthew Irons, Romain Descampe and Ziggy Franzen, the three members of Belgian band Puggy, as composers. The album also includes King of the Show in several forms.
Directed by Yanis Belaid and Jérémie Degruson, the film follows a dog who dreams of entering a prestigious beauty show and finding a family. It opened the Annecy Presents selection and reaches French cinemas on October 14.
The interesting production question is not whether the score sounds like a Puggy record. It is what the published credit and album reveal, and what can only be assessed by watching the film.
A band credit does not explain the workflow
The three Puggy members are credited as composers. That tells us who is credited with composing the score, but not how cues were divided, developed or approved. One member may originate a theme, another may shape rhythm or production, and some decisions may be shared. The published sources do not specify that process here.
What production needs is a coherent route through the group. Who presents the first demo? Who consolidates director notes? Who owns the session and final deliverables? A band can bring a mature internal language, but post-production still needs one dependable approval chain.
That is different from assuming that three individual credits describe three separate workflows. A working band may already have developed habits around authorship and arrangement, but the sources do not document Puggy’s process on this score.
Animation rewards precision without constant punctuation
Annecy lists Yugly as an 84-minute 3D animated feature. Animation can offer music an unusually precise visual surface. Movement, timing, cuts and performance are constructed closely, creating many possible sync points.
The temptation is to mark every visible action. That can make a scene smaller. I would first decide which layer owns each beat. Foley may carry contact and physical detail. Sound design may carry scale or threat. Music can stay with the character’s desire, confidence or fear.
Precision then becomes selective. A phrase can follow the energy of a run without counting every step. A harmonic turn can prepare an emotional reversal rather than announcing the next gag. If several writers shape the cue, that hierarchy has to survive every handoff.
One song can support several screen functions
The album opens with a ballad version of King of the Show. It also includes an intro and a finale under the same title. The track list alone does not establish where those versions appear or how they were made. It does show that related material exists in several published forms.
That is a useful briefing model. A song connected to a film may need a full vocal master, an instrumental passage, a short edit, a reprise or a transformed ending. Planning those possibilities early is safer than trying to carve every narrative use out of one finished single during the dub.
Song and underscore do not need to quote each other constantly. Harmony, pulse, instrumentation or even a rule of contrast can establish family resemblance. The audience can feel one musical world while each version retains a different job.
For editorial, stems matter here. If the vocal competes with dialogue, the team may need an instrumental or a reduced vocal arrangement. If the melody returns under action, the cue may need room to change tempo and structure without sounding like a damaged song edit.
Puggy already has an animation trail
22D Music’s catalogue lists earlier Puggy soundtracks for Bigfoot Family and Hopper et le Hamster des Ténèbres, the French title used there for Chickenhare and the Hamster of Darkness. Yugly is therefore not the band’s first published feature-animation score.
That history is more useful than the generic idea of a rock or pop band moving into film. Repeated screen work can build familiarity with picture changes, cue length, dialogue space and delivery. It does not allow us to assume exactly how this production was organised, but it gives directors relevant work to examine.
When hiring from outside the conventional composer label, I would listen in two directions. Songs reveal identity, performance and production taste. Previous scores reveal whether that identity can stretch across scenes, silence, transitions and narrative duration.
What the album architecture reveals
The release contains 28 tracks. The titles include Yugly’s Theme, Gerald and Jerry’s Theme, cues tied to places or actions, and a seven-minute piece called The Coyote. Those names map the album. They do not prove exact placement in the film or a particular compositional technique.
What they do show is a wide range of published track lengths. Sub-minute pieces sit beside longer spans, and the song material returns in multiple forms. The album therefore combines brief and extended formats without revealing each cue’s exact screen function.
That second life has its own editorial demands. Short functional cues may need sequencing, naming and clean endings for release. A finale may carry more album weight than it did under dialogue and effects. None of that means the album reproduces the film timeline exactly.
The productive question for a band is not how to stop sounding like itself. It is how to make its shared identity available to story. The published material for Yugly gives three concrete markers: three Puggy members credited as composers, a song expanded into several forms and a score for animated character and motion. It does not reveal how the work was divided or whether every cue was written collectively. The credits identify the credited composers, while the film will let audiences hear the musical result.