With the freshly minted Pixar creeping up behind them and the glory days of their collaboration with composer Alen Menken concluding with a foul note for Hercules in 1997, Disney revisited the formula that gave them success with The Lion King. Putting Menken on ice until a failed attempt to resurrect his success in 2004's Home on the Range, Disney decided to approach a mainstream composer with whom the film could be scored with more serious music than Menken tended to provide. For the songs, Disney solicited the Broadway sound from Matthew Wilder and a touch of The Joy Luck Club sound from Rachel Portman, whose Oscar-won popularity was at its height. Because of Portman's pregnancy early in the process, however, Disney made an odd, but rewarding call to veteran Jerry Goldsmith, who had not scored an animated film since The Secret of N.I.M.H. in the early 1980's. He would provide an ethnically heroic and heart-pounding adventure score, rich with its own themes and creative use of percussion and synthetics. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Mulan from the perspective of a Disney collector is the complete disconnect between the themes of the songs and those of the score. While Goldsmith recorded a suite of music that combined a few of the song themes with his own, the actual underscore is completely unrelated to Wilder's tunes. Those songs are decent at best, generally considered functional if not unnecessary. Unlike the unbelievably bizarre gospel approach that Disney chose to take with the Greek themes in Hercules, Mulan's songs are appropriately dramatic and contain elements of Chinese influence in their instrumentation. Gone is the traditional prologue song, which will be a disappointment for some, and the commercial album therefore starts directly in with one of the film's weaker songs at its opening. The quantity has also shifted, with only five songs appearing in the film and none of them receiving the normal reprise that these musicals typically offer.
No comments:
Post a Comment