Buy it... if you long suffered from Alan Menken's absence from Disney during the late 1990's and early 2000's, for Home on the Range lovably reintroduced a decent shadow of his formula back into the studio's animated offerings.

Avoid it... if you expect to hear the quality that Menken produced in his efforts for the studio during his peak and later in the 2000's, because his songs don't adhere to satisfying narrative rules and the score is a reprise of City Slickers.

Menken

Home on the Range: (Alan Menken) Disney claimed for many years that each of its successive children's productions represented the "last 2-D animation" from their studios, but the format has endured longer than expected. One of these claims involved the 2004 flop Home on the Range, which, at 76 minutes in running time, may have best gone straight to video. Mainstream critics put a lashing on the film, a comedy in which talking animals help save their farm by taking matters into their own control (not exactly in Animal Farm fashion, but rather in a Wild West in which yodeling is used as a brainwashing technique on cows). The vocal talent was top notch as usual, led by Judi Dench, Cuba Gooding Jr., Steve Buscemi, and Roseanne Barr. The formula of Disney's 1990's musicals was clearly the mould for Home on the Range, which seemed like stab at easy profits in regards to its lowly production values, but it was perhaps fitting that songwriter Alan Menken be brought back for one more cookie-cutter 2-D musical for the studio. Enthusiasts of the composer were nevertheless optimistic about the opportunity to hear him in action more than ten years after he had left his most popular moment in the spotlight. Before his resurrection in the late 2000's, if you were to study a film composer's rapid ascent into stardom and equally hasty descent back into obscurity, then Menken would have been your perfect subject. Winning eight Academy Awards (more than Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman, and half a dozen other major composers of the era combined) in the late 1980's and early 1990's, Menken already enjoyed a distinguished place in both the history of Hollywood musicals and film music legend. His vast popularity in 1992 was hard to measure; after The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, Menken was all the rage to kids, teens, and many adults. The entire concept of the animated musical was reborn, leading to a "best picture" Oscar nomination for Beauty and the Beast as a whole. It was not uncommon in those years for Menken to have two or three of his songs from any given film nominated for Oscars as well, and he alone caused the AMPAS reaction of creating separate score and song award categories for several years. But after sustaining interest with Pocahontas 1995, the animation world was changing from flat 2-D animation to modern CGI and 3-D, and the format of the musical was giving way to straight animated features.

After suffering from lackluster support for The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1996 and producing the disastrous Hercules in 1997, Menken's reign over Disney's 2-D musicals came to an end. Other composers began rotating in the duties of this genre, with even scoring legend Jerry Goldsmith making an entry for Mulan in 1998. Menken almost fell off the face of the earth after 1997, with a career stalled in limbo despite the fact he had made enough money to support himself for a lifetime. Granted, his output declined in his later scores, but if you are of the generation of movie-goers who also believes that Menken will always have his place in the animation industry, then you were intrigued, if not simply relieved, to see his return with Home on the Range. And while the project did not resurrect the same level of acclaim for the composer, it did open the door a successful return to Disney that yielded the far more popular Enchanted and Tangled in the following years. Even if you were never a Menken fan in the first place, Home on the Range showcases several offbeat extensions of Marc Shaiman's sound for the City Slickers scores, highlighted by champion Western yodeling rendered in ways you never thought possible. Menken seems to embrace these ridiculous comedy styles with great pleasure. The Western swing that he creates for Home on the Range has all of the upbeat style of innocuous 1940's singing cowboy films starring Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. The pace of the rhythms, the whistling in the background, and quotations taken from famous Western themes of past generations are thrown at the listener in a rapid-fire format consistent with a modern 76-minute film, though. On quick glance, the songs and score seem to be identical in underlying format to Menken's previous efforts, with six songs followed by an equal score selection and song reprises mixed throughout. Still, the difference here is that the characters themselves aren't performing the songs as they always had in the past (can none of those lead actors sing?); only Randy Quaid has the token villain performance as himself in a song, a disappointing departure for Menken's previous methodology. An interesting analysis appeared in the Boston Globe in response to this change: "...while Alan Menken's songs are as catchy as ever, it's been a long, slow descent from the grace and spirit of The Little Mermaid to this. Where a Disney movie once used songs to deepen the characters or dazzle the audience, now they're just stunt interludes for such marquee names as Bonnie Raitt, k.d. lang, and Tim McGraw to move units of the soundtrack CD."

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Indeed, where Home on the Range is most lacking is in the extension of the narrative into the songs. Menken created a hybrid in which a Phil Collins-type of collection of narrators sings about the story rather than having the characters create the magic themselves. The best aspects of Home on the Range, on the other hand, are those which actually do adhere to Menken's winning formula and add to it for comedy purposes. The opening chorus song is a throwback to the prelude of The Little Mermaid, and it is appropriately repised. The heartfelt primary character song has been replaced by "Little Patch of Heaven," the clearly film's best song, performed adorably by k.d. lang (in motherly mode) once in full and as the finale reprise. The villain's song is hysterically conceived as a mad-yodeling piece in which famous tunes with Western affiliations are performed by yodelers (Quaid doesn't actually perform the yodeling), and you can receive this with either head-shaking humor or the horror of contemplating the depths of despair for Menken's career. Tim McGraw's "Wherever the Trail May Lead" is generic and pointless in this context. The only intolerable song is the pop version of "Anytime You Need a Friend," performed by The Beu Sisters and standing out like a very sore thumb. The score itself has all the charm of Menken's previous efforts, with pieces of Beauty and the Beast and The Hunchback of Notre Dame evident and the Western theme from the opening chorus showing hints of "Colors of the Wind" from Pocahontas. Listening to this score is a refreshing taste of innocence on one hand but a ghostly reminder of the better glory days for the genre on the other. Snippets of that old Menken magic rebound in portions of both the score and songs for Home on the Range, but it's difficult to compare it to Menken's others given its distinct genre style. He does spice up the equation with several credited statements of Ennio Morricone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and a few uncredited influences from Elmer Bernstein as well. Menken's own version of the end title song, performed himself vocally and on solo piano, seems to try to borrow an idea from Randy Newman's success at the time. In the end, Home on the Range succeeds best when Menken follows the formulas that brought him his prior triumphs, including the constant adaptation of the song melodies into the score. Unfortunately, Home on the Range may not have been the best of films with which to make a comeback, and it does sound like City Slickers far too frequently, but it represented an important start to Menken's Disney comeback. To hear him starting his engines once again in 2004, however, barely gained his efforts a fourth star. ****   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Alan Menken reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.45 (in 11 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.54 (in 56,205 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.