Buy it... if you typically enjoy James Horner's predictable symphonic children's scores and seek an entry in the better half of his efforts in that genre.

Avoid it... if you are easily annoyed by Horner's tendency to recycle ideas within those scores, regardless of the quality of the thematic adaptations for the songs in each film.

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Once Upon a Forest: (James Horner) Political correctness in the animated genre of children's films hit a shameless high in the mid-1990's, led by such unimpressive films as Ferngully: The Last Rainforest and Once Upon a Forest. The 20th Century Fox and Hanna-Barbera production of Once Upon a Forest followed the dying trend of combining talking animals with traditional animation, a method of packing kids into theatres that started ten years earlier and was giving way to better technologies. The film's false advertising implied that it was from the makers of An American Tail, but anybody expecting a Don Bluth-like film was met with a clunker that offered nothing of any interest to the adults forced to babysit through it. Bluth's successful musical collaborator, James Horner, was indeed involved, however, and the project came at the height of his period of countless compositions for children's films. For Horner, Once Upon a Forest came right on the heals of We're Back: A Dinosaurs Story and hit audiences just before The Pagemaster. While many Horner collectors consider The Land Before Time to be the composer's greatest (and, ironically, one of the earliest) children's film score, Horner reach the height of his output for the genre in 1993, and by 1995, he would finish with such assignments for over a decade. Critics of Horner's collective mass of music for the genre often state that all of these scores are all re-hashes and re-arrangements of each other, and, truth be told, the most logical way to evaluate them is to compare them to one another. That said, Once Upon a Forest is among the better of the lot. Structurally, Once Upon a Forest wasn't intended to be a fully developed musical. Horner was accustomed to writing title/cover songs to accompany his children's scores, and in this case, he was asked to write three songs to fit directly into the narrative for the picture. Even so, the movie suffered because it didn't qualify as enough of a musical compared to Disney's superior offerings, leaving Horner's traditional score as an indecisive piece as well. The personality of the music is one that you've heard before from Horner, with the superior depth of the London Symphony Orchestra sustaining a tone that is impressive even when thematically undeveloped.

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Horner faithfully revolves the score around the "Once Upon a Time with Me" song that opens and closes the album and film. That theme is more uplifting than many of his others in the genre, with a feel-good attitude that is rooted in the powerfully expansive strings that Horner prefers to anchor his dramatic material. It is this positive spark of life that makes Once Upon a Forest a better than usual entry for Horner in the genre. Of the three songs, two of them are quite enjoyable. The Ben Vereen song, "He's Back," is a regrettable big band piece that breaks up the consistency of the rest of the score and songs. However, Florence Warner Jones and Michael Crawford both perform songs that are classically consistent with the rest of Horner's work on the album, and those who are overexposed to Horner's typical score writing in the genre can take refuge in these songs. Jones teams up with a full children's choir for the opening and closing themes (which are very similar performances, if not identical), and their Christmasy feeling establishes several similarities to John Williams' sensibilities for the Home Alone scores and songs. Jones' solos weave in and out of both tracks, and in the crisp clarity of the lower ranges of her outstanding voice, she makes up fully for the lack of dramatic power on the part of the accompanying choir. Michael Crawford only performs on one track ("Please Wake Up"), but it serves as a remarkably lovely combination of sounds from The Phantom of the Opera and The Land Before Time. Crawford's voice is also very low in its range, and his performance in this one song stirs up ideas of even grander, potential collaborations between Crawford and Horner (though such a thing has not occurred again). Although it's a rather subdued and short piece, the song is a goosebump-inducing highlight of the album. Of the score tracks on the album, only "The Journey Begins" has the same complexity and classical influence that was evident in The Land Before Time, and while its depth is greatly welcomed, it's easy to get the impression that the employment of the London Symphony Orchestra may not have been necessary for this recording. The ensemble does offer a dance-like celebration piece reminiscent of the finale of Willow. As in Horner's other scores, the "Flying" cue embodies the best adventuresome spirit in the score, spurring light percussion and bold brass with The Rocketeer at heart. Regardless of Horner's repetitious habits, Once Upon a Forest is an enjoyable (though out of print) album, especially with the inclusion of the film's songs as a highlight. ****   Amazon.com Price Hunt: CD or Download

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For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.13 (in 98 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.25 (in 184,725 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.