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Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron on DVD
• Songs featurette • Dolby Digital 5.1 More DVD info... |
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Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron on DVD
• Songs featurette • Dolby Digital 5.1 More DVD info... |
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Filmtracks Editorial Review:
The choice of Adams as the pop artist for Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, however, is not the reason why the music for the film strikes all the wrong notes. In these animated pictures with pop music, the success of both the music and the film depend upon the weight of one over the other. In films such as The Lion King and Tarzan, for instance, the needs of the film dictated the structure and instrumentation of the songs. When choosing the vocal inflections, the background accoustics, and intro and ending structures of the songs, the film's storyboard was the center of attention in that creative process. The best comparison for this film is Tarzan, for which Phil Collins had to speak for the characters through his own voice. In that score, Collins and Zimmer associate Mark Mancina created songs that fit the context of each scene, and later rearranged those songs to fit the needs of the album release. For Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, it's easy to get the impression that the exact opposite happened. In other words, the Bryan Adams songs sound as though they were written as fully intact songs, and then the film was brought in to supplement them. Thus, the needs of the songs outweighed the needs of the film, and that causes the film score listener to wonder if the album wasn't produced for the animation process even began. The songs, for the most part, are decent, typical entries for Bryan Adams... no smash hits, and only one driving guitar in "Get Off My Back" that breaks the combined attitude of the other songs. Overall, they're a wash, a delight most certainly for Bryan Adams fangirls, and a likely bore to everyone else. The Adams songs' overcommercialization is a major contribution to the tedious nature of the overal musical package for Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, but Hans Zimmer's contribution is flawed as well. Zimmer did have a hand in the instrumentation of some of the songs (and it should be noted that beginning with the seventh track on the album, the songs do follow a more acceptable musical norm), though any hint of the enthusiasm or epic size that was evident in The Lion King or The Prince of Egypt is completely missing here. Even his own score tracks have become so "popified" that the best of them, "The Long Road Back," sounds like the highly rhythmic battle hymns in Toys. Perhaps the most confusing part of the score for Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron is how a predominantly Western-themed film ended up with faux-Gladiator electronic music. In the aforementioned cue, Zimmer inserts about a minute of a fiddle, and aside from some rather somber accompaniment from Gavin Greenaway's orchestra, this is the only orchestral instrumentation to appear in the whole project. If you're going to a film to watch horses (animated or otherwise) gallop across a grand view of the Western American Rockies, then why does the music sound like it was pulled from The Peacemaker? In sum, Zimmer's attempts to produce a Western score dependant upon his electronics, even with small tidbits of rhythm stereotypical to the genre thrown in once in a while, are a failure. There are two to three minute score sequences that are very enjoyable, yes, but they don't fit with the songs and they certainly don't fit with the genre. You can't help but view this project as a potential commercial juggernaut at the record stores. But for the same reasons of conflicting interests and inappropriate song structure, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron is not going to capture the same kind of rush of popularity from film score fans and parents of children that The Lion King or Tarzan attracted. It's a major diappointment for Zimmer fans to be sure, if only because the film and its score showed such promise when the film rousingly used Jerry Goldsmith's Rudy theme in its early trailers. The only connections between Goldsmith and Zimmer's work here is a sequence of the theme from The Russia House interestingly translated into Zimmer's broad electronic cellos in the latter half of the thirteenth track, and the adoption of Goldsmith's electronic swishing sound from the early 1990's (famous in The Shadow) as means of now replacing the cymbals during transitional or accented notes for Zimmer. Nearly everything about Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron is saturated by the commercialization of Bryan Adams, with his voice attached to 11 of the 15 tracks, and too many of those songs are disassociated from the film to be affective with Zimmer's contribution. Die hard Zimmer fans will find cues of merit in the 20 minutes of score for Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron presented on the album, including the opening titles ("Homeland"), even though they sound like the bastard child of the themes from The Rock and Toys. But there's nothing new enough here to gain the interest of film music fans. All you have to do is take a look at the supposedly sexy picture of Bryan Adams in the insert to immediately understand why people who listen to Franz Waxman and Erich Korngold consider music like Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron to be a waste of time. **
Note: Early promotional listings had a substantially rearranged track order.
Insert includes lyrics for all of the songs, which allows you to realize just how simplistic they are. Extensive credits also provided, along with a solemn picture of a confused-looking "BA." No extra information about the film or score provided. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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