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The beginning of the aughts had Hisaishi in a very different place from where he was at the start of the 1990s. Back then he was still toggling between orchestral and electronic works. But by this point he had generally moved beyond the sound of his early days - if he revisited it at all, it was often as instrumental rearrangements of select tracks from his 1980s and 1990s studio albums. The occasional shoestring budgets and cheap samples of the 1990s were largely over. He could secure an orchestra on most films and often did, which was great news for those who loved the highlights of his Miyazaki scores but maybe a slight disappointment for those who had been drawn to the composer’s music thanks to the more offbeat approaches taken on A Scene at the Sea and Sonatine.
Even with a key partnership dissolving, the decade transformed Hisaishi from a star in Japan into a veritable institution there and established a major profile for him overseas, something that the rise of mass internet usage, digital music distribution, file sharing, and social media undoubtedly helped facilitate. In part of an effort to be more than just, as the South China Morning Post put it, “an adjunct to the movies of Miyazaki and Kitano,” Hisaishi would start taking on projects outside of Japan - in China (The Sun Also Rises), Hong Kong (A Chinese Tall Story and The Postmodern Life of My Aunt), Korea (Welcome to Dongmakgol and The Legend), and France (Tom Thumb and Sunny and the Elephant). The international success of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, which won America’s Academy Award for best animated feature, and Howl’s Moving Castle made Hisaishi more of a known commodity outside of Japan as well.
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Shoot the Violist (2000) - ****
Discovery #27.
This unconventional blend of string quartet, electric bass, percussion, and winds (practically a Philip Glass ensemble) covers a mix of film themes, new pieces, and instrumental arrangements of earlier studio album pieces including Mkwaju and Tira-rin from Mkwaju, Da-ma-shi-e and Lemore from α-BET-CITY, and 794BDH from Curved Music. Hearing these ideas, some of which were rather grating in their original electronic formats, is a revelation at times; unless minimalism isn’t your thing, this arrangement of Da-ma-shi-e should be an addictive rhythmic delight.
The album also seems to have been the origin of the composer’s DEAD Suite, here as a twelve-minute piece in two parts (d.e.a.d. and Love Song). The first part plays like a somewhat tortured dance between string quartet and piano, not too far removed from some of the agitated film music compositions of Jonny Greenwood. The second introduces a little more lightness with a wandering piano line that morphs into a more elegant idea later carried by the rest of the ensemble. The piece is impressive, if decidedly more austere than everything else on the album. The composer would add more movements in a later performance for a 2005 album in the Works series, but its best version remains here.
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/2xWnCUJlpRWMLPOMPN3T1I?si=TM4Xoxi7QtiuvyHBi1isfw
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Brother (2001) - ***1/2
Takeshi Kitano’s next film was a rarity for him in that it was largely set in America, involving a gangster who flees to Los Angeles and gets involved in organized crime there. Reviews were mixed, with even the director’s most ardent critical champions giving the film a muted reception, and Kitano was rumored to be dissatisfied enough with the experience that he decided never to shoot outside of Japan again. The film is only really remembered for Hisaishi’s score, which is often quite jazzy and nostalgic. Just like composer Jerry Goldsmith in many scores had a solo trumpet at the forefront to represent masculinity, here Hisaishi often has a flugelhorn carrying his main melody.
Other aspects of the score are a bit familiar (the emotional string passages, the contemporary percussion mix), though there’s less stylistic redundancy than there was in Kids Return. And the album does feel like 20 minutes of strong ideas extended to double that length. Still, if it doesn’t hit the heights of earlier Hisaishi / Kitano collaborations, listeners should still be able to assemble 10-15 minutes of stylish highlights - which the composer essentially did for us on a concert album released the following year which includes a unique big band version of the main theme.
In one way Brother remains an outlier in Hisaishi’s career: it’s the only one of his scores for a Kitano film that didn’t receive a Japan Academy Prize music nomination, though this was almost assuredly a result of it being an American production that likely wasn’t eligible for anything except Best Foreign Film (no other aspect of the film was nominated).
Score album - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSP_sMZH6pQ0biRvqv_Y7KGv2NrSxpvW4
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Spirited Away / Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (2001) - *****
Hayao Miyazaki managed to outdo himself once again. His Spirited Away, a tale of a little girl lost in a spirit world, exceeded the critical and commercial success of Princess Mononoke. This was not just in Japan, where it became the highest-grossing movie of all time and was named best picture by the Japan Academy Prize association, but also overseas where it earned over $100M in theaters and beat out a number of American films to win the Oscar for best animated feature. It is one of the few animated films that tends to end up on “greatest films of the 21st century” lists.
Hisaishi’s Spirited Away score was by far his most colorful large-scale work to date. You get big moments of fear and terror that sometimes recall Jerry Goldsmith’s fantastical scores of the 1980s, but those are counterbalanced with plenty of sensitive character moments. You get unique moments of chilling tension like Yubaba, which the composer kicks off by playing an idea that uses a very high piano note in tension with a very low note, as well as the clattering metallic sounds serving as a thematic identity for the gold-giving demon No Face (a nice intellectual touch). Eastern instruments are saturated over multiple passages, vastly more so than what was heard in Princess Mononoke four years earlier. It was the composer’s most sophisticated composition up until this time, and it rewards repeat listens extremely well.
I’d argue you can approach the score for Spirited Away in two ways. One is to view it as a series of glorious individual episodes - the pomp and circumstance of Procession of the Spirits, the bouncing feel of It’s Hard Work, the impressive build-up of The Stink God. This is perhaps the only way to justify the penultimate score track Reprise, which unleashes a new romantic theme that seems to come out of nowhere but overwhelms you with its beauty (in the great tradition of the new theme in the finale of Porco Rosso and Ashitaka and San from Princess Mononoke). The other way is to look at it as a delivery vehicle not just for all the solid secondary themes already mentioned but also for one of the composer’s most affecting character themes, the melody for the lead character Chihiro. Like the girl, the theme (infrequently deployed, but used for maximum impact) gets taken through a tremendous journey throughout the film, from subdued at the start to tentative and then heroic in The Stink God (an all-time Hisaishi track) to a state of resolution by the end of the movie.
Much of what was on Hisaishi’s image album released a few months before the film’s theatrical debut reflected what ended up in the film but with a few tweaks - the main theme carried by la-la vocals, the melodies from Procession of the Gods and It’s Hard Work with lyrics and other vocal elements, and a synth demo of the glorious theme from Reprise. Sea even sounds pretty close to what we got in the film track The Sixth Station. As was the norm with these things, some ideas didn’t make it to the film. The unused aching cello melody in Solitude intriguingly sounds like the main theme of another fantasy film involving lost kids that the composer scored later that year, while the obnoxiously chipper I’m Lonely, Lonely sounds too twee even for Totoro and was thankfully kept out of the movie.
Hisaishi put a handful of tracks into his 2001 Tokyo concert, but the typical format for Spirited Away since then has been Chihiro’s theme (One Summer’s Day) and Reprise in song format. Arguably this has somewhat diminished the work in the public eye as it omits many of the score’s strengths. This wasn’t helped by a 2018 live recording of a new symphonic suite orchestrated by Chad Cannon, which was entertaining but pulled much of the specialty instrumentation out of the mix and (akin to the omission of A Mining Town on the Castle in the Sky symphonic suite) didn’t include the exceptionally entertaining The Stink God. Regardless, fans should still seek out the album for its big live performance of Da-ma-shi-e and the debut of the composer’s alluring rearrangement of the first movement of his string quartet for larger forces.
None of this griping about later arrangements should overshadow how impressive Hisaishi’s initial accomplishment was. It was arguably his finest work for a Miyazaki movie up until this point - and his best film score yet.
Image album - https://open.spotify.com/album/26gn7AM8JXUy7Vm3W9VfU3?si=CSxn-itQSVW7jkwvxH2FtQ
Score album - https://open.spotify.com/album/766a5fKJYFy9ii4Kz2bQy9?si=W5w3WaiRRPaeITeDSNaB4w
2008 Budokan suite - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AbPlw7tsjI
2018 symphonic suite - https://open.spotify.com/track/1PpB7C0iwL4chwpUrJhr3B?si=a675a51248914150
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Quartet (2001) - ****
Discovery #28.
Up until this point, I believe the only notable example of a film composer wearing other production hats was John Ottman, who often served as film editor on Bryan Singer’s movies and even directed Urban Legends: Final Cut in 2000. More recently Michael Giacchino directed an hour-long MCU special and is preparing for an upcoming remake of the 1950s giant ant movie Them!, but nonetheless the list remains short. So perhaps folks were a bit surprised in 2001 when it was revealed that, after years of watching directors like Miyazaki and Kitano work, Joe Hisaishi thought he’d try his hand at directing a movie. Unsurprisingly, it was a music-oriented story, with the protagonist forced to choose between debuting with a world-class orchestra and playing in one last concert with his friends.
Given that this movie was a smaller-scale drama with a decent portion of its runtime made up by musical performances, Hisaishi ended up realizing that he didn’t need a ton of original score, and so a good portion of the music is devoted to new arrangements of some of his earlier material - themes from My Neighbor Totoro, Fireworks, and Kids Return for string quartet, Da-ma-shi-e for saxophone quartet, and even two arrangements of Winter Dreams from his 1992 studio album My Lost City. A stylish main theme performed by strings and contemporary percussion feels like a close cousin of his Kitano scores, while some of the concert-style writing for four strings (Black Wall and Quartet g-moll, the latter based on the main theme) recalls the composer’s DEAD Suite from the prior year’s Shoot the Violist studio album.
Hisaishi’s debut film got respectful reviews, including from American critics, but four years later the composer - plenty busy with other musical projects - showed little interest in returning to the director’s chair. “Apart from the music, there are the costumes, lighting and all that, which took so much time in preparation and on set. I’ll pass on [directing] for now.”
Black Wall (String Quartet version) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihYLvBrc6n8
Da-ma-shi-e (Sax Quartet version) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPGBueQYmlw
Quartet g-moll - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LPUl1WAgME
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Tom Thumb / Le petit poucet, also sometimes labeled as Little Tom Thumb (2001) - ***½
2001 was the first year that Hisaishi scored a film from outside Japan: an adaptation of Charles Perrault’s French fairy tale about a boy who defeats an ogre. Like Spirited Away, this is an adventure score supersaturated with orchestral colors and solo instruments, in this case shakuhachi and kena flutes plus a bunch of Latin percussion. It featured some of the composer’s most impressive ensemble material up until this point (the Paris Philharmonic brass section may be the score’s MVP), including an evolution of his action style that previewed the rambunctious music he’d write for the 2007 miniseries The Legend. The Stravinsky-esque writing he’d toyed with in Princess Mononoke is greatly expanded here; I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he was hired on the basis of that earlier animated work.
There’s a marvelous main theme called Close Your Eyes, one that the composer has revisited a few times in new concert arrangements, but that idea is weirdly only applied as a bookend piece. Otherwise the work proceeds in an episodic fashion with no obvious themes referenced throughout the film. As such, some listeners may find the work a tad anonymous, but the colorful soundscape and occasionally ferocious writing make this one an easy recommendation. U.S. listeners may struggle to hunt it down as the score album isn’t currently on U.S. digital/streaming services.
Tom Thumb was praised by critics for its visuals but little else, and it barely did any business outside of France. Six years later Tom Thumb director Olivier Dahan experienced significant success with his Édith Piaf biopic La Vie en Rose, though seven years after that his career would be crippled by the fiasco that was Grace of Monaco which ended up debuting on the Lifetime cable network instead of theaters as originally intended, back when being responsible for one of the year’s worst films was the worst thing going on in producer Harvey Weinstein’s life.
Main theme (live) - https://open.spotify.com/track/6RsHrrL6k8UsDJs33FCknQ?si=bccd24602b1c4c57
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The Tokyo Concert / Super Orchestra Night 2001 (2002) - ****
In what was essentially Works II for the early aughts, the composer released an album of recordings from a 2001 concert with the New Japan Philharmonic covering over 40 minutes of music from Spirited Away, Quartet, and Brother as well as the main theme from Tom Thumb. Brother sounds bigger here, almost reaching the bombast of Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. The album’s biggest attraction is its final piece: the best-ever version of the Kids Return theme which supplements the usual strings and piano with delightfully raucous brass parts.
Album - https://www.discogs.com/release/10253276-Joe-Hisaishi-The-Tokyo-Concert
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Next time: A partnership goes out with a whimper.
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