> Last post - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=128289
> See my profile for earlier posts.
Going to accept that I might not circle back to the previous parts...
> -----------------------
> The Drifting Classroom / Hyōryū
> Kyōshitsu (1987) - **
Filmtracks really liked those characters post-edit.
> Discovery #10.
> -----------------------
> My Neighbor Totoro / Tonari no Totoro (1988) - ****½
> “The challenge [with synthesizers] is creating something new, a tune that
> has not been played before, a sound that captures several instruments.
> Although it is a challenge, that is part of the fun!”
> The first of director Hayao Miyazaki’s films that wasn’t just
> well-regarded but became a cultural export, My Neighbor Totoro
> charmed both kids and adults and created a character often described as
> Japan’s equivalent of Winnie the Pooh or Mickey Mouse. The distinctive
> furry titular character not only became Miyazaki’s animation studio’s logo
> but also managed to sneak into Pixar’s Toy Story 3 over 20 years
> later, largely thanks to Disney animation boss John Lasseter being a huge
> Studio Ghibli fan who at one point was recorded on video singing the
> Totoro theme song with Miyazaki.
> In some ways, Hisaishi’s Totoro score is very much a product of the 1980s.
> Half of it relies heavily on electronics, with the composer occasionally
> pushing the envelope on how many quirky sounds he could throw into the
> soundscape. Some portions - A Haunted House!, the repeated metallic
> patterns underlying The Path of the Wind - are exactly what you
> would’ve expected the first animated score from a guy hired on the basis
> of studio albums like Mkwaju and Information to sound like
> (instead of what we actually got, which was Nausicaä). But there
> are just as many sections that rely on an orchestra, making the score a
> halfway point between the composer’s burgeoning melodic and contemporary
> sides. Portions also find the composer indulging in his love of George
> Gerswhin, including the hint of swing in The Village in May and
> A Little Monster, the jaunty trumpet in the middle of Moonlight
> Flight, and especially the toe-tapping Catbus.
> The Totoro score album will drive some listeners absolutely insane.
Correct.
> Its chipper attitude might make you want to punch through a wall if you’re
> not in the right mood, and its prominent non-instrumental sounds will not
> be for everyone. Indeed, I was one of those listeners, as Totoro
> was the lowest-rated Miyazaki score in my collection for a long while. But
> its charms have won me over with time - not just the playful sonic mix,
> but also the thing that really made it the first truly great score of the
> composer’s career: how overflowing it is with inspired tunes.
Are you saying that spring 2020 was not the best headspace for me to first experience a score like this, and that my 2/5 rating may have been unwarranted?
> Other scores
> could maybe survive on having only one or two of the serene The Path of
> the Wind, the outrageously catchy Hey Let’s Go march
> (Stroll in some earlier translations), the playful My Neighbor
> Totoro, Mother, or A Lost Child. This score has
> all of them.
> If you want to understand why Totoro is such a lyrical work, look
> no further than Hisaishi’s image album, issued six months (!) before the
> film’s theatrical release. Most of the thematic components heard in the
> film were first realized as fully-fledged songs with vocals. Hey Let’s
> Go and My Neighbor Totoro sound close to their film versions,
> and it is interesting to hear the largely electronic The Path of the
> Wind in a different format that probably could’ve survived in the
> movie, but by the time you get to Catbus and The Dust
> Bunnies as very 80s tunes you’ll be chuckling to yourself,
> wondering if Hisaishi took a dare to have words alongside every idea. “Now
> put words to Nausicaä!”
> Not every idea on that album made its way to the film. Two unused songs
> are rather folksy: the harmonica-backed Festival of Fireworks and
> the easygoing A Small Photo, the latter featuring Hisaishi’s
> singing voice. As it pertains to the exercise music vibes of A Funny
> Word-Chain Song, I’ll paraphrase Christopher Hitchens and say it’s a
> pity there isn’t a hell for that song to go to, though here’s a fun bit of
> trivia: its singer Kumiko Mori would supposedly go on to be the original
> voice of Pikachu.
> Unlike Hisaishi’s earlier major animated works, Totoro wouldn’t be
> immediately followed by a symphonic album, though a karaoke album came out
> later that fall. It took 14 years for the composer to revisit his score in
> a more orchestral style. The work would be divided into eight pieces, with
> the opening Hey Let’s Go used to introduce each section of the
> ensemble, and all pieces would be accompanied by a narrator (like
> Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf or Britten’s The Young Person's
> Guide to the Orchestra), in this case the actor who voiced the father
> in the original Japanese dub. The album also includes the tracks without
> narration, one of which is a gorgeous orchestral version of The Path of
> the Wind that astonishingly hasn’t been a regular part of the work’s
> usual concert suite.
> The usual 8-minute concert suite is still magnificent though, with the
> bustling finale performance of the My Neighbor Totoro tune bringing
> the main program of the 2008 Budokan concert to an exciting close. Almost
> 15 years after first seeing it, I still get chills as the camera cuts
> between sections of the massive ensemble churning away furiously near the
> end of the piece. The recent RPO release covers the same suite, though as
> a surprise the early Hey Let’s Go portion is performed in English
> (just as it was in an English dub released by Disney in 2005). And
> Totoro has found a life outside concerts, with a stage musical
> debuted by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2022 getting a largely
> positive reception.
> On a personal note, I recall playing the orchestra stories album for My
> Neighbor Totoro in my dorm room my sophomore year of college with the
> door open and hearing a friend across the hall shout “Catbus!” in utter
> delight.
So it sounds like I need to revisit this one. But also maybe explore the different albums as well? Hm...
> -----------------------
> Piano Stories (1988) - ***½
> Discovery #11.
> -----------------------
> Venus Wars / Venus Senki (1989) - ***½
> Discovery #12. Of all the campy stuff the composer did in the 1980s, this
> is the only one worth regularly returning to.
> image album. With the composer coming closer than he ever did to emulating
> Harold Faltermeyer, Venus Wars is unquestionably the most
> 80s of any score Hisaishi ever wrote.
Sold.
> -----------------------
> The Universe Within: The Human Body (1989) - ***
> Discovery #13.
> -----------------------
> Kiki's Delivery Service / Majo no Takkyūbin (1989) - ****
> Miyazaki’s tale of a young witch in a new city may have had much of its
> aesthetic based on Stockholm, but his composer took the film’s music in a
> different direction, layering a fusion of French and Mediterranean sounds
> on top of an occasional orchestra. It’s often a smaller-scale score done
> with impeccable charm, with much of its runtime evoking a breezy, carefree
> summer day. Alas, the fun (and the terrific themes) of Kiki’s Delivery
> Service are counterbalanced by a handful of very synthetic tracks that
> don’t sound that much more evolved from their versions on the image album.
> There’s also the obnoxious combination of what sounds like a theremin and
> honky-tonk piano in Surrogate Jiji, a track I’ve only kept in my
> collection on the off chance I ever need something to torture my enemies
> with, though to be fair Hisaishi wrote that as in-film source music
> accompanying a cartoon being watched by a bratty child and it barely even
> factors into the movie.
> That image album also had a few less-than-sensational pieces that
> thankfully didn’t make it into the film in some way: the bleak synths of
> A Sudden Gust and the odd fusion of city pop, smooth jazz, and
> island music in A Date by the Beach. An album of songs, a
> transparent attempt at “Make Kiki Totoro again,” came out in fall 1989 and
> should have come with a warning sticker attached as its only audiences
> were probably Hisaishi completists, extreme fans of the featured vocalists
> (not just Totoro singer Azumi Inoue but also the lead singer of the
> Japanese rock band Ali Project), and people who just really needed
> Surrogate Jiji with vocals in their life. A karaoke album came out
> the following summer.
> Even with its faults, the score has multiple compelling themes and
> passages, and the composer would arrange three of those (A Town with an
> Ocean View, Heartbroken Kiki, and Mom’s Broom) into a
> sprightly and serene concert piece for the 2008 event at the Budokan
> venue. He’d keep returning to parts of that in future albums, with the
> score showing up in his 2010 album with the London Symphony Orchestra and
> his 2014 album Works IV. The latter recording was fine, but it
> wasn’t needed on an album otherwise dedicated to newer works. And one
> other challenge with these reinventions is that they all were missing that
> European flair that the mix in the original recording provided.
> The composer solved that issue with a 2020 symphonic suite newly
> orchestrated by Chad Cannon that brought those elements more to the
> forefront while also introducing tons of boisterous orchestral detail.
> With an action climax that rivals the large-scale rowdiness of Jerry
> Goldsmith’s comedy scores for Joe Dante, a capable translation of the
> original’s electronic passages into instrumental ones, and even a
> tolerable conversion of Surrogate Jiji into a ragtime jam, the new
> symphonic suite suggests that the original score might’ve been superior if
> it had been arranged like this. I’ll concede the beefier sound may also
> have overwhelmed the images though, and that original rendering of
> Hisaishi’s score, while not perfect, still retains some of the most
> uniquely charming material of the composer’s career.
I don't remember Surrogate Jiji, which is possibly why this one is near the top of my Hisaishi/Miyazaki rankings. Charming is the right word.
Also, this is a good space to mention that Spider-Man 2 basically has the same plot as this movie. Young person with special abilities wants to use them for good but the pressures of paying rent and juggling work and their social lives leads to burnout so extreme that it causes them to lose their special powers. After taking some time to get the rest of their life somewhat together, their powers return in a moment of crisis when someone they care about is in mortal peril due to a hydrogen-related disaster about to unfurl. (I know there's a line in Kiki's saying the blimp is filled with helium, shut up and let me have this.)
