> Dolls / Dōruzu (2002) - *½

My lowest-rated Hisaishi score, in but in typical fashion, I still have it a half-star higher than you, haha. Basically remember nothing about it other than it being a largely electronic work with some piano, as you've written. Boring, but not unpleasant.

> When the Last Sword Is Drawn / Mibu gishi den (2003) - ***

Yeah, I liked this one quite a bit more than you. It's a semi-soft **** for me. Enjoyable enough all the way through, with a few really terrific highlights - especially the last track which is a must-listen for any Hisaishi fan imo. I'll agree that it's not among his more memorably distinctive scores, though.

> The General (2004) - ***

Always been curious about this one, but I've never listened. Based on your write-up, I suppose I'd be better off checking out his twenty-minute "Works" recording.

> World Dreams (2004) - ****½

Never heard of this, but your description of it is extremely intriguing! I'll have to check this one out!

> Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) - ****1/2

> Up until this point, Hisaishi’s image albums for Miyazaki movies had
> occasionally featured vocalists and solo instrumental contributors but had
> still tended to be electronic affairs, almost like synth demos and theme
> suggestions more than an actual album most listeners would want to return
> to with any great regularity. So perhaps there was some surprise in early
> 2004 when the image album for Howl’s Moving Castle, Miyazaki’s
> first adaptation of someone else’s concept since Porco Rosso a
> dozen years earlier, arrived and it turned out to be an orchestral album
> utilizing the same ensemble that performed the 1998 Princess
> Mononoke symphonic suite. The image album is often grand and magical,
> and in the tradition of the composer’s earlier image albums it even
> includes significant bits that didn’t make it into the film score, namely
> the regal, wondrous Mysterious World which remains one of greatest
> unused score ideas ever.

> But the image album remains an outlier among Hisaishi’s image albums for
> one other reason that makes the album deeply weird: it doesn’t contain the
> main theme of the film. Every other Hisaishi image album for a
> Studio Ghibli film has at least one track dedicated to the major theme (or
> themes) that would come to define the film and be covered in future studio
> albums and concerts. This one doesn’t - all the more puzzling as the
> actual film score for Howl’s Moving Castle happened to be far more
> reliant on its main theme than any of Hisaishi’s prior Miyazaki scores.

This is one of the few Hisaishi image albums I've listened to, and yes, it is extremely weird that the main theme is totally absent! That said, I think it's a great listen for fans of the score. It develops a lot of the one-off melodies (like the material in "The Magic Door" and "The Merry Light Cavalrymen" among others). Really wonderful "expansion pack" of an album.

> Thankfully, that theme is good, and rather malleable too.

So good that Hisaishi wholesale recycles it in "The Little House." Not sure if there was a particular reason for that - maybe you'll illuminate that in a future write-up?

> boisterous waltzes to trumpet-powered action passages. This does seem to
> come at the expense of recurring secondary themes; there is a warm idea in
> Moving and Friendship as well as a trilling wind idea for
> the fire demon Calcifer, but rarely do a few minutes go by before the
> composer returns to a new variation of his primary melody. How much you
> like the score may depend on whether you think this is a marvelous
> exercise in adaptability or a rare case of Hisaishi (often judicious with
> thematic spotting up until now) overextending an idea.

Hmmmm, I don't know if I've ever considered this score to be particularly lacking in its volume of secondary ideas, but of course, as you say, it is unusually dominated by a single idea rather than a rotation of two or three core identities as would usually be the Hisaishi/Ghibli archetype. But Hisaishi has never been a stranger to compelling themes that only seem to pop in for a single cue or sequence.

> The one lengthy passage that is free of that idea follows the Spirited
> Away template of saving a major theme for a penultimate piece of music
> that covers a climactic reveal scene. In the seven-minute The Boy Who
> Accepted the Star, the composer unleashes a noble trumpet melody
> played by Miroslav Kejmar of the Czech Philharmonic (the ensemble that
> performed this score’s image album, though not the one that played on the
> score recording). By the end, the idea is elevated to sweeping heights.
> The magnificent piece, one of the film score highlights of 2004, at times
> evokes John Williams’ material at its most reverent - and unlike in
> Spirited Away, where said theme seemed to come out of nowhere, the
> composer used an earlier scene in Howl’s Moving Castle to start to
> set up this idea (the midfilm Secret Cave).

A tremendous cue. Probably the score's best, although oddly, "Sophie in Exile" is maybe the cue I've returned to most from this score - that flute passage makes me swoon!