Last post - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=128289
See my profile for earlier posts.

-----------------------

The Drifting Classroom / Hyōryū Kyōshitsu (1987) - **

Discovery #10.

The first of several scores Hisaishi did for director Nobuhiko Obayashi, this covered a low-budget live action adaptation of a manga about a school teleported into an apocalyptic future. Bustling strings and martial snare suggest an epic adventure at the start, and if you liked the main themes from Nausicaä and Arion then you’ll like this album’s main theme too. Alas, the rest of the score is all over the place, ranging from minimalist electronics to metallic clangs to trite comedy fare. The album also contains pop songs and - well before Clint Eastwood was doing this regularly - two pieces written by the director, one a charming piano-dominated piece and the other an annoying stock action track (both arranged by Hisaishi). Still, devoted fans of the composer should at least seek out the 10 minutes of quality melodic material.

Score album - https://youtu.be/hO7hCXKX3oA?si=UwRINxfbpd0l_I7V

-----------------------

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. 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. 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.

1987 image album - https://open.spotify.com/album/7MBpoM8AdFooU6g2nB3MZf?si=AdoaI51MTgOfCLnSivLFIw
1988 film score - https://open.spotify.com/album/2Dn4ABFUYJbrlMF7K12RT3?si=cHSgVpj0QQGL-Kth2bWj8w
1988 karaoke album - https://open.spotify.com/album/45vZtgVgJGAz96VNltDRNh?si=OH_oHEg7Q2693QzbIE5tsQ
2002 Orchestra Stories - https://open.spotify.com/album/1ixPe8dVoovMSki6isJJoW?si=HS8xYTKXRxWtkUa2nEaaOg
2008 Budokan suite (2nd half) - https://youtu.be/mZzXnth9FAs?si=rsVHo88xIrw8c9YK
2010 LSO My Neighbor Totoro - https://open.spotify.com/track/42c56HKycty0CsHd5iPuiP?si=0a3875fa64bc48e5
Live Orchestra Stories performance - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaEULDW7weA

-----------------------

Piano Stories (1988) - ***½

Discovery #11.

Rather than the electronic sound of his earlier studio albums, Piano Stories featured 20 minutes of piano solo performances from Hisaishi’s four notable animated scores up to this point surrounded by original ideas. Hisaishi would put more compelling material on later Piano Stories albums, but this one makes for a soothing 45 minutes on the whole, the Nausicaä track is quite striking, and two new tracks (the rueful, classical Green Requiem and the jazzy, aspirational Twilight Shore) are memorable enough that you wish the composer had found a film for them to be explored further in.

The first Piano Stories album is the only one in the series (of five) to not make it to U.S. streaming services, though it is available to buy as a digital album on iTunes. Select tracks also made it onto a later “best of” album from the series.

The Wind Forest - https://open.spotify.com/track/1lXB18NE2eoJmVDh7yPK7H?si=bf86d1c2455643ed
Green Requiem - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeZZDXQ72uM
Twilight Shore - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VL5ZbEGH83o
Fantasy (for Nausicaä) - https://open.spotify.com/track/1LgwGazm8mMqgkPOV9Ov0O?si=8655c9af3ed34081

-----------------------

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.

This film adaptation of a manga series about racing and military conflict on a terraformed Venus reunited the composer with Arion director Yoshikazu Yasuhiko. Hisaishi’s score fuses his early career city pop with fat 80s synths and the guitar-heavy ambience of Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. One rocking song reunited the composer with singer Taku Kitahara, who sang the vocal version of Catbus on the Totoro 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. An LP image album released before Christmas 1988 appears lost to the ages.

Score album - https://youtu.be/PzCQmKm2FRc?si=iqHAO5ubC-U46vnz

-----------------------

The Universe Within: The Human Body (1989) - ***

Discovery #13.

This music for a TV documentary film about the goings-on within your body was unsurprisingly almost entirely made up of piano, drum pads, and other electronics. If you liked the contemporary style of Curved Music then you’ll probably like this soothing continuation of that sound. As the show expands to the outside world in its last sequence, Hisaishi’s piano finally is joined by a warm orchestral accompaniment not dissimilar to his Miyazaki material. An album came out in 1989, with a shorter second volume emerging around Christmas 1990. In 1991, another CD was released that covered selections from both albums with supposedly fuller sound, though most listeners likely won’t notice an audible difference.

1989 Vol. 1 - https://youtu.be/D0ajCMVKP6M?si=9prWQQKgkS4uEgdm
1990 Vol. 2 - https://youtu.be/5inFemb_UeU?si=qVzENYNBKMG4JzHx
1991 Special Issue - https://youtu.be/3dnRB1kaYG4?si=krY1P5Z80K2p_8-P
The actual documentary - https://youtu.be/yFid0LDlDDY?si=7iTloqkMBdYjy5ln

-----------------------

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.

1989 image album - https://open.spotify.com/album/0Y168qDgdE5wnEIyxRT6es?si=bgf-DkAwTyyNpZZcgnZUAw
1989 score album - https://open.spotify.com/album/2NO5lYWs4aWpsmHOjF4JHk?si=sgckeWYGTyyjjoPNsZDlpg
1989 vocal album - https://open.spotify.com/album/27471z8AFf0kAwhrNZjuyX?si=JblI4P3wSUaauX_w6ZMldQ
2008 Budokan suite - https://youtu.be/elrfDu51Yq4?si=Ogaw9ZjH0uMQmQGM
2010 Melodyphony track - https://open.spotify.com/track/3xgv6z4MQEGcijvQcuPRfj?si=e6f2c7c528fe4bc0
2014 Works IV track - https://open.spotify.com/track/0KejApRLAJsqF2qzKm6OWy?si=2fc1dfaaae70410e
2020 symphonic suite - https://open.spotify.com/album/1KBEf92eBTtfJQU5C7wmf0?si=RUZw3TxuR9mw-0rejPX1jg

-----------------------

Next time: The composer delivers his first great live action film score. And also his first abysmal one.

(Message edited on Thursday, October 19, 2023, at 6:09 a.m.)

> 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.)

> Going to accept that I might not circle back to the previous parts...

If it helps, they are much shorter than the Zimmer/MV/RC rundown posts on average. I was aiming for 2k words or under, though the last post was a bit above that.

> 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?

Spring 2020 not the best. I should go back and check what I explored in spring 2020 and see if anything was similarly impacted.

I used to have it at 2.5/5, so maybe not exactly unwarranted.

> So it sounds like I need to revisit this one. But also maybe explore the different albums as well? Hm...

"A lot of different albums" could practically be the title of this rundown - though that's less a problem with most of the film scores and more a challenge with realizing months into this that Da-ma-shi-e originated years before I thought it did.

> The Drifting Classroom / Hyōryū
> Kyōshitsu (1987) - **

> Discovery #10.

> The first of several scores Hisaishi did for director Nobuhiko Obayashi,
> this covered a low-budget live action adaptation of a manga about a school
> teleported into an apocalyptic future. Bustling strings and martial snare
> suggest an epic adventure at the start, and if you liked the main themes
> from Nausicaä and Arion then you’ll like this album’s main
> theme too. Alas, the rest of the score is all over the place, ranging from
> minimalist electronics to metallic clangs to trite comedy fare. The album
> also contains pop songs and - well before Clint Eastwood was doing this
> regularly - two pieces written by the director, one a charming
> piano-dominated piece and the other an annoying stock action track (both
> arranged by Hisaishi). Still, devoted fans of the composer should at least
> seek out the 10 minutes of quality melodic material.

> Score album - https://youtu.be/hO7hCXKX3oA?si=UwRINxfbpd0l_I7V

** feels harsh for this one, although I agree with your general assessment. It's an uneven score, but with some attractive highlights, and that was enough to net it a *** from me.

> My Neighbor Totoro / Tonari no Totoro (1988) - ****½

> 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.

Consider my interest peaked in both of these. My Neighbor Totoro is a favorite score of mine, so I may be the right target audience for more deliriously chipper interpretations of the material.

> 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.

Interesting! I heard this one once a long time ago and it didn't do much for me, but perhaps I should revisit. I do, however, love the "Wind of Venus" song from this soundtrack.

> 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.

Haha, your dislike of "Surrogate Jiji" is practically a running joke at this point. For what it's worth, I've always found that track charming.

Anyhow, lovely score, and "Town With an Ocean View" is a top ten Hisaishi cue for me.

Loved reading your write-up, as always!

> Haha, your dislike of 'Surrogate Jiji' is practically a running joke at this point. For what it's worth, I've always found that track charming.

My opinion of it as music hasn't changed - but after finally seeing the film a few weeks ago I became more forgiving of its impact on the score. It almost seems as if it was a challenge to write the silliest piece of source music possible.

Seeing the film opened up some other interesting insights about how Hisaishi approached the film, namely how the more electronic pieces tend to be for sequences involving Tombo and other aspects of modernity (the bike, the car, and such). There's an early scene where Kiki flies that at first seems oddly supported by electronics, but then you realize that Hisaishi isn't as much scoring her flight as he is scoring Tombo's amazement at seeing Kiki soar above the town.

> Seeing the film opened up some other interesting insights about how
> Hisaishi approached the film, namely how the more electronic pieces tend
> to be for sequences involving Tombo and other aspects of modernity (the
> bike, the car, and such). There's an early scene where Kiki flies that at
> first seems oddly supported by electronics, but then you realize that
> Hisaishi isn't as much scoring her flight as he is scoring Tombo's
> amazement at seeing Kiki soar above the town.

Love this connection! Had never considered that!