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See my profile for earlier posts.
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Kids Return (1996) - ***½
Discovery #22.
A TL;DR perspective on Hisaishi’s collaborations with director Kitano up to this point would be that if you liked Hans Zimmer’s Black Rain then you’ll probably like these works too, as A Scene at the Sea and Sonatine both use a largely electronic soundscape to evoke the perks and perils of modern Japan. But if the Hisaishi/Kitano formula wasn’t exactly stale by 1996, it was still becoming a tad predictable. Kids Return had a knockout main theme tune (its optimistic interlude is arguably the work’s biggest selling point), but the sonic palette and non-thematic moments didn’t move the needle too much from the composer’s established pseudo-Eastern contemporary style. Nonetheless, it secured the composer a nomination from the Japan Academy Prize, his first since the award shifted to focus on individual scores.
Hisaishi would turn his main theme into various entertaining arrangements, including a boisterous concert finale in December 2001, a performance released in 2002 on the album named The Tokyo Concert or Super Orchestra Night 2001 depending on what region you’re in.
Score album - https://open.spotify.com/album/32TaUR88QyqMkXT4h7ffm0?si=KA1YH30KQkOkcpHb6MsaKg
Piano Stories II track - https://open.spotify.com/track/7JIH7bAXO3s7451nlFV4Sw?si=2efe2ce15a6a4e07
Shoot the Violist arrangement - https://open.spotify.com/track/73bKDtwdyJaWkSoIlqhU9w?si=ee4ac8df638f4c06
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Piano Stories II: The Wind of Life (1996) - *****
Discovery #23.
Whereas the first Piano Stories devoted half its runtime to film themes and was only made up of solo piano, the second album in the series only included one legacy idea (Kids Return) and found the composer utilizing the occasional wind, brass, electric violin, or guitar soloist as well as string ensembles of varying sizes in addition to his own piano playing. The result is an album of some of the composer’s finest tunes of the decade, many of which he rearranged in more expansive formats later in his career. Most notable are the wistful Friends and The Wind of Life, the playful and energetic Les Aventuriers, the powerful Asian Dream Song, and the idyllic Sunday, with the latter’s prominent guitar part suggesting the instrumental mix that Hisaishi would use on his next Kitano collaboration.
Angel Springs hails from a commercial for Suntory’s single malt Yamazaki whisky. It’s good, though the composer would come up with a more memorable melody for a different product for the company years later.
Asian Dream Song in particular is worth calling attention to, and not only because it's a dynamite piece of music. The tune became the theme song of the 1998 Paralympics Games held in Nagano, and it would receive a number of subsequent variations including a pop song version, a pop instrumental akin to Hisaishi’s Kitano scores, and an orchestral version that closed a 1998 concert which, like the Sonatine arrangement done around that time, reaches Princess Mononoke levels of majesty. A rendering of the idea for orchestra and a gargantuan choir was used during the actual opening ceremony, though that version sadly remains unreleased.
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/1QDFS0uYL7jEmBoM92uxQi?si=0kfzOedLT_6Vv5_G6TR03w
Asian Dream Song vocal version - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltubYMiMwFA
Asian Dream Song pop instrumental - https://youtu.be/I3pzJb6MOrA?si=Vz5xUw2zwK4DKJAH
Asian Dream Song 1998 concert - https://open.spotify.com/track/2iJlxrRh7RQSKxXxczRUcH?si=8852b7f1244c4863
1998 Paralympics opening ceremonies (first 3 min and 58-63 min) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_kNvUm-Tck
2019 Les Aventuriers - https://open.spotify.com/track/33pFgPpcaM6WtBWMX5eoSX?si=5979206fc1c24253
I couldn’t find the Suntory commercial, but I hope it went like this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiQnH450hPM
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Parasite Eve (1997) - **
Discovery #24.
Possibly the first horror / thriller film on his resume (still a rarity today) is this entry about a husband whose dead wife’s organs create a malevolent entity that wants to destroy humanity, an adaptation of a 1995 novel that was also surprisingly turned into a successful video game franchise from the company responsible for Final Fantasy. The composer may not have had much of a budget, since much of his short score is rendered via keyboards and cheap-sounding samples. The opening five-minute piece does unleash real strings and a female soprano recalling Ennio Morricone’s music at its most operatic, and the idea is returned to at the end of the album, which makes this the 1990s version of The Drifting Classroom - likable at its bookends, otherwise skippable.
Album - https://youtu.be/biQOk-0owAg?si=dRsXueMzlyknURhQ
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Princess Mononoke (1997) - ****½
The historical fantasy film with environmental overtones that turned Hayao Miyazaki into an internationally renowned filmmaker came about in reaction to his experiences with Porco Rosso. “The war happened (in the former Yugoslavia), and I learned that mankind doesn’t learn. We couldn’t go make some film like Kiki’s Delivery Service. It felt like children were being born to this world without being blessed. How could we pretend to them that we’re happy? But when I finished, I didn’t understand it: ‘What did I make?!’ At first I decided, ‘This is something children shouldn’t see,’ but in the end I realized, ‘No, this is something that children must see,’ because adults, they didn’t get it — children understood it.”
The absence of whimsy didn’t just apply to the movie, which was the first Miyazaki movie since 1979’s The Castle of Cagliostro to not prominently feature flying. It also impacted the music, which eschewed the jollity that pervaded the composer’s work on Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Porco Rosso and also seemed to avoid the kind of wonder that Nausicaä and Castle in the Sky evoked at times. Whereas Porco Rosso sometimes suggested Hisaishi was paying tribute to Italian film music masters Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, in Princess Mononoke one gets the sense that the composer was channeling Igor Stravinsky, in particular the Russian composer’s famed composition The Firebird. If Totoro bounces, Mononoke broods. There are requiems and adagios and all manner of sad music at times.
But Hisaishi counterbalances such sorrow and dread with orchestral majesty that befits the scope and scale of a quasi-historical epic, namely the pounding, taiko-infused material for the demons and a resonant main theme that’s in contention for one of the best melodies the great tunesmith ever created. Princess Mononoke also has a few intriguing one-offs that make the score more than just a collection of above-average themes. There’s a host of quirky percussive sounds for the tree spirits to remind listeners that this is the same composer whose first album was the very drummy Mkwaju. There’s an inspiring new age anthem. There are strange otherworldly vocal effects in the climactic sequence. There are the low plucked rhythms in Lady Eboshi, perhaps the only aspect of the score that’s a tad derivative given its similarities to some of the villain material from Nausicaä. And there’s the gorgeous finale piece where Hisaishi unleashes a new piano melody - named after the lead characters Ashitaka and San but playing more like a “nature in balance” idea.
Hisaishi’s image album for the concept came out nearly a year before the film did in Japan. Some ideas basically carried over to the finished film as is; The Legend of Ashitaka has more Eastern instrumental colors, The Cursed God plays like a synth demo, and Ashitaka and San is a longer version. But astute listeners will notice that some instruments didn’t end up in the film mix, namely the erhu, percussive plucks of the biwa, and primal shrinks of the nohkan flute. And - even more so than the Porco Rosso image album - there are substantial ideas that didn’t make the film or the symphonic suite: a more Eastern take on folksy material from the Nausicaä image album, a jaunty tune for the protagonist’s red elk Yakkle, a classical-sounding string and harp idea in the second half of Lady Eboshi, pounding action material for the wolf goddess Moro, and a quirky synth melody in The Kodamas that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Universe Within TV special. Not to mention that Hisaishi's daughter Mai Fujisawa, at this point a teenager over a decade removed from la-laing her way through Nausicaä, also sang on the image album’s version of the Princess Mononoke theme song.
For the first time since Castle in the Sky, Hisaishi put together a symphonic suite album within a year of the film’s release. In this case his efforts took him outside of Japan, with the composer getting a quality performance out of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, though it wasn’t the only international recording he made in 1998 as the next Piano Stories album made use of an Italian orchestra. Given that a significant portion of the 33-track, hour-long score album is made up of shorter pieces, the suite’s arrangement of the principal ideas of the score into longer tracks does make for a superior listening experience. The symphonic suite also adds a striking martial brass theme to The World of the Dead which wasn’t in the film or the image album. However, the suite does migrate the work into a largely standard arrangement that loses the Eastern instruments, vocals, and weird sounds that were an asset in the original recording. Ultimately, you can’t go wrong with either album, and I sincerely recommend hearing both.
With its film quite popular and its music widely praised, the score from Princess Mononoke unsurprisingly has made its way into a number of other formats. Half its original symphonic suite was on the 1999 Works II concert album. The composer included Ashitaka and San on a 2002 album of piano solos. The epic 2008 Budokan concert had a nine-minute piece covering the main theme, The Demon God, and the Mononoke theme song with an added choral presence and the powerful tones of female soprano Masako Hayashi, whose voice had recently graced Ponyo; this presentation was previewed without voices in a 2006 concert released on the Psycho Horror Night album. More importantly, that 2008 concert’s second encore piece was a new arrangement of Ashitaka and San where the melody’s second iteration was carried by a girl’s choir, producing one of the most astonishingly gorgeous passages of the composer’s career and providing an absolutely perfect wrap-up to the event.
A 2021 symphonic suite was essentially a hybrid of new arrangements of film tracks, portions of the symphonic suite, and Budokan’s operatic Mononoke song. Unlike the 1998 symphonic suite, it includes the chattering Kodamas, and The World of the Dead features some new interesting woodwind and brass parts. But the new suite also truncates some passages that played better in extended formats in that earlier release. Hisaishi also does some curious things with female soprano Yoko Yasui including having her toggle between lyrics and wordless vocals in the Princess Mononoke song and (more problematically) prominently featuring her in the second half of the Ashitaka and San track which unbalances the serenity of the piece. On the whole, the live concert recording released on album in 2022 is fine and perhaps a decent starting point for those who’ve never heard the score before, but those more familiar with the work will likely find it the least essential of the four new Miyazaki movie symphonic suites the composer has put out since 2018.
Princess Mononoke secured an English translation from fantasy author Neil Gaiman and a U.S. distribution deal with Disney (through Miramax, then a subsidiary), though as mentioned in the Castle in the Sky portion of this rundown its U.S. box office performance didn’t meet expectations when it came out around Halloween 1999. But in Japan Princess Mononoke was a massive success, becoming the highest-grossing domestic film of all time and winning best picture at the following year’s Japan Academy Prize ceremony, the first such win for an animated feature. It was the first time Hisaishi was attached to a best picture winner in his home country. It wouldn’t be the last.
1996 image album - https://open.spotify.com/album/1hByaNnxlXLurn1qBcDwpj?si=ngs12mtYTFqUURr0PYJwJg
1997 score album - https://open.spotify.com/album/2ZHxPDTCRU5STetdmXeW6p?si=hsFQoz_HQ2ihQ4w40ll_Kg
1998 symphonic suite - https://open.spotify.com/album/5BHtoNvVkT1QxEnPP551kK?si=sRn4yRBXQgWPGJKKdrEwSg
2002 Ashitaka and San on piano - https://open.spotify.com/track/022qa8RJ1bDMVf5q9sxKwf?si=57b35b4d54d242d0
2006 concert suite - https://open.spotify.com/track/1QvJdMm7R2Xp5T0eagZOUU?si=44999ea3c5a94e6c
2008 Budokan suite - https://youtu.be/bCM3clq-_c0?si=EJmlOKQVz3M7NSi7
2008 Budokan Ashitaka and San - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V190P2-_t_4
2021 symphonic suite - https://open.spotify.com/album/75Vkyw1xoI7K0oMXLt46gK?si=FYdnb4dSSUuVhj9WLHQIDA
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Works I: Joe Meets 3 Directors (1997) - *****
The first - and still the best - album bearing a Works title, this featured significant orchestral reworkings of ideas from seven Hisaishi scores from the 1980s and 1990s, most of which have already been praised as part of this rundown. The sole one that I haven’t mentioned yet is the heartwarming arrangement of For You from the 1993 film Samurai Kids; with this score’s CD album being out of print and fiendishly difficult to find, Works I was for many outside Japan the only way to hear any content from this score until Hisaishi reworked additional material from it on his 2010 album Melodyphony.
Stellar playing from the London Philharmonic Orchestra secures a top rating. If you’ve never heard a Hisaishi score, or perhaps are curious about what his music sounds like outside of Studio Ghibli, then Works I is an excellent place to start.
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/6HmZwqLsuQm2cuPVXDpDid?si=IpVkaSkHQeuPMH0WwCQ32g
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Next time: The 90s close with the best Kitano score and one of the composer’s catchiest tunes.
