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Encore (2002) - **½
Discovery #29.
This was a return to the style of the first Piano Stories, with the composer alone on piano playing themes from various films and studio albums. The market for something like this is limited, and while some arrangements are new (namely the Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away tracks) the content may still feel overly familiar for seasoned listeners.
If you’re looking for fresh material, the album is perhaps the only one on U.S. digital/streaming services that has Hisaishi’s theme from the 2000 film First Love / Hatsukoi, a score otherwise unavailable outside of an out-of-print CD.
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/5pSXHB3YxpvayU1byEzKTZ?si=QrjeAJVBRbKvlDS-mQrczw
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Dolls / Dōruzu (2002) - *½
Discovery #30.
Kitano’s next film, one vastly more stylized than his early realistic movies, was an anthology of three stories dealing with varying flavors of unhappiness. Hisaishi’s score, the only major one of his in this decade to go in an electronic direction, is among his most ambient works, with drifting synths occasionally interrupted by the composer’s slow piano playing. The conclusive track introduces some Brother-like percussion and a bit more energy, but on the whole the short score (barely over twenty minutes on an EP-style album) should have been called Dulls instead.
Dolls wasn’t a major critical or commercial success. It took over two years for the film to get even a limited release in the U.S. But it was still considered a visually stunning work, and it secured Japan Academy Prize nominations for art design, cinematography, and lighting in addition to Hisaishi’s eighth score nomination. Yet it also marked the end of his partnership with Kitano, one that had covered seven of the director’s last eight films, the sole exception being 1995’s Getting Any?, the most panned sex farce since Jerry Lewis’ 1966 space-based Cold War catastrophe Way…Way Out.
When asked in 2003 about not using Hisaishi on Zatoichi, his revival of a famed fictional blind samurai, Kitano half-joked about the composer’s recent successes making him too expensive, but also said certain scenes “required percussion-based music. Hisaishi as a composer is not very flexible, so I decided to use someone else.” Given how prominent drums had been in Hisaishi/Kitano collaborations, including the recent Brother, some other unspoken element was likely responsible for their break-up. Hisaishi doesn’t appear to have said anything on the record about it, though in an earlier promotional video for Tom Thumb he hinted at a possible contributing factor. While he characterized his Miyazaki films as being highly collaborative, “with Kitano I have practically no communication.”
After Zatoichi, Kitano’s career took a bit of a dip. He remains a respected figure in Japan, but a surrealist, semi-autobiographical trilogy (a return to the actor-director’s comedy roots) wasn’t successful, and a later set of three Outrage crime movies got a mixed reception. It remains to be seen what happens with Kubi, his violent samurai epic that premiered at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival and is set for a wider release later this year. Regardless, it is remarkable to think back on 1997, when both of Hisaishi’s main collaborators made films that eventually received significant international attention, and see how their careers have diverged since. Miyazaki (who’s kept working with Hisaishi) has become even more well-known and respected outside of Japan, while Kitano’s films rarely have made a dent outside of his home country.
Album - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pUkWsPKmto8
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When the Last Sword Is Drawn / Mibu gishi den (2003) - ***
Discovery #31.
Hisaishi - whose resume at this point was full of animation, contemporary dramas, and the occasional fantastical film - got one of his first prestige drama assignments in this movie about two samurai during the fall of Japan’s 1800s shogunate government. Some traditional instruments including a taiko ensemble accompany an orchestra in what was becoming a not-unexpected sound for the composer. The score has likable character moments and tense percussive action, but it’s not among his most distinctive works. You’ll be occasionally impressed by individual moments, most involving the noble but somewhat restrained main theme that finally flourishes in the last track, but also surprised how the 40-minute album seems to go in one ear and out the other. That assumes you can even find the CD as it wasn’t released in the U.S.
Shown at the Tokyo Film Festival in fall 2002 before getting a wide release in January 2003, When the Last Sword Is Drawn was not a success at the box office, certainly not compared to Kitano’s Zatoichi which outearned it tenfold in Japan and also did decent business overseas. But the 2004 Japan Academy Prize show was still a showdown between these two samurai films, with Kitano’s getting nine nominations and the other getting eleven, though none of those was for Hisaishi’s score. Zatoichi took home five awards, including one Kitano shared with two others for editing and another for Keiichi Suzuki’s score, but When the Last Sword Is Drawn ended up getting the award for best picture, making it all the more surprising that the composer hasn’t arranged its main theme for any future albums or concert recordings.
Final track - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpI_POfLl48
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Etude: A Wish to the Moon (2003) - ****
Discovery #32.
A beguiling mix of original compositions and extreme reinventions of less familiar ideas (including Dawn Flight, derived from Les Aventuriers from Piano Stories II), this is the only one of his solo piano albums worth returning to.
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/40yhQ9lfcanVVJkHTvSd0q?si=_NbXla3GRkSnqaSuqAmuEg
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The General (2004) - ***
Discovery #33.
Buster Keaton’s silent film classic from 1926 has received a number of subsequent re-scores over the years, the most notable ones written by Carl Davis in 1987 and Robert Israel in 1995. Hisaishi was given the chance to write his own take on the music to coincide with the film’s release on DVD in 2004. The resulting score is very much in his orchestral comfort zone - pompous orchestral marches, woodwind interludes, and string passages with small hints of Americana (some suggesting the influence of Elmer Bernstein, possibly because both have used Aaron Copland as a reference point).
Hisaishi created a capable simulacrum of Golden Age scoring while also writing something undeniably in his voice. However, the score seemed to focus on beauty and occasional militarism and less so on comedy and thrills, the latter becoming especially problematic in 2021 when a 2CD set of Carl Davis’ various scores for Buster Keaton films came out and revealed that Davis wrote an absolute barnburner of early Hollywood-style epic action music in the vein of They Died with Their Boots On for his 1987 gig. The juxtaposition creates the impression (fair or not) that Hisaishi wrote capable music that could have been adapted to a variety of contexts while Davis’ exciting accompaniment seemed so wedded to the era and the film that it tricks you into thinking it must have been written for the original film’s 1926 release.
Hisaishi recorded a 20-minute suite for a Works album released the following year with a more spirited performance than the work originally received. For most listeners that should be a sufficient presentation.
2004 Hisaishi score - https://open.spotify.com/album/23cUcK5lKLV3JXi77r6UVv?si=Raflyl5zRCy8fZ9CjIoDuQ
1987 Davis score - https://open.spotify.com/album/51RuhYQZNwGu8riw5Y8JTb?si=i4R_MI7oTv2TK_MQTySLYA
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World Dreams (2004) - ****½
Discovery #34.
The equivalent of a John Williams or Erich Kunzel pops album covering various famous film themes, this marked the debut recording of an offshoot of the New Japan Philharmonic called the World Dreams Orchestra, which Hisaishi intended to have perform music outside of the standard classical repertoire. You might think that prior sentence meant we got some typical “greatest hits of Hollywood” anthology recording interchangeable with those aforementioned Boston Pops and Cincinnati Pops albums or the various City of Prague Philharmonic albums released by Silva Screen. But did you see the star rating up there? In Gen Z terms, this album slaps.
There is some typical fare - James Bond tunes, The Pink Panther, Mission: Impossible, Jerry Goldsmith’s Chinatown - though all have new arrangements done by Hisaishi, some of them strikingly different from the usual presentations. The Bond medley has Goldfinger and Thunderball played in counterpoint, while the Chinatown track has exquisite trumpet playing by Tim Morrison, well-known to score fans for often being John Williams’ trumpeter of choice. There’s also a swaggering performance of the theme from the American TV show Ironside (known to later audiences thanks to Quentin Tarantino dropping it into Kill Bill Vol. 1) by Quincy Jones, the man who inspired Mamoru Fujisawa’s musical alias.
Unsurprisingly, there are a few of the composer’s pieces on the album - and unlike Encore they generally avoid a sense of redundancy. The Castle in the Sky suite is rather unique in that it starts with a sprightly arrangement of the fanfare for Pazu and later features the main melody carried by solemn trumpet; it’s a compelling alternative to the later Budokan presentation. The drums in Raging Men from Brother are even more bellicose than they were at the 2001 Tokyo concert. And the piece World Dreams, a memorable melody realized in a stately arrangement here, debuted on this album and would be revisited by the composer several times, with an arrangement for orchestra and choir on a 2016 concert album, another instrumental version closing the symphonic suite album for Spirited Away, and yet another instrumental version attached to the symphonic suite album for Kiki’s Delivery Service only a year later.
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/5xIlbLoLnwYrlPj7FsYqo5?si=4vLbeXVRQvCZ6j-dTtF3lw
World Dreams 2015 - https://open.spotify.com/track/25xkoWOlw4T61F6mUIcinR?si=a9c24d9a9a4f4edb
World Dreams 2018 - https://open.spotify.com/track/2Y8M0oJPNfDY6vQqlwb9IY?si=b82e564902cf48c2
World Dreams 2019 - https://open.spotify.com/track/16bFSBWDwE4XN9QgwabT7P?si=93a8a95ad8224c5a
World Dreams 2021 in concert - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZIp4AV2ZDA
The album wrapped up with a piece from an upcoming Miyazaki movie. That piece had already been included on the image album released earlier in the year, but it was still a few months before the film debuted at the Venice Film Festival.
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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.
Thankfully, that theme is good, and rather malleable too. Whereas earlier Hisaishi animation scores often had a number of memorable themes that tended to get performed in only one or two modes, here we found the composer translating his idea from sensitive piano to aching strings to 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.
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).
Howl’s Moving Castle doesn’t have the wild colors of Spirited Away. It is much more influenced by the styles of Western classical music (Tchaikovsky comes to mind at times), and with the exception of a briefly used accordion and even more briefly used vocal chanting the work is entirely made up of a standard orchestral ensemble. That’s neither a pro or a con, but the work may not quite have the same allure to fans of his last two Miyazaki scores for that reason. Still, if it’s not quite a top-shelf Hisaishi/Miyazaki team-up, Howl’s Moving Castle proves the next best thing is still terrific. At this point in their partnership, these scores were almost guaranteed to be one of the ten best of the year, with the few exceptions being Kiki’s Delivery Service (a good score but the least of their collaborations at this stage) and the Castle in the Sky re-score, a tremendous accomplishment which had the misfortune to come out in 2003 (an especially strong year for scores) but would have been in the top scores of 1999 if the new dub had been released that year as originally intended.
The composer clearly liked what he wrote, as he included different suites on two compilation albums released the following year. The 13-minute one on Works III was slightly pared down for the 2008 Budokan event, though it still remained the second-longest suite of that concert, and that suite was reused for the 2023 RPO album. A 2019 theme arrangement featuring accordion and mandolin found its way on to the 2022 Princess Mononoke symphonic suite album.
Howl’s Moving Castle was one of the most commercially successful Japanese animated films ever made, doing well at both the domestic and international box office, though it didn’t receive quite as much widespread praise as Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away did. This was reflected in the film getting ignored by the Japanese Academy Prize awards after those earlier pictures beat out a bunch of live action films to win best picture in their respective years. Perhaps this slight would’ve been remedied if the organization had introduced a best animated feature category, something it actually did two years later, though (as with the U.S. Academy’s introduction of that category at the Oscars in 2002) it virtually guaranteed that an animated feature would never again have a shot at winning best picture.
Image album - https://open.spotify.com/album/7bIVSEcjSgekLQTwtIu9oN?si=Jkc769-KS7itTA0Hx0fFFw
Score album - https://open.spotify.com/album/5fqlZFKYqvkIe2jdDGt2nl?si=yg6YfoSqTTaCWWu74b3Xgg
2005 Piano Stories 4 theme - https://open.spotify.com/track/39uLYYZytVUwcjgeYLI409?si=ca7026ca5d604a3f
2005 Works III suite - https://open.spotify.com/track/5SD3yA793GDebxEa1IHjMv?si=399fac7fb2b84e8b
2008 Budokan performance - https://youtu.be/qg-g2DH8GZw?si=kiXeg06zl5bmhv6o&t=4123
2019 theme arrangement - https://open.spotify.com/track/2dfVtaFZldciBMj7nGlOmu?si=c801d88de92d479e
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Next time: “I found it strange that anyone would want to approach me to write for a comedy.”
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