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Tokyo Family / Tôkyô kazoku (2013) - ***
Despite mixed reviews and marginal box office, Tokyo Family, a remake of the famed 1953 drama Tokyo Story about an elderly couple visiting their adult children, got 12 Japan Academy Prize nominations. It became the most consequential of the six projects released in 2013 that had a Hisaishi score, as the composer and director Yoji Yamada would work together on four more films. For their first collaboration, Hisaishi delivered one of his more intimate instrumental scores. The film didn’t require much more than an understated theme and pleasant interstitial material, so expect a likable 24 minutes of music on the album but not anything constituting a major work from the composer.
Album - https://arksquare.net/detail.php?cdno=UMCK-1442
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Lady Nobunaga / Onna Nobunaga (2013) - ****
Airing over two nights on Japan’s Fuji television channel, this four-hour miniseries adapted a 2006 novel that reimagined the famed 1500s feudal lord Oda Nobunaga as a woman - and with over 20% of IMDb user ratings suspiciously at one star it became an early example of a regrettable trend of online review bombing of female-centric properties. Hisaishi wasn’t a surprise choice to score the show given how many historical dramas and epics had been on his resume recently, though arguably that style was at risk of getting played out after the adequate but comparatively unremarkable Tenchi: The Samurai Astronomer from the prior year. Rest assured that Lady Nobunaga would assuage those fears, with the composer delivering a forcefully dramatic, rousing version of his orchestral mannerisms for this genre. Buoyed by two very good themes and occasionally armed with the kind of East-West fusion sound that had graced the The Legend, Hisaishi’s score compares favorably with his work on that earlier miniseries and Clouds above the Hill.
Coincidentally, the lead actress in the series was also the voice of the sea goddess in the Japanese dub of Ponyo.
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/3bo6dASAAAP7yMEgEkaUxq?si=o8mow3OESHmd_cUcFu20JA
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Giant Squid: Filming the Impossible / Shinkai no Cho Kyodai Ika (2013) - ****
This orchestral score was for a TV documentary that was the first to capture live footage of the giant squid in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, a collaboration between Discovery and Japan’s NHK that was later broadcast on the BBC. Hisaishi wrote more music than what ended up in the final cut of the documentary, and in fact the album is longer than the show’s runtime by about two minutes, but who really cares when the score is this good? Elegant and wondrous, it continues the nautical feel of Ponyo and is an easy recommendation for anyone who likes the evocative, impressionistic, and richly orchestrated nature documentary scores of composer John Scott.
I’ve seen this called Legends of the Deep: The Giant Squid as well as Giant Deep Sea Creatures - and the Japanese title translates to Giant Creature of the Deep Sea - but I’m going with the title of the version that David Attenborough narrated.
Album - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yG74aehHUq8
The documentary - https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x12k0kq
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The Wind Rises / Kaze tachinu (2013) - ****½
Miyazaki originally set out to make a biography of Jiro Horikoshi, an engineer who designed fighter planes but opposed WWII, only as a manga series in 2009, fully intending to make a sequel to Ponyo next. But staff at Studio Ghibli convinced him to pursue a film version of this story as well. And yet one could argue that the famously pacifistic director may have injected the themes in The Wind Rises into a future movie anyway, given the recent rise in nationalist sentiments in the country and how those had been reflected in the movies made and released in Japan. Prime minister Shinzo Abe, reelected to a new term in 2012 after having been out of office since 2006, had questioned the historicity of Japan’s well-established wartime atrocities and had, along with other members of the political right in the country, entertained revising the country’s post-war constitution to enable expanded military activities. Meanwhile, numerous properties didn’t just visualize high seas action, like the successful Umizaru film franchise, but also dramatized major events in Japan’s wartime past, as seen in Yamato and Clouds above the Hill (both ironically scored by Hisaishi).
These elements came to a head when The Wind Rises, at the time though to be the director’s final feature, came out in summer 2013, as members of the right-leaning DPJ grumbled about the filmmaker’s politics while Miyazaki published an editorial denouncing continued attempts by that party to remilitarize the nation. Miyazaki's film was awarded the Japan Academy Prize for best animated feature and was by far the highest-grossing 2013 film at the domestic box office, so he may have been laughing all the way to the bank. But laughs would be few and far between in December 2013 when the film The Fighter Pilot, also known as The Eternal Zero, dramatized the life of a World War II kamikaze pilot. Miyazaki came out swinging, calling the film “a phony myth” and “a pack of lies” and saying he hated this kind of thing. Yet with The Fighter Pilot making more money than any 2013 Japanese film except The Wind Rises and winning eight Japan Academy Prize awards including one for best picture, the cultural battle for Japan’s soul remained unresolved.
In some ways Hisaishi’s score - his sole collaboration with Miyazaki up until this point to not receive an image album - is a throwback to the seaside sounds of Kiki’s Delivery Service and Porco Rosso. There’s a notable orchestral presence in many tracks, but it’s balanced against various specialty instruments including balalaika, mandolin, guitar, a standard accordion, and a Russian type of accordion called a bayan, though intriguingly not the Argentine bandoneon that the composer had occasionally used, notably in the Tango X.T.C. performance on 1992’s Symphonic Best Selection. There are bustling moments evoking flight (some suggesting the influence of Hisaishi’s recent concert music), bits of pomp and circumstance, and a spirited march for the protagonist’s imagined interactions with Italian aircraft designer Giovanni Caproni. But while the music retains the sense of jollity and rhythm from those aforementioned earlier efforts, it is not quite as upbeat as them, Hisaishi’s main theme and secondary romantic idea playing well in intimate and more sweeping settings but both tinged with melancholy as well as the composer’s usual nostalgic overtones.
The score was widely acclaimed, becoming not just the second straight Miyazaki score of his to win the Japan Academy Prize award for best score but also becoming the first animated score of his to be awarded by the International Film Music Critics Association. The composer recorded eight tracks with the World Dream Orchestra as part of a compilation album released the following year, though future performances (including the suite on the 2023 RPO album) would tend to focus on the main theme and its specialty instrumentation at the expense of the score’s other interesting elements. Still, if The Wind Rises was to be Hisaishi’s swan song with his collaborator of 30 years, it was a heck of a way to go out.
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/59U5FQ4kDEt11Q2UcFu1dK?si=hJ2yed5LQse7JzZur9K0LA
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The Tale of Princess Kaguya / Kaguya-hime no Monogatari (2013) - ****
As with 2010’s twofer of Ni No Kuni and Mr. Dough and the Egg Princess, 2013 brought not one but two Studio Ghibli collaborations for Hisaishi, with the companion to The Wind Rises being an animated film helmed by Grave of the Fireflies director Isao Takahata that was originally intended to be released in Japan the same day as Miyazaki’s film but was pushed to November to finish up the artwork. The adaptation of a 10th century Japanese folk narrative didn’t look like any prior Ghibli film or indeed any other major animated work, at times more like a moving watercolor painting than a typical feature film, and perhaps that unconventional style stretched to a runtime well over two hours explained why the movie underperformed in theaters despite widespread critical acclaim. Japanese classical composer Shin'ichirō Ikebe, perhaps best-known to Western viewers for his contributions to Akira Kurosawa’s trippy 1980 historical epic Kagemusha, was attached to the film as of 2012, but for unknown reasons he left the project and Hisaishi jumped on board.
Among Hisaishi’s East-West fusion works, Kaguya really plays up the Eastern part of that equation, with significant portions seemingly designed to evoke the feeling of an ancient folk song being discovered; it was arguably the score of his most influenced by traditional Japanese music since Spirited Away. But whereas that earlier Miyazaki score was often a large-scale fantasy, here the music is more intimately staged, with a more chamber-sized feel to the performance with the exception of a handful of climactic pieces (the romantic orchestral majesty of Flight and the buoyant ensemble for the celestial finale). Shivvers of contemporary classical music creep through at various points. Hisaishi’s various themes are also impressive, though their aversion to the nostalgic feel of the composer’s Miyazaki melodies - and the anticlimactic, understated final score track - may leave some listeners are bit cold. Score fans should also be advised that music is judiciously applied in the film, meaning most tracks on the album are on the shorter side, and thus the five pieces recorded for a 2014 concert (released on Works IV) may be a better starting point before exploring the full score.
Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/0RkkwrIWDzsYSw11lmhNYx?si=tx6C5MsQTTGGw1vZuXiTrw
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Miracle Apples / Kiseki no ringo (2013) - ****½
For his 2013 output Hisaishi received three Japan Academy Prize nominations, with The Wind Rises beating out Tokyo Family and Princess Kaguya at the 2014 ceremony. But one of his best works from this year came from a film that didn’t get any nominations, made less money at the Japanese box office than G.I. Joe: Retaliation and White House Down did, and was called “a big puzzling letdown” by the Japan Times. The dramatization of a farmer’s efforts to operate without pesticides owing to his wife’s allergy turned out to have the last great live action film score of Hisaishi’s career, a spirited and playful delight that should appeal to anyone who adored the intersection of overflowing optimism and soulful character drama in A Tale of Ululu’s Wonderful Forest. One’s enjoyment may vary depending on your tolerance for the jaw harp, which twangs its way through several tracks, but for my money the score remains an underrated gem.
It being underrated is understandable though. The album appears to have no digital or streaming presence these days (at least in the U.S.), and CDs of it seem prohibitively expensive to acquire from the overseas secondary market. Pity.
Album - https://music.apple.com/jp/album/kisekino-ringo-original-soundtrack/1442950805?l=en-US
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You’d think after yet another year of extraordinary productivity and with the composer only in his early 60s that Hisaishi would continue to crank out scores with regularity. You’d have been wrong, as this kind of prodigious output for visual media would never happen again for him. Playing a part was that Hayao Miyazaki, his sole major recurring collaborator, had said The Wind Rises would be his final film, with its advertising in the U.S. proclaiming it a “farewell masterpiece.” Also, with the composer now having more name recognition both in Japan and abroad (even getting a profile and photo shoot in GQ Japan in 2018), there was an opportunity to take some of his concerts overseas. And with scores only ever being one outlet for Hisaishi’s musical voice (he’d mused about needing a break from them every so often in 2005), perhaps it was unsurprising that he became more interested in concert compositions in the wake of Minima_Rhythm.
The GQ shoot - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzLJuo_RGYk
The years after 2013 pushed the composer in new and occasionally quite interesting directions. But for those like me (who had discovered his music in 2008 and been impressed both by his subsequent output and by his back catalog) or those who’d been following his career since his earlier film efforts, the next ten years - a “film composer emeritus” era in a way - felt like a disappointment. Like it or not, the kind of music that had drawn people to Hisaishi’s scores either wasn’t being asked for by the next generation of Japanese filmmakers or (more likely) didn’t interest him as much anymore.
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Next time: The final Japan Academy Prize nomination, two more Minima_Rhythm albums, and his first sequel score.
(Message edited on Wednesday, November 29, 2023, at 5:18 a.m.)
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