Last post - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=129671
See my profile for earlier posts.

I wanted to see the film before posting this, but the weekend got too busy (one can only fit in so much in a month before your kid is due). Ah well.

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

The Boy and the Heron / Kimitachi wa Do Ikiru ka (2023) - ****½

Despite pronouncements that director Hayao Miyazaki was retiring with The Wind Rises in 2013, Hisaishi never quite believed it. “I had thought that he would make another film.” But while Hisaishi wasn’t surprised about teaming up again on The Boy and the Heron, he was surprised about how the collaboration deviated from the usual multi-year timeline, as he didn’t see anything from the film until July 2022, five years after Miyazaki had commenced production (it was originally planned for a summer 2020 release to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics). “Usually, I’m shown storyboards and materials, and we have discussions about the movie which I would then compose music for. But this time Miyazaki didn’t want me to have any kind of advance knowledge or preconceptions, so I saw it when it was pretty much finished.”

Stories have emerged about how much of The Boy and the Heron was ceded by the famously hands-on director to his animation team, the octogenarian's diminished eyesight and flagging energy no longer making him the indomitable force he was in decades prior. With the music it was much the same. “He said, ‘Well, I leave it all up to you.’ Normally we would have meetings during the process. That was a real shock, because then it wasn’t as if we were going to have lots of direction as to what to do with the music. I sort of left things alone. I had some concerts I had committed to abroad. I thought maybe he would get back to me with what he wanted, but he didn’t say anything. So, I met with some of the staff who were in charge of the music and talked about when and where in the film some of the music should go. I created the demo tape. Even then there were hardly any changes requested. The only time we really discussed the music [was] for the scene where the heron comes and we kept taking away different instruments from the music. I told Miyazaki if you don’t have any music at all then people will be taken aback, so he agreed when we finally arrived at the piano.”

Even with the evolution of Hisaishi’s sound in the last ten years towards more obviously minimalist compositions (especially in his concert music), many score fans still expected the music of The Boy and the Heron to contain the resplendent instrumental colors and evocative melodies that had populated most of Miyazaki’s films. Those fans could not have been more wrong, not only because they’d ignored how Hisaishi had changed as a film composer (contrast Children of the Sea and Soul Snatcher with his 2013 output, for starters) but also because the opening of the film was different from the usual Miyazaki fare. “The first hour or so was a rather real depiction of wartime Japan and the young boy, so I decided it would be good to have myself playing the piano without much extra instrumentation. And then the second half, because it was a fantasy world, a [view] of heaven and hell, I thought an orchestra would be fitting for that. But since it is still showing the personal feelings and internal psychological conditions of the hero and Miyazaki himself, I wanted to make it a rather minimal kind of music throughout.”

The Boy and the Heron is a throwback in one way though - it’s a return to Hisaishi’s early days of selective use of themes. His wandering Ask Me Why melody (one that the composer originally wrote as a birthday present for the director in 2022 before it was used here at Miyazaki’s request) only appears three times, and the first instance is just the chords and some of the arrangement, the idea’s progressions only surfaced via percussive hints. In between the first and second appearance (i.e., the next 10 album tracks) is largely sparse and restrained music, somewhat like Princess Kaguya but without that score’s sense of folk music. Save for the jaunty opening to Adolescence and stingers related to the heron, the early goings feel more introspective than the usual animation music - though perhaps this was just a continuation of Hisaishi’s 1999 feelings about trying to avoid typical Hollywood scoring. “What we can get from Mahito’s journey is what we see on the screen. There was no need to explain through music what the character is going through. I wanted to be a certain distance from the characters - be in between the story and what we see on screen in terms of the music.”

The main theme’s delayed unveiling leads into a marginally more expanded sound palette, the low strings really hitting hard in A Trap, a larger string ensemble occasionally floating behind the rolling Princess Kaguya-like piano of Sanctuary, and Ark finally tipping us into orchestral territory complete with some quirky percussive backing that suggests a hybrid of Mkwaju and Kodamas from Princess Mononoke. The next three score tracks continue the orchestral feel, with Warawara unleashing bizarre synth vocal accents straight out of Totoro and the composer’s 1980s studio albums and Rain of Fire adding the la la vocals that were prominently featured in the film’s teaser trailer - though the subsequent three tracks (Cursed Sea, Farewell, Reminiscence) return to the feel of the early material. On the album, it’s not long before the la la voices reappear with a more robust orchestral backing in A Girl of Fire, the muted brass accents a nice touch, but again we are soon pulled back to smaller forces, A Song of Prayer (The Delivery Room) practically existing at the scale of the composer’s original DEAD Suite arrangement save for an ominous bell toll.

As the score hits its home stretch, we start to hear material that will finally appeal to fans of the composer’s more melodic works, with The King’s Parade adding some playful frivolity that wouldn’t have been out of place in a Ni No Kuni score, the two Granduncle tracks along with The Great Collapse injecting some warmth - and finally some non-muted brass - into the proceedings (as well as percussion hammering away at the same note akin to the composer’s The End of the World concert piece), and the final Ask My Why appearance providing the most essential thematic statement from the film. The ensemble piece The Last Smile ends things on a somewhat optimistic note, even if the final chord suggests some irresolution. No collection of the year’s best score tracks should be considered complete without at least one of the last three pieces, though I imagine few such collections will include the credits song Spinning Globe by J-pop star Kenshi Yonezu which has nothing to do with Hisaishi’s material and also has bagpipe noises (the U.S. album release omits it).

It will be hard for many score fans to know what to do with the music for The Boy and the Heron on first encounter (me being confounded by it actually provided the impetus for doing this rundown). It is indeed an outlier when looking across the composer’s collaborations with Miyazaki, and even the director recognized that, saying, “There’s nothing like this.” And yet It is also the truest encapsulation of Hisaishi’s belief that he had to “reinvent” himself every time he worked with Miyazaki, the score having much more in common with Children of the Sea and his more recent concert material than any other Ghibli score of his and perhaps being the only one of his animated works you could imagine being performed as part of Hisaishi’s minimalist Music Future concert series. Its episodic structure and melodic restraint, as well as its reliance on sparse instrumentation for most of its runtime, will undoubtedly leave some listeners cold. But if you have any affinity for the composer’s post-2013 output, then The Boy and the Heron - with its unusually contemplative and enigmatic vibes, its impressive aversion to what’s expected, and its terrific climactic material - will reward repeated visits.

Album - https://open.spotify.com/album/6oXCKKghd9Shmz2iU7ebbW?si=Z4P-OGTCROyhv4SWXimK-w
Ask Me Why live at the Hollywood Bowl - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G6A1ddy2OA
Interview about the making of the film with one of the animators - https://fullfrontal.moe/inoue-boy-and-heron

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

Next time: That’s it for this year! The rundown goes on hiatus until Hisaishi’s concert with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in summer 2024.

> Last post - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=129671
> See my profile for earlier posts.

> I wanted to see the film before posting this, but the weekend got too busy
> (one can only fit in so much in a month before your kid is due). Ah well.

> -----------------------

> The Boy and the Heron / Kimitachi wa Do Ikiru ka (2023) - ****½

> as he didn’t see anything from the film until July 2022, five
> years after Miyazaki had commenced production (it was originally planned
> for a summer 2020 release to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics). “Usually,
> I’m shown storyboards and materials, and we have discussions about the
> movie which I would then compose music for. But this time Miyazaki didn’t
> want me to have any kind of advance knowledge or preconceptions, so I saw
> it when it was pretty much finished.”

> “He said, ‘Well, I leave it all up to you.’ Normally we
> would have meetings during the process. That was a real shock, because
> then it wasn’t as if we were going to have lots of direction as to what to
> do with the music. I sort of left things alone. I had some concerts I had
> committed to abroad. I thought maybe he would get back to me with what he
> wanted, but he didn’t say anything. So, I met with some of the staff who
> were in charge of the music and talked about when and where in the film
> some of the music should go. I created the demo tape. Even then there were
> hardly any changes requested.

Both of these points are fascinating, and also the kind of steps in the process that tend to lead to scores we don't like as much in these parts.

> Even with the evolution of Hisaishi’s sound in the last ten years towards
> more obviously minimalist compositions (especially in his concert music),
> many score fans still expected the music of The Boy and the Heron
> to contain the resplendent instrumental colors and evocative melodies that
> had populated most of Miyazaki’s films. Those fans could not have been
> more wrong, not only because they’d ignored how Hisaishi had changed as a
> film composer (contrast Children of the Sea and Soul
> Snatcher with his 2013 output, for starters) but also because the
> opening of the film was different from the usual Miyazaki fare. “The first
> hour or so was a rather real depiction of wartime Japan and the young boy,
> so I decided it would be good to have myself playing the piano without
> much extra instrumentation. And then the second half, because it was a
> fantasy world, a [view] of heaven and hell, I thought an orchestra would
> be fitting for that. But since it is still showing the personal feelings
> and internal psychological conditions of the hero and Miyazaki himself, I
> wanted to make it a rather minimal kind of music throughout.”

I listened to DA-MA-SHI-E a year and a half ago so I feel like that was a primer for me before hearing this score. Will need to go back and find which article you talked about that piece (I heard it on the Songs of Hope album)

> The Boy and the Heron is a throwback in one way though - it’s a
> return to Hisaishi’s early days of selective use of themes. His wandering
> Ask Me Why melody (one that the composer originally wrote as a
> birthday present for the director in 2022 before it was used here at
> Miyazaki’s request) only appears three times, and the first instance is
> just the chords and some of the arrangement, the idea’s progressions only
> surfaced via percussive hints. In between the first and second appearance
> (i.e., the next 10 album tracks) is largely sparse and restrained music,
> somewhat like Princess Kaguya but without that score’s sense of
> folk music. Save for the jaunty opening to Adolescence and stingers
> related to the heron, the early goings feel more introspective than the
> usual animation music - though perhaps this was just a continuation of
> Hisaishi’s 1999 feelings about trying to avoid typical Hollywood scoring.
> “What we can get from Mahito’s journey is what we see on the screen. There
> was no need to explain through music what the character is going through.
> I wanted to be a certain distance from the characters - be in between the
> story and what we see on screen in terms of the music.”

Another potential pink flag haha.

> The main theme’s delayed unveiling leads into a marginally more expanded
> sound palette, the low strings really hitting hard in A Trap, a
> larger string ensemble occasionally floating behind the rolling
> Princess Kaguya-like piano of Sanctuary, and Ark
> finally tipping us into orchestral territory complete with some quirky
> percussive backing that suggests a hybrid of Mkwaju and
> Kodamas from Princess Mononoke. The next three score tracks
> continue the orchestral feel, with Warawara unleashing bizarre
> synth vocal accents straight out of Totoro and the composer’s 1980s
> studio albums and Rain of Fire adding the la la vocals that were
> prominently featured in the film’s teaser trailer - though the subsequent
> three tracks (Cursed Sea, Farewell, Reminiscence)
> return to the feel of the early material. On the album, it’s not long
> before the la la voices reappear with a more robust orchestral backing in
> A Girl of Fire, the muted brass accents a nice touch, but again we
> are soon pulled back to smaller forces, A Song of Prayer (The Delivery
> Room) practically existing at the scale of the composer’s original
> DEAD Suite arrangement save for an ominous bell toll.

> As the score hits its home stretch, we start to hear material that will
> finally appeal to fans of the composer’s more melodic works, with The
> King’s Parade adding some playful frivolity that wouldn’t have been
> out of place in a Ni No Kuni score, the two Granduncle
> tracks along with The Great Collapse injecting some warmth - and
> finally some non-muted brass - into the proceedings (as well as percussion
> hammering away at the same note akin to the composer’s The End of the
> World concert piece), and the final Ask My Why appearance
> providing the most essential thematic statement from the film. The
> ensemble piece The Last Smile ends things on a somewhat optimistic
> note, even if the final chord suggests some irresolution. No collection of
> the year’s best score tracks should be considered complete without at
> least one of the last three pieces, though I imagine few such collections
> will include the credits song Spinning Globe by J-pop star Kenshi
> Yonezu which has nothing to do with Hisaishi’s material and also has
> bagpipe noises (the U.S. album release omits it).

> It will be hard for many score fans to know what to do with the music for
> The Boy and the Heron on first encounter (me being confounded by it
> actually provided the impetus for doing this rundown). It is indeed an
> outlier when looking across the composer’s collaborations with Miyazaki,
> and even the director recognized that, saying, “There’s nothing like
> this.”

I think I clearly liked it on first listen, but needed another (and probably more still) to get a good grasp of what it is.

> And yet It is also the truest encapsulation of Hisaishi’s belief
> that he had to “reinvent” himself every time he worked with Miyazaki, the
> score having much more in common with Children of the Sea and his
> more recent concert material than any other Ghibli score of his and
> perhaps being the only one of his animated works you could imagine being
> performed as part of Hisaishi’s minimalist Music Future concert series.
> Its episodic structure and melodic restraint, as well as its reliance on
> sparse instrumentation for most of its runtime, will undoubtedly leave
> some listeners cold. But if you have any affinity for the composer’s
> post-2013 output, then The Boy and the Heron - with its unusually
> contemplative and enigmatic vibes, its impressive aversion to what’s
> expected, and its terrific climactic material - will reward repeated
> visits.

I think Soul Snatcher is the only score I've heard of his post-Wind Rises, which was eh, but the journey this one goes on is lovely. Plus that main theme is a winner, even in its limited usage.

> Album -
> https://open.spotify.com/album/6oXCKKghd9Shmz2iU7ebbW?si=Z4P-OGTCROyhv4SWXimK-w
> Ask Me Why live at the Hollywood Bowl -
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G6A1ddy2OA
> Interview about the making of the film with one of the animators -
> https://fullfrontal.moe/inoue-boy-and-heron

> -----------------------

> Next time: That’s it for this year! The rundown goes on hiatus until
> Hisaishi’s concert with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in summer 2024.

Awesome work! Now I need to follow up on the ones I missed. And get back to the Zimmer rundown...

> I listened to DA-MA-SHI-E a year and a half ago so I feel like that was a primer for me before hearing this score. Will need to go back and find which article you talked about that piece (I heard it on the Songs of Hope album)

Back in post #2, as the piece originated on one of his early electronic albums! https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=128129

> Awesome work!

Thanks!

> Now I need to follow up on the ones I missed. And get back to the Zimmer rundown...

Oh, yeah, that thing lol. Crazy to think that I was still working on that this year...feels a lot longer ago.

> Last post - https://www.filmtracks.com/scoreboard/forum.cgi?read=129671
> See my profile for earlier posts.

> I wanted to see the film before posting this, but the weekend got too busy
> (one can only fit in so much in a month before your kid is due). Ah well.

> -----------------------

> The Boy and the Heron / Kimitachi wa Do Ikiru ka (2023) - ****½

> Despite pronouncements that director Hayao Miyazaki was retiring with
> The Wind Rises in 2013, Hisaishi never quite believed it. “I had
> thought that he would make another film.” But while Hisaishi wasn’t
> surprised about teaming up again on The Boy and the Heron, he was
> surprised about how the collaboration deviated from the usual multi-year
> timeline, as he didn’t see anything from the film until July 2022, five
> years after Miyazaki had commenced production (it was originally planned
> for a summer 2020 release to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics). “Usually,
> I’m shown storyboards and materials, and we have discussions about the
> movie which I would then compose music for. But this time Miyazaki didn’t
> want me to have any kind of advance knowledge or preconceptions, so I saw
> it when it was pretty much finished.”

> Stories have emerged about how much of The Boy and the Heron was
> ceded by the famously hands-on director to his animation team, the
> octogenarian's diminished eyesight and flagging energy no longer making
> him the indomitable force he was in decades prior. With the music it was
> much the same. “He said, ‘Well, I leave it all up to you.’ Normally we
> would have meetings during the process. That was a real shock, because
> then it wasn’t as if we were going to have lots of direction as to what to
> do with the music. I sort of left things alone. I had some concerts I had
> committed to abroad. I thought maybe he would get back to me with what he
> wanted, but he didn’t say anything. So, I met with some of the staff who
> were in charge of the music and talked about when and where in the film
> some of the music should go. I created the demo tape. Even then there were
> hardly any changes requested. The only time we really discussed the music
> [was] for the scene where the heron comes and we kept taking away
> different instruments from the music. I told Miyazaki if you don’t have
> any music at all then people will be taken aback, so he agreed when we
> finally arrived at the piano.”

> Even with the evolution of Hisaishi’s sound in the last ten years towards
> more obviously minimalist compositions (especially in his concert music),
> many score fans still expected the music of The Boy and the Heron
> to contain the resplendent instrumental colors and evocative melodies that
> had populated most of Miyazaki’s films. Those fans could not have been
> more wrong, not only because they’d ignored how Hisaishi had changed as a
> film composer (contrast Children of the Sea and Soul
> Snatcher with his 2013 output, for starters) but also because the
> opening of the film was different from the usual Miyazaki fare. “The first
> hour or so was a rather real depiction of wartime Japan and the young boy,
> so I decided it would be good to have myself playing the piano without
> much extra instrumentation. And then the second half, because it was a
> fantasy world, a [view] of heaven and hell, I thought an orchestra would
> be fitting for that. But since it is still showing the personal feelings
> and internal psychological conditions of the hero and Miyazaki himself, I
> wanted to make it a rather minimal kind of music throughout.”

> The Boy and the Heron is a throwback in one way though - it’s a
> return to Hisaishi’s early days of selective use of themes. His wandering
> Ask Me Why melody (one that the composer originally wrote as a
> birthday present for the director in 2022 before it was used here at
> Miyazaki’s request) only appears three times, and the first instance is
> just the chords and some of the arrangement, the idea’s progressions only
> surfaced via percussive hints. In between the first and second appearance
> (i.e., the next 10 album tracks) is largely sparse and restrained music,
> somewhat like Princess Kaguya but without that score’s sense of
> folk music. Save for the jaunty opening to Adolescence and stingers
> related to the heron, the early goings feel more introspective than the
> usual animation music - though perhaps this was just a continuation of
> Hisaishi’s 1999 feelings about trying to avoid typical Hollywood scoring.
> “What we can get from Mahito’s journey is what we see on the screen. There
> was no need to explain through music what the character is going through.
> I wanted to be a certain distance from the characters - be in between the
> story and what we see on screen in terms of the music.”

> The main theme’s delayed unveiling leads into a marginally more expanded
> sound palette, the low strings really hitting hard in A Trap, a
> larger string ensemble occasionally floating behind the rolling
> Princess Kaguya-like piano of Sanctuary, and Ark
> finally tipping us into orchestral territory complete with some quirky
> percussive backing that suggests a hybrid of Mkwaju and
> Kodamas from Princess Mononoke. The next three score tracks
> continue the orchestral feel, with Warawara unleashing bizarre
> synth vocal accents straight out of Totoro and the composer’s 1980s
> studio albums and Rain of Fire adding the la la vocals that were
> prominently featured in the film’s teaser trailer - though the subsequent
> three tracks (Cursed Sea, Farewell, Reminiscence)
> return to the feel of the early material. On the album, it’s not long
> before the la la voices reappear with a more robust orchestral backing in
> A Girl of Fire, the muted brass accents a nice touch, but again we
> are soon pulled back to smaller forces, A Song of Prayer (The Delivery
> Room) practically existing at the scale of the composer’s original
> DEAD Suite arrangement save for an ominous bell toll.

> As the score hits its home stretch, we start to hear material that will
> finally appeal to fans of the composer’s more melodic works, with The
> King’s Parade adding some playful frivolity that wouldn’t have been
> out of place in a Ni No Kuni score, the two Granduncle
> tracks along with The Great Collapse injecting some warmth - and
> finally some non-muted brass - into the proceedings (as well as percussion
> hammering away at the same note akin to the composer’s The End of the
> World concert piece), and the final Ask My Why appearance
> providing the most essential thematic statement from the film. The
> ensemble piece The Last Smile ends things on a somewhat optimistic
> note, even if the final chord suggests some irresolution. No collection of
> the year’s best score tracks should be considered complete without at
> least one of the last three pieces, though I imagine few such collections
> will include the credits song Spinning Globe by J-pop star Kenshi
> Yonezu which has nothing to do with Hisaishi’s material and also has
> bagpipe noises (the U.S. album release omits it).

> It will be hard for many score fans to know what to do with the music for
> The Boy and the Heron on first encounter (me being confounded by it
> actually provided the impetus for doing this rundown). It is indeed an
> outlier when looking across the composer’s collaborations with Miyazaki,
> and even the director recognized that, saying, “There’s nothing like
> this.” And yet It is also the truest encapsulation of Hisaishi’s belief
> that he had to “reinvent” himself every time he worked with Miyazaki, the
> score having much more in common with Children of the Sea and his
> more recent concert material than any other Ghibli score of his and
> perhaps being the only one of his animated works you could imagine being
> performed as part of Hisaishi’s minimalist Music Future concert series.
> Its episodic structure and melodic restraint, as well as its reliance on
> sparse instrumentation for most of its runtime, will undoubtedly leave
> some listeners cold. But if you have any affinity for the composer’s
> post-2013 output, then The Boy and the Heron - with its unusually
> contemplative and enigmatic vibes, its impressive aversion to what’s
> expected, and its terrific climactic material - will reward repeated
> visits.

> Album -
> https://open.spotify.com/album/6oXCKKghd9Shmz2iU7ebbW?si=Z4P-OGTCROyhv4SWXimK-w
> Ask Me Why live at the Hollywood Bowl -
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G6A1ddy2OA
> Interview about the making of the film with one of the animators -
> https://fullfrontal.moe/inoue-boy-and-heron

> -----------------------

> Next time: That’s it for this year! The rundown goes on hiatus until
> Hisaishi’s concert with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in summer 2024.

An excellent series bud! You definitely liked Heron more than me but I think I should giver another listen - or just try and see the film, cause dang it looks good.

I am very remorseful that I have read none of this rundown. I have no excuse, but I definitely wanna go back and read all these!

The film is stunning. I was blown away after seeing it yesterday. It's at the same time a Very Ghibli Film while also not being much like any other Ghibli movie. I just adored it, and expect subsequent rewatches to be rewarding. Hisaishi's music, man, you nailed my exact thoughts on its minimalism. I thought of Children of the Sea in the theater! I loved how different it was while still being recognizable as a Hisaishi score. (See, this is how you do restrained and respective while still being engaging lol)

I am also reminded that I need to be careful about my admiration for creators whose work I love. Definitely disquieting to hear Miyazaki host a workplace that would qualify as abusive at times! I really enjoyed reading that interview you linked, I love hearing the "how the sausage is made" rundowns on anime (when they're not detailing inhumane working conditions...) and how the artists' styles come through on the work they do. There's definitely the same idea of an anime being the sole brainchild of the creator (like how we think of film composers), when it's in fact a collaboration that at its best is better than the sum of its creative parts.

Great write-up of this score. I haven't listened to it on album yet, but I'll be referring to your write-up when I do. I saw the film last week and thought Hisaishi's score was very effective, but not sure if it's going to translate into a top-tier effort on album for me. We shall see!

Thanks as ever for this series! It was exceptionally thorough, well-researched, well-written, and entertaining. I enjoyed it tremendously and found it extremely useful and helpful. I will be seeking out many of the non-soundtrack albums you recommended.

> Thanks as ever for this series! It was exceptionally thorough, well-researched, well-written, and entertaining. I enjoyed it tremendously and found it extremely useful and helpful. I will be seeking out many of the non-soundtrack albums you recommended.

Thanks sir - both for the kind words here and the engaging responses throughout the series.

I am pleasantly surprised that I was able to give even one of the board's fellow Hisaishi obsessives something to discover.

Also a pleasant surprise - I made it until this post and no one gave me any grief for not getting to the scores that were too hard to find for a reasonable price, namely Welcome to Dongmakgol and The Postmodern Life of My Aunt.