Filmtracks Traffic Rank: #339
Written 11/8/03, Revised 3/13/09
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Buy it... if you are a Phil Collins collector and are open to the prospect
of hearing an easy, but not necessarily inspiring extension of his songs for
Tarzan.
Avoid it... if you'd rather not be confronted by the same style of Collins
material re-hashed against a background of a few mundane score suites on a
jumbled, short album.
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| Mancina |
Brother Bear: (Phil Collins/Mark Mancina) With two dimensional
animation seemingly on the way out the door in the early 2000's, Brother
Bear figured to be one of Walt Disney's final attempts to tell a serious story
with old-fashioned, hand-drawn styles of animation. Set in the Pacific Northwest
before the coming of the white man, the story tells the spiritually rich tale of a
young Indian man whose brother is mauled, and, bent on revenge, goes seeking the
bear that killed him. Through a magical transformation, he himself becomes a bear,
is adopted by a bear family, and has to escape the wrath of his other remaining
brother, who is now hunting all bears for revenge. It's another cycle of life
story, and many of the morals and other story elements in Brother Bear come
straight from other Disney animations of the previous ten years. Critics were
especially hard on the film, mostly in relation to the modular aspects with which
the project seemed to be pushed through Disney while other, more viable 3D
animations were being produced. Aside from the tiresome need for a political
message, the employment of 2D animation was looking old in comparison to modern
technologies in the genre, and the music unfortunately fell into the same trap of
being labeled as a recycled production element from a time past. Just as Elton John
and Hans Zimmer were given a second chance at the animation genre to continue the
success of The Lion King (with the lackluster Road to El Dorado),
Phil Collins and Mark Mancina were reunited after their Academy Award-winning
efforts for Tarzan four years earlier. Collins and Mancina followed the same
formula down to the exact scheme of song construction and reprise statements for
Brother Bear. Collins' generic world-music sound proved to receive
consistent, major criticism from viewers of the film seeking a fresh new sound.
When bringing the same narrative voice back for another animated film, it's often
hard to sculpt that music so that audiences forget that the voice had been
previously tied (and tied well) to another setting and group of characters. While
not a technical travesty, Brother Bear failed to change the overall equation
of its music to be considered particularly memorable for casual audiences. The
habit of writing only a couple of songs and then fleshing them out in several
different performance variants was a bothersome tactic, providing far less distinct
material than a quick survey of the soundtrack would indicate.
Almost fatally, the ghosts of
Tarzan haunt the music for
Brother Bear at every turn. Collins' songs are less tied to the location of
the film this time, making his them sound like a customary solo release that he may
have produced with or without the film. The actual structure of his songs does not
vary often, making him the equivalent of James Horner in the pop song realm, and
his material for
Brother Bear comes across as a collection of ideas that he
has previously introduced in either his solo work or in
Tarzan. The pop
style is consistently subdued for these songs, and never does Collins achieve the
heart and genuine sense of family and love that was heard in
Tarzan. Nor do
listeners get outstanding instrumentation as well, with the few unique arrangements
added by composer Mark Mancina often mixed under the traditional elements of the
pop band. An interesting twist, though, is the inclusion of Tina Turner for the
vocal performance describing the spirit of the land. While she doesn't pop into
mind as the obvious voice for mother nature (as opposed to something as seedy as
James Bond or Thunderdome), she effectively restrains her voice, never allowing her
naturally harsh tones to show through, and yet, this necessary move also makes her
difficult to understand when you try to follow the generic lyrics. Mancina's score
does what Collins' songs completely fail to accomplish: insert a genuine Native
American sound into the equation. Faint Inuit-language chanting in harmonic
melodies and soft flute performances present a better representation of the
setting. The percussion section is well stocked as well (although much of the
tingling sounds could very well be synthesized), but the action sequences in
Brother Bear are not as full-fledged in their rendering as those in
Mancina's other works. This may have been an editing problem, but the brass in
particular is muted either by a lack of numbers or a poor mix. Never,
unfortunately, does Mancina capture a sense of magic with chorus that he provided
for some of the awesome landscape shots in
Tarzan. On album, less than
twenty minutes of Mancina's score is countered by multiple, redundant arrangements
and performances of the musical numbers that appeared in the film. Why can't these
animation albums ever be chronologically sequenced with the rearranged pop
performances of the songs at the end? In any case, no matter the track order,
Brother Bear marches through the basic motions and ultimately comes out
flat. Mancina fans would successfully seek and distribute dedicated score bootlegs
of his work almost immediately.
** @Amazon.com: CD or
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