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Review of Brother Bear (Phil Collins/Mark Mancina)

FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:

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.

FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:

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.  **

TRACK LISTINGS:

Total Time: 48:48

• 1. Look Through My Eyes - performed by Phil Collins (4:00) • 2. Great Spirits - performed by Tina Turner (3:23) • 3. Welcome - performed by Phil Collins (3:38) • 4. No Way Out (Theme from Brother Bear) - performed by Phil Collins (single version) (4:17) • 5. Transformation - performed by The Bulgarian Women's Choir (2:28) • 6. On My Way - performed by Phil Collins (3:40) • 7. Welcome - performed by The Blind Boys of Alabama/Phil Collins/Oren Waters (3:13) • 8. No Way Out (Theme from Brother Bear) - performed by Phil Collins (Phil Collins version) (2:37) • 9. Transformation - performed by Phil Collins (2:25) • 10. Three Brothers* (6:44) • 11. Awakes as a Bear* (6:48) • 12. Wilderness of Danger and Beauty* (5:30)

NOTES & QUOTES:

The insert includes lyrics for all of the songs and unnecessary glamour shots of Collins, but no extra information about the score or film.

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