PRINTER FRIENDLY VIEW
(inverts site colors)

The resulting soundtrack for Christopher Robin contains new songs from Sherman, reprises of his classic tunes, two new themes for the orchestral score by Brion, and one new main theme by Zanelli, not to mention a slew of ghostwriters providing bits and pieces here and there. Even Danny Elfman's usual orchestrating team became involved. Casual audiences probably won't care about the disjointed elements of the overall soundtrack, and Zanelli's team does a pretty good job weaving the new ideas together, but this haphazard methodology does have a nagging negative impact on the score. It's the kind of work that surely suffices and even excels at times, but there's an absence of convincing emotional connection in this music that comes from its conservatively rendered stance and sometimes disparate thematic interests. The ambient tone is largely fine, with the orchestra utilizing all the solo piano, woodwinds, and light chimes you'd expect for the occasion. The lack of convincing depth to the ensemble performances, even in the final action and resolution sequences, is a bit disappointing. While the concept has never blown the roof off the theatre with its musical resonance, this live action variation merited some of the ambitious presence of comedy and drama closer to Rachel Portman's vintage output in the genre, such as The Adventures of Pinocchio. There's a lot of melodic intent to unpack in Christopher Robin, but the slow and understated nature of the score's personality could lose the interest of listeners anyway. The discussion of new themes for the score has to pause for a moment to consider the interpolation of Sherman's classic themes into the mix. Sadly, these adaptations are provided more wholesale than hoped; for a film about rediscovery, the composers fail to intelligently integrate Sherman's music directly into their own themes as they become more focused during the length of the narrative. You hear the famous "Winnie the Pooh" theme, along with "Up, Down and Touch the Ground" and "The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers," dropped into the film without the kind of thoughtful interpolation necessary in this context. The album release completely ignores two of the three, with only the brief phrasing of "The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers" heard in "Nothing Ever Bad Comes from Bouncing." Zanelli, Brion, and associates essentially reinvent themes for the major concepts where all-new ideas weren't really necessary or even desired, at least not by the end of the film. The presence of the new Sherman material, including his cameo during the credits sequence, negates any argument of necessary musical separation.

The best cue attributions available for the Christopher Robin score seem to indicate that Zanelli and his crew wrote what became the film's main theme while Brion's contribution was reduced to the work's two major secondary themes. Interestingly, it's the new theme by Zanelli for Pooh and his relationship with Robin that both dominates the score and needlessly shuns the prior musical identity for that connection. Heard immediately in "Storybook" and continuing through the majority of cues in the score, this melancholy piano-led theme eventually achieves redemption by its full, symphonic performances in "I Do Nothing Every Day" after being run though a number of stylistic variants in between. It's an affable series of three-note phrases that retains its inherent sadness even in its most upbeat performances. Meanwhile, Brion's theme of mischief bursts forth in "Train Station" and "Heffalump Battle," along with frenzied extensions of its jazzy, Heffalump-worthy humor in late action cues. (These are the portions that owe the most to Portman humor.) Brion's piano theme of outright sadness is heard in full during "Not Doing Nothing Anymore" and likewise returns in the latter half of the score. Interestingly, neither of the character themes, Zanelli's nor Brion's, helms the score's arguably most pivotal moment. At the height of "A Father of Very Little Brain," Zanelli opts instead to adapt fragments of the score's prior identities into a new momentous idea of victory. It's at moments like this and "Returning to the Hundred Acre Wood" when obvious, smart interpolations of the Sherman themes, whether vintage or new, would have been appreciated. Surprisingly, two of the most engaging cues are back-to-back Zanelli entries early on; in "I Would Have Liked It to Go On for a While Longer" and "Chapters," the music handles the transitional scenes in the story with better pep and engagement. The latter features the score's only notable choral element, aiding acoustic guitar and percussion in denoting the passage of time before yielding to a singularly positive pop-like moment of optimism in the final minute of the cue that remains, almost oddly, the highlight of the whole work. When you step back from this soundtrack, you get the feeling that it could have been coordinated so much more effectively had its production process gone smoothly. The result effectively serves its purpose, but there are melodic opportunities missed and the Sherman involvement seems token. The recording is also rather mundane, with none of the improvement to the ambient depth of the concept that Zanelli had guided for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. Expect the nearly hour-long album for Christopher Robin to drag significantly during its middle passages.  ***   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Total Time: 56:50