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| Horner |
Once Upon a Forest: (James Horner) Political correctness in
the animated genre of children's films hit a shameless high in the mid-1990's,
led by such unimpressive films as
Ferngully: The Last Rainforest and
Once Upon a Forest. The 20th Century Fox and Hanna-Barbera production of
Once Upon a Forest followed the dying trend of combining talking animals
with traditional animation, a method of packing kids into theatres that started
ten years earlier and was giving way to better technologies. The film's false
advertising implied that it was from the makers of
An American Tail, but
anybody expecting a Don Bluth-like film was met with a clunker that offered
nothing of any interest to the adults forced to babysit through it. Bluth's
successful musical collaborator, James Horner, was indeed involved, however, and
the project came at the height of his period of countless compositions for
children's films. For Horner,
Once Upon a Forest came right on the heals
of
We're Back: A Dinosaurs Story and hit audiences just before
The
Pagemaster. While many Horner collectors consider
The Land Before Time
to be the composer's greatest (and, ironically, one of the earliest) children's
film score, Horner reach the height of his output for the genre in 1993, and by
1995, he would finish with such assignments for over a decade. Critics of
Horner's collective mass of music for the genre often state that all of these
scores are all re-hashes and re-arrangements of each other, and, truth be told,
the most logical way to evaluate them is to compare them to one another. That
said,
Once Upon a Forest is among the better of the lot. Structurally,
Once Upon a Forest wasn't intended to be a fully developed musical. Horner
was accustomed to writing title/cover songs to accompany his children's scores,
and in this case, he was asked to write three songs to fit directly into the
narrative for the picture. Even so, the movie suffered because it didn't qualify
as enough of a musical compared to Disney's superior offerings, leaving Horner's
traditional score as an indecisive piece as well. The personality of the music is
one that you've heard before from Horner, with the superior depth of the London
Symphony Orchestra sustaining a tone that is impressive even when thematically
undeveloped.
Horner faithfully revolves the score around the "Once Upon a
Time with Me" song that opens and closes the album and film. That theme is more
uplifting than many of his others in the genre, with a feel-good attitude that is
rooted in the powerfully expansive strings that Horner prefers to anchor his
dramatic material. It is this positive spark of life that makes
Once Upon a
Forest a better than usual entry for Horner in the genre. Of the three songs,
two of them are quite enjoyable. The Ben Vereen song, "He's Back," is a
regrettable big band piece that breaks up the consistency of the rest of the
score and songs. However, Florence Warner Jones and Michael Crawford both perform
songs that are classically consistent with the rest of Horner's work on the
album, and those who are overexposed to Horner's typical score writing in the
genre can take refuge in these songs. Jones teams up with a full children's choir
for the opening and closing themes (which are very similar performances, if not
identical), and their Christmasy feeling establishes several similarities to John
Williams' sensibilities for the
Home Alone scores and songs. Jones' solos
weave in and out of both tracks, and in the crisp clarity of the lower ranges of
her outstanding voice, she makes up fully for the lack of dramatic power on the
part of the accompanying choir. Michael Crawford only performs on one track
("Please Wake Up"), but it serves as a remarkably lovely combination of sounds
from
The Phantom of the Opera and
The Land Before Time. Crawford's
voice is also very low in its range, and his performance in this one song stirs
up ideas of even grander, potential collaborations between Crawford and Horner
(though such a thing has not occurred again). Although it's a rather subdued and
short piece, the song is a goosebump-inducing highlight of the album. Of the
score tracks on the album, only "The Journey Begins" has the same complexity
and classical influence that was evident in
The Land Before Time, and while
its depth is greatly welcomed, it's easy to get the impression that the
employment of the London Symphony Orchestra may not have been necessary for this
recording. The ensemble does offer a dance-like celebration piece reminiscent of
the finale of
Willow. As in Horner's other scores, the "Flying" cue
embodies the best adventuresome spirit in the score, spurring light percussion
and bold brass with
The Rocketeer at heart. Regardless of Horner's
repetitious habits,
Once Upon a Forest is an enjoyable (though out of
print) album, especially with the inclusion of the film's songs as a highlight.
**** @Amazon.com: CD or
Download
| Bias Check: |
For James Horner reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.15
(in 108 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.23
(in 203,383 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
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The insert includes no extra information about the score or film.
