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Review of Quest for Camelot (Patrick Doyle)
FILMTRACKS RECOMMENDS:
Buy it... on the commercial album if you are strictly a casual enthusiast of
animated musicals; otherwise, seek the isolated score to appreciate Patrick
Doyle's admirable, ethnically rich, symphonic work for the project.
Avoid it... if you were forced to watch the film and never again want to raise those dreadful memories.
FILMTRACKS EDITORIAL REVIEW:
Quest for Camelot: (Patrick Doyle) After the fiscal success
of Warner Brother's venture into the animated realm with Space Jam (to a
degree), they decided to put a Disney-like spin on an Arthurian legend. Their goal
was to follow the mould, to the very last detail, of the popular Disney and Fox
animation musicals that had received so much critical praise earlier in the
1990's. The studio went over the top for Quest for Camelot, signing some of
the highest available talent for the singing and speaking voices. The cast was
magnificent, with several top names accompanied by the most famous vocalists in
the world. They hired veteran songwriters and composers to produce what they hoped
would be one of the top selling soundtracks of all time. Unfortunately, despite
all their ambitious intentions, Quest for Camelot turned out to a colossal
failure, destined to be ridiculed by adults and shunned by children for its very
substandard animation, mismatched speaking and singing voices, and considerable
problems with the flow of the plot. You could use Quest for Camelot at a
college to illustrate the anatomy of a doomed picture, but despite the lengthy
list of faults with the film, the music itself wasn't the cause of the failure.
For film score and musical collectors, the project offered high priced talent that
needs to be, to an extent, exonerated from the ills of the film. Songwriters David
Foster (St. Elmo's Fire, The Bodyguard) and Carole Bayer Sager
(Arthur, Forget Paris), who both rose to fame with their pop efforts
of the 1980's, conjured the industry standard of seven songs to be featured in the
narrative. With the Arthurian tale demanding a strong, orchestral presence, an
ethnically loyal choice of Patrick Doyle was made for the underscore. The
constructs of the songs by Foster and Bayer Sager are pleasant and harmonically
simple. If you can strip away bad memories of the film and study the songs on
their own, you may note that they are a very strong group, surpassing many of Alan
Menken's more mundane efforts for Disney at the time. Following the template of
producing pop versions of the original orchestrally-backed songs as they appeared
in the film, some of these pieces are overused and beaten to death by their own
plethora of performances. Thus, the only versions of the songs that can really be
appreciated are those seven original orchestral versions that are performed by the
singing counterparts of the on-screen voices.
Both "I Stand Alone" and "The Prayer" are inspirational, upbeat pieces that mimic mid-1990's Menken songs of character aspirations. "United We Stand" is an attempt to steal percussive thunder from The Lion King, and it works. The villain's piece, "Ruber," takes the same badguy-song equation from The Lion King, and "If I Didn't Have You" is a comedy spoof of Aladdin's relief showstoppers. The two songs including the heroine, "On My Father's Wings" and "Looking Through Your Eyes," take a page directly from Beauty and the Beast, and with the best results of the lot. Most of these songs were ruined for moviegoers by the poor choice of vocalists, many of whom have no vocal resemblance to their spoken word counterparts. And while the songs are therefore an utterly useless failure in the picture, a few of them play spectacularly on album. The performances by the three Corrs sisters are well placed with the Celtic spirit of the overall package, and Andrea Corr's voice (for the heroine) presents the only truly ambitious performance on screen or album. Her genuine embracing of the character pulls her away from the pop style you hear in the Corrs' hit songs. Celine Dion, while not sounding anything like Jane Seymour and being far too confident for the Lady Juliana voice, does keep herself restrained from her screeching potential, performing in her more soothing, lower ranges. The truly disastrous vocal choices for Quest for Camelot include the one for the blind hero Garrett, for whom Cary Elwes offers a muted, dull speaking performance and Bryan White provides a strikingly disparate, nasal singing voice for the same character. White's voice unfortunately ruins his character's song of glory ("I Stand All Alone") and is painfully nasal when in a duet with the lower ranging Andrea Corr. Also an embarrassment to the picture are Steve Perry's singing performances for Pierce Brosnan as King Arthur, which are equally laughable in presenting Arthur (and James Bond, for that matter) with a Phil Collins-like rasp. Thank goodness that neither Merlin (John Gielgud) nor Sir Lionel (Gabriel Byrne) were required to break out in song. Thankfully performing their own songs were Gary Oldman as the evil Ruber (who steals the Excalibur sword), as well as Don Rickles and Eric Idle as the comedic two-headed dragon (an unfortunate, though probably necessary addition to the film). While Oldman's performance shows signs that at least someone other than Andrea Corr was having a good time at the recording studio, both his song, as well as that of the dragon, serve up the vocals in a non-singing format that do an injustice to the songs' actual melodies. Meanwhile, the orchestral elements in Quest for Camelot are considerable. The film features about 45 minutes of traditional underscore and most of the songs are backed by a deep orchestral arrangement of some kind. The first four songs in the film (tracks 2 through 5 on the commercial album) all have lush orchestral backing arranged by orchestrator William Ross and their composer, David Foster. The songs in the second half of the score were arranged by underscore composer Patrick Doyle and his team of Lawrence Ashmore and James Shearman. Despite this split in orchestral arrangement duties, the symphonic recordings all sound strikingly similar in style throughout all the songs (and equal to the score). Doyle's battle with leukemia in 1998 is an interesting side story in the production of Quest for Camelot and may explain his involvement in only arranging half the picture's songs. Concurrently to the remarkably creative Great Expectations (another fine score for a failed film), Doyle was diagnosed with leukemia and was presented with a dilemma because he was already signed on for Quest for Camelot when he began his treatment. Luckily, both the producer and director of the film, as well as Warner Brothers, valued Doyle's talents and involvement in the project to such an extent that they allowed him a considerable amount of extra time to work from the hospital in order to finish the score. Doyle expressed his gratitude to the hospital for allowing him to work on such a momentous artistic task on the premises. His resulting score accentuates the songs and introduces several new motifs and a title theme for the film. This title identity that Doyle added to the mix isn't strong enough to displace any of the songs in power or memorability, though it has the same adventuresome swing as the composer's earlier Shipwrecked and even pulls some style from his Shakespearian works. The fully orchestral effort has interesting choices for instrumentation, but Doyle learned on the project that music had to turn from cue to cue at a very fast rate, thus disrupting the flow of the overall work. In these regards, the score for Quest for Camelot thus serves as a taste of several different Doyle sounds rolled into one continuous frenzy of activity. His action music doesn't sustain itself as well as it does in his other efforts, however the moments of creativity, such as the deep male chanting that opens the film, compensate for the frenetic pace. The choral elements aren't in the same horror format as in Needful Things, with the singers even presenting the stereotypical, positive finale crescendo at the end of the film. The use of the timpani is pronounced in several major cues, with Doyle sometimes unleashing the power of the percussion section to propel the scenes of the villain's actions. In the ethnicity department, Doyle throws in a tribute to Bill Whelan's popular Irish folk music for the show "Riverdance," including mad tapping and pounding percussion livening up the score with bravado in a couple of places. For comedy purposes, the composer avoids the obnoxious side of slapstick treatment and elects, for instance, to insert a performance of several bars of John Williams' theme for Superman into a triumphant cue. The tricky part in realizing Doyle's contribution to the score is recognizing what he did and did not write. Much of the memorable use of thematic material is actually comprised of lingering arrangements by Doyle of the songs written by Foster. While Doyle does utilize some of the song's themes (especially in the final few scenes of the film), he chooses to reference his own theme for the film more often than Foster and Bayer Sager's themes, even though the songs are usually quoted elsewhere at least once in the underscore. The great accomplishment by Doyle, finishing work on Quest for Camelot and then recovering from his illness to proceed with his career as normal the following year, was thankfully made available on the film's DVD release, which includes an isolated score track (the existence of which praised by Doyle himself). The commercial CD album for Quest for Camelot was an embarrassment to Warner Brothers, selling quite well for a number of years, but stumbling over every pitfall of "popified" animation song albums. No fewer than three versions of "Looking Through Your Eyes" are shoved at the consumer, with the film version supplemented by Foster's own keyboarded (instrumental) version and a mistake-filled rendition by LeAnn Rimes (which may have been fine had it not been for the vocal errors). The completely out of place performance on the album would turn out to be its greatest success. After "The Prayer" is performed by Celine Dion in the film (with subdued attitude), Italian opera upstart Andrea Bocelli takes a swing at it, simultaneously in English and Italian. Despite the man's fantastic voice, the Italian sound doesn't fit the environment of an Arthurian film, and it further exposes the executive greed and stupidity of handling Quest for Camelot as a marketing ploy rather than a serious piece of art. While "The Prayer" is far more somber than the more energized "On My Father's Wings" and "United We Stand" songs, it was the combined star power of Dion and Bocelli that lofted "The Prayer" onto a Golden Globe win for "Best Song" in 1999 and an Academy Award nomination opposite the primary songs for Mulan and The Prince of Egypt. The irony that "The Prayer" wasn't even the title song for Quest for Camelot was lost on Academy voters, who were treated to a performance of the song by Dion and Bocelli together, in English and Italian respectively. So popular was that pairing that Dion would include it on her subsequent solo album. On the Quest for Camelot album, the recordings are both poorly mixed, causing static distortion when the Dion and Bocelli extend to upper ranges. So what is the recommendation? This one's tough. Quest for Camelot was such a horrible film, and some of the vocal choices were extremely questionable. And yet, the songs, lyrics, and score on paper (and its orchestral performance) range from enjoyable to magnificent. The commercial album (which alternated between being in and out of print for ten years) features the songs, obviously, and the performances by Andrea Corr and Andrea Bocelli alone make it worth a used-CD purchase. It has six minutes of Doyle's score, cut and pasted from all over the battle sequences of the film. Animation fans, and especially those who enjoy the Disney formula, will find merit in it. Doyle collectors will be very disappointed, however, by the lack of creative material on the commercial album, which broke the composer's 17-film streak of consecutive score CD releases (dating back to Henry V in 1989). Thus, for these listeners, the isolated score is a strong alternative. Whether you actually purchase the discounted DVD or pick it up in bootleg form, you won't be disappointed by the offering. The isolated music, amounting to about an hour in length, presents Quest for Camelot in a fascinating light. Doyle's score is seamlessly integrated in and around the instrumental backings of the actual songs, so you hear Doyle's material mingling with Foster and Bayer Sager's themes without any sudden breaks. You can hear the Corrs sisters perform the tin whistle, violin, and bodhran without Andrea's voice (or White's insufferable voice on "Looking Through Your Eyes"). A heavy and dramatic Doyle arrangement of "Ruber"'s orchestral performance without Oldman's wild vocals is a highlight. The lack of vocals in "United We Stand" vastly improves the second half of that song. So without their occasionally questionable vocals, the songs are often improved, even without the voices carrying the dominant melody, and Doyle's surrounding score is about 45 minutes in length. There are some quick fades and poor edits in the isolated music, but its existence is a very welcomed tribute to Doyle's ability to write this score while in a hospital bed. Animation and Doyle enthusiasts beware: if you acquire either the isolated score or commercial album, you'll immediately want the other.
TRACK LISTINGS:
1998 Atlantic Album:
Total Time: 45:07
* composed by Carole Bayer Sager and David Foster ** composed by Carole Bayer Sager, David Foster, and Steve Perry *** score material composed by Patrick Doyle # Italian translation by Alberto Testa and Tony Renis 2001 Complete/DVD/Bootleg: Total Time: 62:57
(Note: No track listings exist on the bootleg. These track
titles have been assembled and verified from the chapter titles of the DVD.)
NOTES & QUOTES:
The insert for the 1998 Atlantic album contains extensive credits, but no
lyrics or extra information about the score or film. The following quotes are from
Patrick Doyle regarding Quest for Camelot in 1999:
"I think [the isolated score on the DVD] is a great thing. It gives people an
opportunity to hear something they wouldn't normally hear. Clearly there's a very
large market for it. I was delighted to be asked to do an animated film like that.
It was especially poignant because it was written while I was in hospital... that's
something to do while you're basically in isolation for a few months. There's an
awful lot of music in Quest for Camelot, and the score had to change at
every turn. The consultants at the hospital did say it was fairly unusual for
patients to pursue any kind of intellectual pursuit. I was lucky in that I was
given a lot more writing time by Warner Brothers, and Frederik Du Chau and Dalisa
Cooper-Cohen were unbelievably supportive."
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The reviews and other textual content contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Christian Clemmensen at Filmtracks Publications. All artwork and sound clips from Quest for Camelot are Copyright © 1998, 2001, Atlantic Records, Warner Studios DVD/Bootleg and cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 8/17/03 and last updated 4/1/09. |
