: (John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams) Spawning multiple
sequels of equally satirical animation, Dreamworks' smash 2001 hit
shakes the
bonds of the usual confines for the genre and balances outrageously stupid and juvenile
humor with just enough emotional and socio-cultural sensitivity to function. An excess of
toilet humor defines
's ridiculously dumb script, but with its own endless
parodies of the animated genre (and fairy tales in general), it ranks highly on the
likeability meter. The production was assigned a music director to arrange the collection of
numerous songs that were decided upon for the film early in the process, and while
's music was largely defined by these placements, an increasing role for the
underscores in the subsequent sequels helped shed more light on the work by John Powell and
Harry Gregson-Williams for the original entry. For collectors of film scores in the animated
genre, Powell and Gregson-Williams were becoming a pairing as friendly as Shrek and Donkey.
By far the most enormous mainstream success of their collaborations,
represented the third partnership between the composers for Dreamworks' animated pictures.
In between solo projects during this era that often relied more on synthesizers than large
orchestral ensembles, the composers produced animation film scores that were quickly
eclipsing the mass of the rest of their other work in popularity. With
both strong and attractive scores in the context of their films, the duo
of Powell and Gregson-Williams walked a fine line for
. The storyboards of the
film had already been synchronized with several songs by the time of their hiring, and the
job of the composers was to integrate enough original underscore and thematic material to
connect the spaces between those songs and, in a few scenes, carry the musical load by
themselves.
Fan response to
Shrek's music was even more aroused than the scores for
the previous two projects, making it a hot holiday item when it was belatedly released on
album. Why exactly that response was so wild, however, has always been something of a
mystery. Powell and Gregson-Williams had secured their reputations as orchestral comedy
professionals, and this music fits its film well enough to suffice. But divorced from the
visuals,
Shrek is a significantly weaker score than
Antz and
Chicken
Run, mostly due to the obvious lack of originality in its constructs. All three of these
popular scores by the duo are alluring because of their personalities of creativity and
spunk, and in all three you can easily hear parody-style inspiration. But for
Shrek
the composers did little to extend those unoriginal concepts into the cohesive whole that
the previous two had formed, leaving you with a score filled with chopped up cues of limited
development because of the short length of each scene in the story. It's a score that serves
its film well enough because you don't notice the haphazard methodology in an equally
frenetic pace of on-screen action. On album, however, it becomes clear that the slapstick
narrative deals a heavy blow to the flow of the music; in the time it takes the full
ensemble to develop a theme or rhythm of worth, the cue ends and the next one sets a
different pace. Even more problematic in regards to
Shrek is the striking connection
between it and half a dozen other film scores. Both
Antz and
Chicken Run owed
much to existing stylistic mechanisms, poking fun at generalized sounds (partially in a
historical sense) instead of making specific references. Powell and Gregson-Williams still
do pull at the general inspiration throughout
Shrek, but along that journey are
several direct quotations from existing film scores from not only their own careers, but a
variety of others' as well.
The most famous and controversial of these unoriginal moments in the score
comes in "Escape from the Dragon," a wildly popular piece that explodes with rhythm,
percussion, and synthetic sounds taken shamelessly and obviously from the pages of David
Arnold's
The World is Not Enough (down to even the corny echoing effect). The cue
works brilliantly for its scene in the film, but the sheer contrast between that sound and
the rest of the score cuts to the heart of the album's problems with cohesiveness, too. What
casual fans may not realize, however, is that the theme for the dragon heard in "Escape from
the Dragon," "Ride the Dragon," and "I Object" (reportedly the work of Powell) is extremely
derivative of Trevor Rabin's theme for
Deep Blue Sea (which itself wasn't an entirely
original piece for that terrible 1999 film). Other parts of the score are suspect as well.
The theme for Fiona, also representing the fairy tale as a whole, is an extremely blatant
merging of Mark Knopfler's cult favorite
The Princess Bride and these composers' own
Chicken Run. Some fans even point to Golden and Silver Age cross references. From the
soft tones of this theme (immediately heard in "Fairytale") to especially the performances
on acoustic guitar in "Friends Journey to Duloc," the score for
Shrek owes much of
its appeal to
The Princess Bride. In the final few tracks, this wondrous fantasy
theme is allowed to hold the film's musical center stage, exaggerating the feeling that this
music has been heard before in other places. For those of you who ponder why Kermit the Frog
comes to mind when listening to the last cue in the film, it's because the dragon and fairy
tale ideas combine to form a theme with a first few measures that are a close cousin to
Kermit's "Rainbow Connection" Muppet song. These "liftings" may not be noticeable while
the film is playing, but on album, they stick out like a sore thumb. For those without these
musical references in your memory, then perhaps the
Shrek score will play better on
album, and then the music may simply turn out to be a less rambunctious version of
Chicken Run for you.
As to be expected in any comedy score with visions of turning puns with
various established musical concepts, there are sudden cuts and manipulations of gain that
accompany the haphazard nature of the film's script. Among other parody elements in the
score exist the two most famous pseudo-songs in the
Shrek film and on album. While
both "Welcome to Duloc" and "Merry Men" (a nod in a sense to Mel Brooks) were hailed as
major selling points of the album, it is exactly this kind of unlistenable wailing (in
South Park-like voices, no less) that turns most veteran film music collectors away
from scores like this. Cute parody scores such as
Shrek raise generational questions
as well, the early collaborations between Powell and Gregson-Williams continuing to appeal
to a somewhat younger crowd. Another sticky point with the
Shrek recording is its
sound quality; it is no secret that
Chicken Run exhibited incredibly dynamic range,
both in resonance and clarity. But
Shrek's fidelity is closer to that of
Antz,
lacking the tangy edge of crisp sound that made
Chicken Run a specimen to enjoy
simply for its sound. As for the contents of the music,
Shrek contains no cue that
comes even close to matching the length and robust construction of a track like "Building
the Crate" from
Chicken Run. So, in the end, beyond all the hype, the music doesn't
translate particularly well from film to album anyway. A mish-mash of short rhythmic bursts,
thematic rip-offs, and a few nearly unlistenable comedy tracks form a whole that is far less
cohesive than the second score in the franchise. Gregson-Williams took the reigns for
Shrek 2 and
Shrek the Third, the former often considered the strongest of the
three. Undoubtedly, for the casual film music collector with a limited budget,
Shrek
2 is the place to start in the franchise, with better sustained structures for the full
ensemble to perform. All of these scores, however, remain lightweights by necessity.
@Amazon.com: CD or
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- Music as Written for the Film: ***
- Music as Heard on Album: **
- Overall: ***
| Bias Check: |
For John Powell reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.28
(in 50 reviews)
and the average viewer rating is 3.16
(in 52,492 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.
|
