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| Mothersbaugh |
The Willoughbys: (Mark Mothersbaugh) Those who work
in the foster care industry have much to protest about the insanity of
Netflix's 2020 animated children's film,
The Willoughbys.
Parental abuse, orphan rebellion, and foster care nightmares are all
topics plundered for this wildly stupid but generally entertaining flick
in which the four children of a wealthy family revolt to attempt the
vacation deaths of their uncaring parents. In the animation style of
Hotel Transylvania and
The Addams Family, these kids spend
the film sticking together in their plight for freedom from the parents,
a supposedly evil nanny, and a variety of external forces that drive
them apart. With a talented voice cast,
The Willoughbys earned
significant critical and audience praise despite its disturbing
narrative undercurrents. Reuniting with director Kris Pearn after
collaborating on
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2 is musician
extraordinaire Mark Mothersbaugh, whose long career transition from Devo
new wave darling wearing funny hats into an orchestral film score
composer wearing funny hats continues. While taking much longer, his
career arc has followed the path of Danny Elfman's to a great degree if
not for the fact that Mothersbaugh never really broke through into the
non-children's-genre mainstream outside of a notable foray into the
Marvel Cinematic Universe with
Thor: Ragnarok in 2017.
Mothersbaugh's extensive credits in the animated movie realm are
highlighted by his repeated work in the
Cloudy With a Chance of
Meatballs,
Hotel Transylvania, and
The Lego Movie
franchises, much of it flashing moments of greatness despite the scores
typically remaining too fragmented to appreciate apart from their films.
In many of these assignments, as well as
Thor: Ragnarok, the
composer shows significant prowess with a full symphonic ensemble,
reinforcing notions that he could write magnificent dramatic film music
if ever called to do so.
The Willoughbys contains more of the
same but with even wilder swings between the impressive and insufferable
passages, and, to its credit, it is perhaps the funniest Mothersbaugh
score to date.
Since one of the children in the story is a singer (her
screen voice, Alessia Cara, performed the "I Choose" song for the film
and includes some melodic continuity with Mothersbaugh's score), there
is a distinctly musical tone to the movie. Expect vocal interludes with
lyrics and plenty of genre-defying infusions of tones from all sorts of
types of music. It's intelligent but challenging all the same. On the
definite upside, Mothersbaugh maintains a consistent thematic base for
The Willoughbys, with a main theme for the children, an adventure
variant, and a stomping, pretentious motif for the parents by the end.
The primary theme is a sensitive Elfman emulation, offering redemptive
feelings to more tonally optimistic cues like "I Want Her to Stay" and
"The New Family." The adventure theme really shines in late cues like
"Chase/Rainbow Zeppelin" and "Follow the Yarn," where it takes on some
similarities to Alan Silvestri's
Night at the Museum scores.
These orchestral expressions of the themes will be the highlights of the
score for most film music collectors, but surviving the outrageous spins
of the rest of the work will take patience. Mothersbaugh takes the main
theme and roars through big band swing and 1970's rock, sometimes mixed
together, shifting to softer vintage jazz tones. In "The Willoughbys,"
the two "The Willoughby Boogie" cues, "We Are Orphans," and "Parents Are
Still Alive," this material adeptly transfers the melody to a mostly
unrecognizable form. Early in the work, a harpsichord and loungey
keyboarding form a bastardized classical effect out of the swing and
rock cues. By "Melanoff's Factory," Mothersbaugh strays to 1980's
electronica in what would serve as perfect accompaniment for a Terry
Crews robot dance. (Crews voices Melanoff.) The harpsichord persists
into the straighter orchestral material as a prickly reminder of the
parents, adding faux importance to "Brochure Montage," "Nanny's
Arrival," and "Man of the House," the last cue nauseatingly medieval.
The source-like moments of pure humor from Mothersbaugh include the
demented Bing Crosby imitation followed by tropical luau tones in "The
Warmest Glove/Parents Depart" and the angelic female singing in "The
Perfect Family" that merges David Arnold choral majesty with Randy
Newman flightiness to form a real estate sales pitch that culminates
with the singers saying, "Buy this house!" at the end of the cue.
As for the more strictly orchestral passages in the
score for
The Willoughbys, the vague haunted house environment
early in the score doesn't really have enough weight to carry the mood.
Moments like "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" and "Here Beastie Beastie"
are understated, and a promising opening to "Melanoff's Magnificent
Mustache" yields the work's single, putrid stab at horror later in that
cue. But the action scenes late in the film form upwards of twenty
minutes of the most impressive symphonic material of Mothersbaugh's
career, featuring some outstanding mixing to bring a sense of
larger-than-life dynamism to the recording. Starting at "We Unite as
Willoughbys" and "Willoughby Beast," the score offers a depth of
resonance unusual for Mothersbaugh, only the return to crazed
electronica in the truly awful "Escape" distracting from an otherwise
really robust set of action cues. The duo of "Chase/Rainbow Zeppelin"
and "Follow the Yarn" is particularly impressive, for former building
upon a foreshadowed presence of yodeling in "Brochure Montage" in a way
that takes the singing and blends it perfectly with the ensemble as a
tonal accent. The main theme is enunciated with lofty exhilaration in
these cues, accelerated in tempo nicely to maximize the redemptive
spirit. The application of various percussive techniques with drums and
metals in "Following the Yarn" is another highlight. In the end,
continuity issues relating to the genre-hopping tendencies and extensive
instrumental variance are the defining characteristic of the music for
The Willoughbys, a bright, extroverted personality connecting
them all but not allowing for any semblance of consistency. The film's
narrative may be well-served to an extent by this haphazard shift over
the course of the score, but the total loss of the big band swing
element by the end is unnecessary. What replaces it is really quite
good, but there must have been a better way to connect all the wildly
disparate styles of this score into a more cohesive development. To his
credit, the composer presents phrasing in "The New Family" that adeptly
foreshadows the rather underwhelming song, which is not included on
album. On the score-only presentation, "Chase/Rainbow Zeppelin" and
"Follow the Yarn" are eight minutes of outstanding highlights; on the
other hand, there is a special place in film music hell for a cue like
"Escape." It's a Mothersbaugh score at heart, no doubt, so expect a
whirlwind listening experience for a forgiving mood.
*** @Amazon.com: CD or
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