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Compilation of 9 songs and 16 orchestral pieces is moving, multifaceted
By Sean Daly
St. Petersburg Times
Published on Sunday, Jul 05, 2009
In the pantheon of Pixar flicks, the new Up makes it an even 10 gems. A Bug's Life always seems to get ranked last.
But if you revisit A Bug's Life — and you really should — pay attention to Randy Newman's score. The satirist has worked five Pixar jobs, and his marching music for Flik & Co. is nothing short of magnificent. It's Fanfare for the Common Ant, and it nods not just to Aaron Copland, but also to the magic of Walt Disney, a guy who knew about patriotism, pluck and talking insects.
A Bug's Life Suite is presented in its entirety on the new Disney Pixar Greatest, a compilation of nine songs and 16 orchestral pieces. Pixar's music — some of cinema's best in the past 14 years — humanizes and makes visceral digital 'toons created on machines.
Thomas Newman, Randy's cousin, has scored two Pixar movies, and his Finding Nemo and WALL*E are masterworks of minimalism, each one slyly evoking its movie's theme.
Michael Giacchino's score for Up is an appropriately buoyant homage to the flying music of both John Williams and the Sherman Brothers, Uncle Walt's songwriters for Mary Poppins, Jungle Book and so on. By slyly referencing Disney movies of old, Giacchino reminds adult viewers of when we were young, thus making Up, a movie about the brutal passage of time, even more heartbreaking.
The first half of Disney Pixar Greatest is made up of vocal tracks, and Sarah McLachlan's When She Loved Me, from Toy Story 2, is just waiting to tear your heart out again. Also devastating is James Taylor's Cars weeper Our Town, about the dissolution of a once-gleaming burg. Randy Newman wrote both of those songs, and I blame him for my snozzling loudly into movie-theater napkins. The best Pixar music never settles for bouncy and disposable — it often longs to move you to tears.
I'll admit that Disney Pixar Greatest isn't perfect: Rascal Flatts' cover of Life Is a Highway is a stinkeroo. And I never liked Peter Gabriel's cloying Down to Earth from WALL*E. Plus there are glaring omissions: Where's Strange Things from Toy Story? Or Robbie Williams' cheeky take on Beyond the Sea from Nemo?
Still, there's a reason Pixar songs and scores have been nominated for, and won, scads of Grammys and Oscars. The music is rousing, multifaceted, endlessly seductive.
In the pantheon of Pixar flicks, the new Up makes it an even 10 gems. A Bug's Life always seems to get ranked last.
Get the full article here.
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