Monthly Archive for March, 2011

Ponyo, the big-eyed fish princess, daughter of Fujimoto, wants to be a human. The eponymous heroine of Hayao Miyazaki’s 2008 animé movie does get her wish and she is united with her friend Sösuke at picture’s end.

Miyazaki’s films have always been a mix of imaginative animation fantasy intertwined with a vision of a darker material world: in Ponyo, a world that has spun out of balance because of the disruptive effect of man’s intervention in the natural order. The whale-like tsunami that chases Sösuke and his mom, Lisa, along a perilous coastal highway is not just an arbitrary force of nature but the result of “magic” unleashed, a power that has thrown the world off kilter. Given Miyazaki’s pursuit of a theme of the consequences of nature under duress, it is not a far reach to see a wider metaphor for man’s hubris expressed here in tropes of Japanese animation and manga. Here is the film’s official trailer.

Continue reading ‘Ponyo, And The World Out of Balance’

Anthony Tommasini's Ten: Bach (in the tondo at left), then l-r, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Debussy, Stravinsky, Brahms, Verdi, Wager, Bartok.

On the night of March 30, 1955 at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood, film composer Dimitri Tiomkin made one of the more memorable and unintentionally hilarious Oscar acceptance speeches of all time. Tiomkin, a Russian Jew born in the Ukraine in 1894 and a student of the great composer Alexander Glazunov, was one of the most sought after film composers in Hollywood. A few years before, he had been the first composer to win two Oscars the same year—for the song and score of Fred Zinneman’s High Noon. Tiomkin had created a musical voice more distinctly American than any other of his other émigré colleagues. His command of English, however, was considerably less than colloquial.

Ladies and gentlemen, because I am working in this town for 25 years, [he began] I like to make some kind of appreciation to very important factor that makes me successful and adds to the quality of this town. For my award, I would very much like to thank Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss. . .  Josef Strauss, Richard Strauss, Richard Wagner, Beethoven, Schubert, Haydn, Mendelssohn, Rimsky-Korsakov …

He likely would have continued with this litany, except the laughter so drowned him out that host Bob Hope had to intervene. Hearing the names of so many classical music giants called out during such a poplar culture celebration must have seemed wildly discordant. Tiomkin, however, was serious. Over the course of his Hollywood career Tiomkin amassed nearly two-dozen Academy Award nominations, four of them becoming Oscars. He knew whence his best ideas flowed and he wanted simply to say so to the world at large.

Today, many of our films are crammed full of pop music songs, nostalgic as well as original, with tie-ins to CDs and downloads as their own raison d’être—irrespective of the dramatic needs of the film. But film music in the Golden studio era (and for some composers today) looked over its shoulder at the giants, mining the classics for themes, sometimes employing barely reworked rip-offs. Others, such as Korngold, incorporated themes from their film scores into their “serious” music.

Continue reading ‘Tommasini’s Top Ten’