To accompany them musically, the creators of Strange World appealed to composer Henry Jackman, who seemed indeed to be the perfect candidate for the job. Jackman has established himself as one of today’s top composers by fusing his experience as a successful record producer and creator of electronic music – which did wonders on Wreck-It-Ralph, Ralph Breaks The Internet and Big Hero 6 – with his classical training.

Growing up in the southeast of England, he began composing his first symphony at the age of six. He studied classical music at Oxford and sang in the St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir while getting involved in the underground rave scene and producing popular electronica music and dance remixes, eventually working with artists such as Seal and The Art of Noise.

So, the composer is obviously used to stretching his creative muscle to explore the most diverse of universes, from Winnie The Pooh to X-Men: First Class, Kick Ass or Puss In Boots.
Strange World provided another territory for him to explore, and was a particularly exciting challenge.

Henry Jackman: Indeed, in the case of Ralph and Big Hero 6, big themes and the big orchestra were associated with strong electronic elements. In the case of Wreck-It-Ralph, it was very much 8-bit. With Ralph Breaks The Internet, it was more modern, and in Big Hero 6, the techno elements would reflect the science of the sets, almost like the Silicone Valley. Now Strange World is very much not like that, in the sense that it depicts a fantastical, but organic, not so technological world. It is very much a celebration of the symphony orchestra in all of its pomp and glory. That’s not to say that there’s not some extended colors. It’s orchestra plus real concert choir enhanced with a kind of otherworldly synth choir that blends with it. Also, sometimes string lines are combined with fantastical string sounds. But it’s just an augmentation, unlike Big Hero where you hear things that are very deliberately supposed to sound like they come from the fabric of the world of electronic music. In Strange World, electronic elements are used to enhance and extend the sound of the orchestra, a bit like augmented reality.

AV: Indeed, the strangeness of the musical world you created for the film doesn’t just lie in these augmentations. The truth is out there…

HJ: Rather than going through electronics, the most important device I’m using to evoke another world is unusual melody and harmony. There are some augmented colors in it, but I’d rather take my inspiration from great composers like Debussy and Scriabin, composers who have a wide range of use of harmony that’s intriguing and otherworldly. Don Hall, the director, with whom I’d already done Winnie The Pooh and Big Hero 6, has been nothing but encouraging. We also talked about other musical references, like Raiders Of The Lost Ark and Empire Strikes Back. I wouldn’t dare compare myself to John Williams, but these scores correspond to a certain type of action-adventure, a certain use of committed thematic orchestra. It’s a reference for everyone. People come and know what that feels and what that sounds like. Of course, you can’t hope to reach the grand style of the master himself, but at least you could give yourself an ambitious inspiration. So, I was very happy we were all on the same page with what this world should feel like.

AV: How did you make your score “strange”?

HJ: I was working on The Gray Man for Netflix and I’d been talking about Strange World, then I got this little idea. So, I took a couple days out of the production which was in very good shape, and I came out with these four harmonic positions, like a series of arpeggios that was a sort of a four-chords sequence. When I first came out with them, I didn’t analyze the harmony, I just wrote them as they came and felt happy with them. And because the four chords themselves were so unusual, when it came to writing a melody, there was only a certain amount of notes that were available to me, and it ended up pushing me into all sorts of unusual dissonances that were still melodic. It felt like beautiful-ish and melodic but also a bit dissonant. Because it was written almost away from picture, I wrote that as 3 minute and a half piece which I called “Strange World Passacaglia”. It was strange because it almost felt like the piece was in charge of writing itself and I was in charge of serving the piece. Some of the arpeggiation with the harp reminded me of Debussy-Ravel, like La Mer. Also, something about the string line feels a bit like an Austro-Germanic tone poem, something Wagnerian.

Because of that kind of unsettling character, I was prepared for some reactions. I remember thinking that the people of Disney would think maybe that would better fit to a concert hall than to an animated feature, but they loved it in the end! Even during the recording, the leader of the orchestra came to me to ask: “Are you sure of that note? Do you mean that?” “Yes, I mean that! I know it’s not what you could expect, but it’s correct. Trust me.” Having written this piece away from picture, it provided the DNA of the score with its contradictory tension, and it made something that felt lush at the same time. Not scary like the score of Predator, but very odd. Somehow like the trumpet theme in Jerry Goldsmith’s Alien score. That’s a good example of something melodic, almost like a romantic overture for that sort of a theme. It’s melodic, it’s beautiful, but it’s not safe…

AV: How did you use that material within the very score of the movie?

HJ: Even though I wrote it away from picture, and because the directors loved it, I used it as my secret weapon, my Leitmotiv. For any entity that appears in this strange world, I tried to keep going back to this original material. Then, I kind of deconstructed that material from the Suite to fit the story. Some way or another, everything coming into that strange world comes from that piece. It’s kind of the DNA of that world. My secret code…

With our thanks to Henry Jackman, Matt Justmann and Samantha Shea.

It’s a fresh start for a definitely new take on the franchise, including the musical point of view, as the creators of the series appealed to Crush Effect to compose and perform the series’ soundtrack.

Crush Effect, consisting of music duo Jesse Molloy and David Veith, makes genre-bending music that spans from nu-funk to nu-disco to electronic Motown. Their experience with production and live music runs deep, as David plays keys for Rolling Stone’s Karl Denson (Tiny Universe); and Jesse plays sax for Panic! At The Disco, among other myriad music credits.

Transformers: Earthspark marks Crush Effect’s first foray into composing, and the creative team gave them the freedom to compose a cinematic, synth-heavy score for the series pulling sounds from modern cyberpunk, EDM, and the dance world.

Considering such an intriguing proposition, we were anxious to talk with them to learn more about that artistic adventure that promises “more than meets the eye”.

Animated Views: How did you go from record and music production to animation?

David Veith: It was kind of a slow process. Jess and I started on this adventure to get into film and TV about four or five years ago and we got to it in a backwards way. Aside from our records, Jesse and I do a lot of producing, we produce other people and we met who is now our agent, Lee, on some other’s project. He really liked our work and he thought there was something cinematic about what we do sort of naturally and he asked us if we would like to pitch for TV or film. Of course, we agreed because it was like a childhood dream. So, Jesse and I built up our reel, pitching for some pilots and TV shows, that kind of thing, and Lee got us a few pitches for Nickelodeon for some of their projects. Then Transformers popped up. It seemed like it was gonna be a good fit. Luckily for us, the creative team over there really wanted to go onto a direction that Jesse and I did naturally. They were so great. You can imagine Tranformers as a big franchise, and it’s Nickelodeon, too, and they were gonna give it to these two guys who had never done animation before and who were not TV professionals at all. But they liked the music enough and gave us a shot, and it worked out! It was so exciting for Jesse and I when we got the job. We were ecstatic!

Jesse Molloy: It was so cool! This project had people like Ciro (Nieli), Ant (Ward) and Dale (Malinowski) who were willing to take a risk and go with us on this. They believed in what we could bring to the show in terms of sound. Man, it was just super exciting for us! We had a lot of fun working on that.

AV: From then on, what was your first move? The sound? The themes?

DV: It was kind of all of the above. When we got the job, they called us and we were hoping to start right away, but because it was the holidays last year, we didn’t really get started with our first creative meeting until February. Ciro, Ant and Dale gave us the overall arc of the characters in the entire season and they told us they wanted something thematic and to punch up musically because they didn’t want it to sound like a kids’ show. When things go dark, they wanted to really go dark, which was really cool. Then, they basically gave us six weeks from that meeting to when we delivered the music for the double pilot episode and they didn’t want to listen to any of our cues until then. They wanted to watch the whole thing. That was nerve-racking for Jesse and I because we didn’t know if we were going in the right direction, and we could get fired right after being hired! But it was a risk for them, too, because it could have been a disaster, and six weeks wasted. But they were super happy with what we came up with. And now, we’re with episodes 17 and 18, and we still use thematic material that was written during those first six weeks. So, it was kind of a trial by fire.

JM: The guys at Nickelodeon really wanted to see what we could deliver all at once. It was nerve-racking but also exciting to just dive into the world they laid out. We were like kids in a candy store, or like being on a mission for something. We had to use our intuition for make sure we were on the right track and then there was a bird-eye view to make sure we were in the world we were after.

AV: Animation is a very specific kind of art. How did you find your methodology to work within that realm?

DV: Their original approach was, they didn’t want it to be a normal cartoon with non-stop music and some mickey-mousing going on. They wanted it to feel a little bit more cinematic. So, when the music does come on in certain situations, they really wanted to feel it in a way. So, we would pick big moments, and those big moments felt like tracks almost. We were still scoring, but with that kind of feeling as opposed to traditional animation music in which music follows the action in such a way that it almost becomes sort of a background noise you immediately forget. They really wanted it to mean a little bit more.

And once we got on the dub stage, we gave them a lot of options musically, so they could edit things according to what they wanted. They really responded positively to that kind of dynamic from us, and it worked. Everybody was super happy. You learn by trial by doing this now every week. You learn pretty quickly little tricks to get into a scene, more elegant ways to get in and out of things, to shift emotionally on certain stuff. We kinda fell into that. And, you know, Jesse and I always loved movies and TV and soundtracks, too, so, we kinda have a sense of what we like, things added to pictures that we like, and we sort of followed those trajectories.

JM: Also, I think it was the right time for us running into Ciro, Ant and Dale, because our hybrid approach where we have been making records while spending some years on a mission to write to picture and to score. And it was also just a good match. We just got lucky to become part of such a great team.

AV: How did you find the sound of the series?

JM: I think for Dave and I, that nostalgia-meets-modernity approach and very synth-driven world come from when we watched the family interact on the picture. I wanted to go back to that feeling, all this excitement when we watched those movies in the 80s which you want to watch again. Because it gives you a nostalgia or an aesthetic that you remember. I felt that big undertow of sound coming from that period. So, we wanted to grab that, getting inspired by the way they used music at that time and adapt it to the idea that it’s about new Transformers.

DV: When we started, they had a pretty good world musically where they wanted to live, especially Ciro, based on Tangerine Dream and Wendy Carlos’ Tron soundtrack, also some of the stuff that Atticus Ross does with Trent Reznor, like in the Watchmen series. They had a really cool hybrid world that they wanted to go in. So, we kind of took a lot of cues from that and did our own thing. We didn’t want it to sound like an 80s retro soundtrack, but we wanted to pull from those technics and sounds from that time, and mix them in with a lot of sounds from today. Something ironic with a lot of those sounds is that modern pop now is a nice blend of those concepts, too.

AV: That blending does echo the storyline of the series itself, as it is about the meeting of the old generation of Transformers with a new one.

DV: Definitely. We tried not to go to hard into one direction, but make a nice blend. The music of the original show now seems nostalgic and dated, but at the time it was the modern sound of the 80s cartoon with crazy riff guitar stuff. So, we did our own version of what modern is, plus pulling back into that world of Transformers.

AV: Did you use any vintage material to resume that 80s sound?

DV: I would say, for convenience, most stuff we do is in the computer. We’ve got some analog synths, but working remotely, Jesse would have to get the same ones, and so on, so it would not make sense regarding the constraints of animation scoring. Now, we have software that really feels like the original stuff, so we just had to make sure we were on the same software and share the same palette. It made things a lot easier for us, while making sure we have the very sound we wanted to have.

AV: Can you tell me about your thematic approach?

DV: For the first couple of weeks, Jesse and I just tried to come up with thematic ideas for either characters or places or family. It was a kind of a cross between melodic and sonic. Sometimes, it’s just a sound like when we get to a place where we can play sounds that fit the characters. Sometimes, it’s definitely a melodic thing and we try to break those down into very small bits that we can use in a lot of different ways. Most of our motives are maybe four notes, five notes, not like long-sweeping John Williams thematic stuff. For us, it made more sense to keep them much shorter because you can use them in a lot of different ways for this particular style of scoring.

JM: It’s funny because, sometimes, creating an atmosphere, you get a melody coming out of it, and you realize that it actually fits the character. I remember in the first pilot, there was this big action scene, and I would be just like “let’s get these very heavy drums! Something really driving!” And then some melody would come out of that, and you just want to add to it and work on it. It’s funny what comes out of melodicism and sound design altogether.

AV: Your music can be so magical at some times, like in the cave sequence of the pilot, and at the same time it can get so much darker than in any other animated series.

JM: Growing up, I had this backyard that, for me as a kid, was enormous. When I see it today, it’s the smallest backyard you’ve ever seen. But as a kid, it was huge. I just loved to go there and use my imagination to live adventures. When I saw that cave scene, I remembered that feeling in my backyard, thinking : this is my world. Anything can happen here. What’s fun about writing music to picture, is that I could re-live some of those of emotions, even in the smallest ways. So, there’s some magic in Earthspark in that way that you can really talk to families and kids and find things that can resonate for everyone.

DV: That cave scene was one of the first big scenes that we scored. Jesse did a lot on that one. He found the sound for it, and when we went back and listened to it, we felt we could use a lot of that for the Terrans and the kids, too. It felt right in that way. And then we knew we wanted to contrast that when things go dark. The creative team pushed us to go as dark as we possibly could, and as much as we could in that kind of series. There’s that kind of balance in that show which can be “feel good” and also like “high stakes” with either action or dark drama. It’s a nice contrast, I think.

AV: How do you share the work as a duo?

DV: Jesse and I have been working together remotely for a decade, writing ideas and sending them back and forth to each other. During the pandemic, we moved from San Diego to LA. When we got the show, we wondered how we would do it. But we just did like we always did. We have a meeting before every episode with the creative team, and then Jesse and I have our own meeting after that. We go through the cues. Usually there’s more than one storyline in one episode. So, we decide who takes storyline A and storyline B, and then when they interconnect, we make sure that we do that in a cohesive way. As we write, we send movie clips back and forth to each other and make comments. We have a good creative flow. Thank goodness we have high speed internet!

JM: It’s kind of a second nature for us in a way. You put us on a mission, be it a track for a rapper or a singer, or something for a commercial, or Transformers: Earthspark, and we’re on. It’s just like getting money from your parents and going to the candy bar!

AV: It seems you really had fun on Transformers: Earthspark. Would you like to continue that kind of cinematic adventure?

DV: 100%! Jesse and I have been doing music for decades in different formats, whether it’s playing live, touring, producing, writing, commercials… now it seems like a natural progression. It’s so much fun and so creative to do. We’d love to keep doing this. I’d love to score live action, because it’s so different from animation. We like edgy things. That doesn’t mean dark but something you wouldn’t expect, sonically.

JM: 10 years ago, I wouldn’t have imagined to live something like that! I come from live music. I’m on tour right now. Then, we got this incredible creative progression together making so different things. And now, we use all those experiences in that new adventure. So, I agree. We got the bug! We got the bug!

With our thanks to David and Jesse, and to Andrew Kopp and Yefan Zhang at White Bear.

Dan Romer is an award-winning composer, songwriter and music producer based in Los Angeles. His score includes four-time Oscar-nominated Beasts Of The Southern Wild (Searchlight), Maniac (Netflix), Good Doctor (ABC), Beasts Of No Nation (Netflix), Atypical (Netflix), Skin (A24), Station Eleven (HBO Max), and the Emmy award-winning series Ramy (Hulu). He is also the music producer and co-composer for the film adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen.

In 2018, Romer composed the music for Ubisoft’s flagship video game Far Cry 5.

In addition to his scoring work, Dan produced several worldwide hit singles for numerous acclaimed artists including A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera’s Grammy winning “Say Something,” and Shawn Mendes’ “Treat You Better.”

Animated Views: How did you embark aboard Luca?

Dan Romer: Tom MacDougall, the president of Disney Music, approached me not long after my first feature, which was Beasts Of The Southern Wild. He just said he liked my music and wanted to meet me. So, we hung out and he said, “You know, I hope one day we have a film we can work on together.” You know, I’m a huge Pixar fan and I said that would be amazing. Some years later, he called me and he said, “This is incredible: Enrico, our director on this film, Luca, separately asked about you to be the composer. So, we’d really like you to come meet him and check out the material.” So, I went up there at Pixar and saw everything they had and I became so excited to score that movie.

AV: Did you come to know what led Luca‘s director Enrico Casarosa to choose you as the composer?

DR: That’s not really a question that I would ask a director, but Enrico did say that he liked my style and that he felt like one of the things I know well how to do is adding emotion to kids running around having fun. Also, he was interested in the idea that I had done work inside other cultures’ music frameworks, like on Beasts Of The Southern Wild that I did in a sort of Appalachian/Americana type music. And then, you know, I had done The Little Hours, where I had done a deep dive into Medieval music, and on Win It All I did all the taiko drum score. So, he knew I was (going to be) able to listen to a lot of Italian folk music, film score and pop music and sort of integrate that into the score of his film.

AV: How did your research on Italian music go?

DR: It kinda came from all around. I actually looked for a lot of Italian folk music myself and I found some old, traditional stuff that I really loved. The different kinds of recording that you find are so interesting. Also, Enrico made me two playlists, an Italian score playlist and an Italian pop song playlist, and I listened to those quite a bit. In addition to that, I have two people from Italy that I work with on a regular basis: Giosuè Greco, who’s been one of my closest collaborators throughout the last bunch of years, and Lorenzo Carrano, who did the orchestration on Maniac, and they helped me on that. Giosuè is also the whistler on Luca. He’s the best whistler I know. He’s an incredible musician, a flute and a saxophone player before anything else.

AV: The musical color of Luca is very much based on pizzicati, which give the score a very original, crystalline signature sound.

DR: Generally speaking, we wanted the ocean music to be more washed out, kind of dreamier. Now, as far as the pizzicato goes, we were messing around a lot with the different sounds we were gonna use, and the thing that Enrico kept coming back to was, “I want to have an Italian feeling to it, but at the core of it, I want it to be a Dan Romer score.” Actually, pizzicato is something I use a lot when I am left to my own devices. On Beasts Of The Southern Wild, which is my first personal score, I used a lot of pizzicato. Maniac was a complicated project with a lot of different kinds of music, but for the current world music, they wanted it to sound more like my music, so that is sounds very different from the rest of the score in the show. Pizzicato is very much a part of my music-making process. It comes from my working in rock and pop production where I’m very used to having guitars as a timbre I have access to. You could obviously use guitar in film scoring, and it would be great, but for my first personal project in film scoring, I really stayed away from using guitar with my orchestral score. For Beasts Of The Southern Wild, I decided to not have access to traditional guitar playing. So, the pizzicato strings kind of stood in for that. Now, it’s part of my musical language, and in Luca, I wanted to associate pizzicato to the youth and the excitement of the children.

AV: It’s a very refreshing approach to animation music.

DR: I’m getting nervous to use pizzicato for comedy. If there are some places where it happens, it’s just part of the palette, where it kind of works well. But I’d rather try to make pizzicato sound emotional and use percussion for comedy.

AV: Was it also a way to differentiate the sea and the land through orchestration?

DR:The land and the sea have different sounds to them for sure. But I wasn’t thinking about it as land versus sea; I was thinking more as the emotional journey of these two boys and Giulia. I thought the movie would work best when thinking about things through Luca’s point of view and Alberto’s point of view more than thinking about the places.

AV: Can you tell me about your thematic approach to the movie?

DR: I wrote all the children’s themes in the same time signature, very similar tempo, and mostly in the same scales. And I did this so that I could have call and response between their themes, that I could play Alberto’s theme in-between Luca’s theme, and have a quick succession of the others, and the same with Giulia. That was very important to me, because when they’re hanging out, I wanted to be able to use all the themes at the same time instead of having just one Luca moment, and then one Alberto moment and so on. I wanted to have everyone together and evoke anyone’s melody at any moment.

AV: How did you come to the idea of the whistling?

DR: The whistling for me sort of represented the possibility of what could be on the outside of the water, you know. Once Luca gets on land, we kind of stop the whistling. Because, to me, it is really the promise of this dream that is the outside world, and once he’s there, we kind of let it go and we go to the Italian ambiance instead of it.

AV: And how did you create that very Italian ambiance, then?

DR: Well, there’s a couple of rules that I got from Giosuè and Lorenzo, basic stuff that guided me initially. But what I like doing when I’m trying to incorporate any different culture’s music into the score I’m writing, I try to literally breathe and eat that music before I start writing and while I’m writing, listening to nothing but that music. Because it doesn’t work so well when you listen to a type of music and say “I’m gonna emulate that music” and just do it. So much of making that music is the subtleties in the melody, the subtleties in the harmony, the subtleties in the rhythmic variations. And these are all things that you can’t learn just by listening once and copy. It’s something that you have to link into your soul and then, because you’ve listened to so much of it, you can write in the same spirit. I’m not saying I became as good as an Italian composer, but I think that you get closer by letting it get into your body through osmosis than through emulation.

AV: Among your Italian influences, I detected some touches of Nicola Piovani (La Vita e Bella), all the way back to Puccini (and not just for the Maria Callas aria!). Am I right?

DR: Yes, you’re correct! I was mostly focused on Italian film score music – Nicola Piovani, Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone – than on Puccini, but it’s in there, too.

AV: How did you approach Ciao Alberto in regard to Luca?

DR: I thought it was a really cool opportunity to do more of the kind of the punk rock-sounding Italian folk music that I had researched during the film. I heard this one piece of music that sounded like stomps, castagnettes and flute. It was just so aggressive and I loved it. I didn’t get to really do something like that in Luca, and so when we were talking about Ciao Alberto, I said, “I have this idea where we play the themes of Luca only using Italian folk instruments and percussion – no orchestra, no horns, no big percussion, no psychedelic experimentation. Let’s just stick to folk percussion, bass, guitar, piano, violin and mandolin.” And that’s pretty much it!

AV: Your score is very orchestral, but at the same time very intimate.

DR: You know, I wanted to use a smaller string section than usual because that’s what they were using in 1960s Italian film scores, but because of how many parts I was writing for a lot of these strings, as I was writing a lot of long strings and pizzicato strings at the same time, we needed more strings players in order to make all that happen at once. So, we ended up using a bit more than I originally intended. But because of covid, we weren’t able to record the whole orchestra at once. We recorded the strings, and then the brass, then the woodwinds, and then we did the percussion. Then we had a mandolin session, where we had all the mandolin players playing all together. For the guitar and the accordion, I had played all of them on the demos, and we ultimately ended up using mostly my guitar and accordion playing on the score. We tried to have other musicians coming for the guitar and the accordion, but it’s interesting: when you have a demo and it’s working, it’s very hard to say, “Let’s replace it,” because you’re used to the sound and the feel of the original.

What we also did was, I have two string players that I work with quite a bit, Jonathan Dinklage and Tara Atkinson. Jonathan has been playing violin and viola for me maybe for the last twelve years. He played every violin and viola on Beasts Of The Southern Wild, except for the fiddle. And Tara has been playing cello for many years, too. My engineer, Greg Hayes, was listening to my score for Maniac and Beasts Of The Southern Wild, and he said, “Your string sound is so unique. How do you get it?” And I answered, “Well, we use two string players overdubbing again and again, playing the same part over and over again.” And he said, “I think it’s part of your sound. So, I think we should record the orchestra and have Jonathan and Tara re-record all the strings and then add that into the mix as another sound that we can use.” So, a lot of the pizzicato in Luca is Tara and Johnny, and we used different amounts of different musicians in order to get different sounds on the film.

AV: How will you keep on that musical journey as a composer?

DR: I would say that a lot of very interesting harmonic and melodic ideas got brought to my attention throughout studying these Italian film composers and I will say, the next thing that I have coming out is a HBO Max series called Station Eleven and I think there’s actually a fair amount of influence from the harmony and melody that I picked up during Luca in that show.

With our thanks to Dan Romer, and Adrianna Perez and Kyrie Hood at White Bear, and April Whitney at Chronicle Books.

With Encanto, Germaine will be cemented in history as the first-ever female composer to score a Walt Disney Animation Studios feature film.
Before that, she co-wrote and produced five of Coco’s original songs with co-director Adrian Molina, including “Un Poco Loco” and “Proud Corazón”, and also provided additional music.

Recently, she scored Kung Fu Panda Land Of Awesomeness for Universal Studios Beijing, and completed two feature films for Universal Animation, Curious George: Go West, Go Wild and Curious George: Royal Monkey. She co-wrote and produced the main title theme song for the hit Nickelodeon show The Casagrandes. She also did the music for two of 2019’s six female-composed films: Little and Dora And The Lost City of Gold.

To prepare the score of Encanto, Germaine fully immersed herself in Colombian music, culture, and literature. Her music is a love letter not only to that country and its culture, but also to the characters of the film to whom she felt so connected.
She tells us more about her journey with this very original movie.

Animated Views: As Encanto is set in Colombia, how did you dive into its musical traditions?

Germaine Franco: I got into the film and the music by listening to a lot of Colombian music. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to go to Colombia because of the pandemic. So, I brought Colombia to me! I listened to thousands of hours of music, from the 1850s all the way to contemporary music. I got into the different genres and all the different regions.

Also, I was able to work with Colombian session musicians who live here in the United States, like Justo Almario, who is a clarinet and sax player, and percussionist J.B. Perez.

I used authentic Colombian instruments, too, like the tiple and the bandola, which are different types of guitars. I literally bought an arpa llanera, a marimba called marimba de chonta, which is a very specific Colombian marimba, and some percussion instruments, tamboras and other hand drums called cununos, and lots of shakers. I had them all shipped to me so that when I recorded, I was using these instruments that have that specific sound from Colombia.

AV: How did all these instruments inspire you?

GF: First, I wrote at the piano, getting all the melodies and themes and motives and harmonies. And then, as I was continuing to write, I was buying those instruments and was inspired by their sound. So, I found the place to use them in the score, seeing what works better for each instrument.

I also developed a lot of textures because there’s this idea of “magical realism” in literature, which is very common in the literature of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other Colombian writers. It is not specific to Latin American literature, but it is often there. So, the question was – how could we apply that idea to music and sound? A lot of it was kind of having some ambiance sounds. I used some instruments like the harp and the bandola and did a lot of sound effects like tickling the strings a little and having fast and slow tremolos, and then I would layer them with a lot of other instruments in order to develop a texture in certain moments, like when Mirabel walks into Bruno’s tower.

AV: In such a musical film, with so many songs, so many themes, how did you find the score’s own voice, thematically speaking?

GF: That was a very important discussion. When I came in, Lin had already written these fantastic and beautiful songs. So, what we talked about was – we should limit the amount of themes that we tie to each character because if there’s too many, you can’t remember them. So, basically, we decided to make (fewer) themes. One of them was for Mirabel. You can discover it at the beginning, when you first see Abuela speaking to her. It’s very simple, in 3/4. And then, when the brothers and sisters are getting their magic, it starts to expand and becomes the Encanto theme, the overall theme of the casita. It’s not necessarily tied to the house, but it’s kind of the magic of the house. I varied this theme in many different ways. For example, when Abuela is praying, you can hear the Encanto theme very simply on strings. It also comes back many times in different time signatures, harmonized differently. It’s always changing because the house is also always changing, and so is Mirabel.

I used different Colombian rhythms with this theme so that it would change but remain Colombian. For example, when Antonio receives his gift, the idea from Jared and Byron was to make it very Afro-Colombian. They were thinking of the Choco Rainforest with that beautiful imagery of the trees and the animals, and it perfectly went with Afro-Colombian rhythms, one being called “Bullerengue” and the other one “Mapalé”. You still hear the Encanto theme, but it’s done in a completely different way.
Also, in that scene, we actually had a Colombian choir that I was able to add.

You know, Carlos Vives is one of the most amazing singers from Colombia. He’s singing the song “Colombia mi Encanto” in the film and on the record, and I saw his band live at the Hollywood Bowl, which was another way I got into the Colombian sound. I was able to talk to the musicians afterwards, and I invited the accordion player named Christian Camilo Peña to play on the Cumbias. I also wanted the singers. So, we gathered 12 singers after they went back home in Colombia and we did a Skype/Zoom choir session. It took a long time, but it was great. So, we got these incredible Colombian voices on that one particular cue and then also we had the accordionist play on several cues, which is so exciting because he’s got this sound, with his button accordion, which is very different from the keyboard accordion, very different from the Mexican, or French or even Italian accordion. Every country has its own accordion style, and I was happy to be able to get his. He did not read music. So, what we did was – I had the guitarist who played on Coco, named Federico Ramos. He also played the tiple, the mandola and the guitar on Encanto and he would play the melodies, like maybe eight measures, and then Christian would learn it by ear, and then they would go back and forth. And it was worth it because it just sounds so great.

Those experiences working with the musicians and singers were really excellent and so inspirational in terms of interchange of musical ideas.

AV: How did you approach that fantastic Colombian choir?

GF: The choir is a very important part of the thematic phrasing on Encanto. You can hear it first right from the beginning, when the mountains are opening up. To me, the choir always has to be about the feminine voice of Mirabel. I wanted to represent the feminine spirit of the music of Colombia in film. So, I studied this type of singing called “Cantadoras”. They’re descendants of slaves that escaped, and they kept their singing style alive. The women are playing marimbas and percussion and shakers as they’re chanting. When I heard that, I said, “I love these voices. This will really make this scene come alive.” I was gonna try it with the LA session singers, but I didn’t really have anyone that I thought could really do it, because it’s Afro-Latino. So, I thought, as I drove away from the concert by Carlos Vives, let’s get Isa Mosquera, who’s one of his singers. She got twelve singers, and we recorded each voice separately, you know soprano, alto, tenor, bass, so I could really mix it really well, and then, after I edited their part, I added the Los Angeles choir of 22 singers. So, the LA choir had to match the sound of the Colombians, and they did a great job. I worked with Edie Lehmann Boddicker, one of the top vocal conductors and contractors, and she’s singing, too. She’s been on so many of my projects and she really helped me get an amazing sound.

AV: I was really impressed by that very special, magical sound, and it reminded me somehow of the Bulgarian Women’s choir singing in Brother Bear.

GF: I didn’t know that score for Brother Bear, but the funny thing is – it was really difficult to make demos of that sound with the synthesizer and the music library. When I write on my keyboard, I have these different sounds, but that very specific choir sound you can’t recreate unless it’s real people singing. So, when I would make the demos for the directors, I was using the Bulgarian choir sounds to show them what it could sound like! Then I would say, “But it’s gonna be different. I can’t demo this until I actually do it for you live.” And they were really kind enough to believe that I would get that sound, because they didn’t really know what it would sound like ‘til they heard it live. And when Jared and Byron finally listened to the choir live, they loved it. They really let me do my thing on that. I have to say that I just kept working on that one over and over. Every time I would show it to them, I kept changing it. Even after they approved the cue and I had it sent to be orchestrated, I would still be changing it. Even the night before the session. Because I really wanted to keep adding more, because I wanted to make it the best I could.

AV: Colombia is a country of great diversity, which shines through its music, that has so many cultural influences. How did you manage to keep true to that diversity and richness of styles, while keeping a cohesive voice to your score?

GF: Well, I always stuck to the theme, I think that would be the answer. And I also did limit myself to certain types of rhythms. There are so many other Colombian rhythms that are not in the movie. You know, one of the executives on Coco and now President of Walt Disney Music Tom McDougall used to say on Coco ,”This is not a documentary”. So, that would kind of let me have that freedom to pick and choose which rhythm to use.

That was kind of my challenge on this film to figure out how to tell that story musically, be true to the directors’ vision, embrace the Colombian culture and rhythms and still tell a Hollywood story. So, you don’t have to use every single rhythm from every region in Colombia, because we wouldn’t have the time. We’re telling a story and we use the ones that work, like for example the “Joropo”, which is a kind of dance. This whole piece is on the soundtrack. It’s very fast, with lots of triplets. I really wanted to put that in, and I found places that would work. I couldn’t use the entire piece as a whole, so I used sections of it. But the point is, wherever I used this rhythm, I was still sticking to the theme. Even if I changed the harmony, I still had the melodic material. Otherwise, you could go anywhere.

Also, the directors, Jared, Byron and Charise, were very helpful with that, because they were very clear on what they wanted. We had so many discussions and meetings about what the music was supposed to do and what were the characters and their intent. So, I think it wasn’t just me. It was a collaborative process.

AV: What connection did you feel with Mirabel?

GF: I obviously connected with Mirabel because she is very strong-willed and also she never gives up. She keeps going and she’s always on the move trying to figure out how to help her family and how to repair and fix the problems with the house. So, I tried to find a rhythm for her that would always kind of be underlying. I gave her the Cumbia rhythm which is like the national rhythm of Colombia. I personally love Cumbia and the directors do, too. It’s so Colombian. So, I did have that connection, and I basically accompanied her with different elements of Cumbia. Even though when she’s in an action thing, you can still hear it behind.

AV: You not only scored the whole movie, but also participated in the arrangements of the songs.

GF: Most of the songs were already written when I arrived on the movie. Lin would be still changing things here and there, but I was asked to add some orchestra. They were already arranged by Lin and Mike Elizondo with the rhythm section and the vocals. So, what I did was adding orchestral elements sometimes to help make them more cinematic. That was really great to do. And certain songs have more orchestra, like “Waiting On A Miracle” and the last song, “All Of You”. Also, one thing I did was to work on getting from the score into the song. Sometime, I would write a little intro into the song so it sounds like the score is going right into it.

Collaborating with Lin was so exciting because he’s such a wonderful writer and storyteller, musician, composer and singer. He’s got so many ideas and they’re all great. So, basically, I had his demos and Mike would send me his Logic sessions, and then I would put the strings and other orchestral elements on top of that. And we would go back and forth. Then I was able to produce the orchestral sessions for the songs. That was really exciting because the songs sound great without the orchestra, and then the orchestra just gives a little more lift. It was super fun to do.

AV: What does Encanto represent for you as a musician and a composer. What did that experience bring to you in your overall journey as an artist?

GF: Encanto for me represents a turning point in my career as a writer, because I was able to work with such an incredible team of filmmakers and collaborate with Lin. It just really pushed me as a composer. It was definitely a journey as a composer to start with just one scene and then be able to develop the score from the beginning to the end. I had really great support from Disney. To be able to record for almost a month with live musicians, that just doesn’t happen often anymore. Today, so many things are done, as they say, “in the box,” with the composer doing all the parts. You know, I can do that, and I do that. But having all the resources to record an orchestra for two weeks, and a choir in Colombia, and all of these incredible soloists like Pedro Eustache interpret my music is such a highlight in a musical journey. It’s just so gratifying, and I am so grateful.

It represents a point in my work where I’m showing myself what I can do. Especially during the pandemic. While we were recording, we had a covid officer. We couldn’t record the normal way and had to be flexible and figure out how to get it done in the middle of covid. I feel happy that I was given so much support and also was able to finish it in that context.
In the end, I’m so happy with the soundtrack. I love the soundtrack. I love the way the movie came out.

I guess the best part for me was, when the film came out, I went with my mother to see it, and she was so happy. My mom supported me since I was so young. She was watching Encanto, and it kind of blew her away!

With our deepest thanks to Germaine Franco, Adrianna Perez and Kyrie Hood at White Bear, and April Whitney at Chronicle Books.

Describing that music as a “space opera” is not hyperbole, considering the amount of imagination, culture and talent the composer put in this score.

Raised in Chicago by a master woodworker, Michael approaches each score like a carpenter with a keen eye for craftsmanship. Combining a spirit of inventiveness with meticulous attention to detail, he believes that materials matter, and uses his expansive collection of instruments and cutting-edge technology to craft a score uniquely fitting of each project. A passion for the process of filmmaking lies at the core of his work, and through collaborating with directors and producers, he loves the challenge of guiding a project from the script to the final mix.

Michael Kramer is a two-time Emmy-nominated composer and multi-instrumentalist for film, television, and video games. A graduate of USC’s prestigious film scoring program, he scores the hit Cartoon Network TV series LEGO Ninjago: Masters of Spinjitsu, for which he received a 2020 Emmy Award nomination.

In 2019, Disney Imagineering recruited him to write and produce several tracks for Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, the highly anticipated new land in both Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Playing in the “Oga’s Cantina” attraction, one of his featured tracks is a follow up to the iconic “Cantina Song” from the original Star Wars film.

Other TV credits include Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, Netflix’s Healing Powers of Dude, DreamWorks TV’s Rhyme Time Town, and Disney XD’s Lego Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures, for which he was also nominated for a 2017 Emmy. On the big screen, Michael’s music can be heard in Furious 7, Thor: The Dark World, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, on which he collaborated with Brian Tyler. His video game credits include Need For Speed: The Run, Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, and Assassin’s Creed: Unity.

Obviously no stranger to composing for animated series with sweeping mythologies and larger than life characters, Michael utilized his musical world building acumen to find the perfect vibe for this brand-new take on the classic sci-fi/fantasy franchise.

Michael Kramer: I was thinking the other day of this idea of re-creating a beloved franchise, and I was trying to find a metaphor with something in my own language, and the closest thing I could come up with was a song cover. I looked for the best song covers I know, and for me, the best song covers are the ones that stay true to the soul of the song. And at the same time, you’ve got to bring something new to it, something that feels authentic to you, to your voice and to your generation. Otherwise, why re-do it? Then I thought of the cover that Johnny Cash did of “Hurt”, the song by Nine Inch Nails. That was a wild thing: Johnny Cash, the legend of folk, covering the industrial music of Nine Inch Nails! But in the end, they both have a darkness in their spirits and they’re both connected to the soul of the song, yet in different ways and coming from different generations. Hopefully, we did the same with He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe. It’s a different take, a different cover. It’s not the same tone, but it still feels like the original song.

What’s incredible about the MOTU universe and mythology is that it is so vast. So, as a composer, it was simultaneously exciting and daunting because there are so many different characters and the world is so big. I wondered how to support that musically. It took me almost months to sit down and figure out the amount of themes that would be required, how they could evolve with the characters, and what concept each one could represent in addition to its very character. But it was crucial to have that kind of roadmap of the themes before even sitting down at the piano. Rob David was instrumental in that. He helped me choose the episodes where I could use my themes, and in some cases, he advised me to save a theme for later because he knew each detail of the overall show, and that it would be more efficient that way. He was my Gandalf in the scoring process! Jeff Matsuda helped me a lot in that process, too. It’s such a big world and it was so fun to play in it.

AV: How familiar were you with the franchise before?

MK: I was born in ’83, the year the series came out, so I actually watched the show later in life, but most of all I had all the action figures. I had Castle Grayskull, I had Cringer, He-Man and even the weirder characters like Stinkor. I had a vast imagination in my mind that I filled up playing with those characters as a child. For me, it was very special to work on this project because I had an internal take at what the universe was and I think it was easier for me to re-imagine because I wasn’t so attached to what the original show was. I had seen episodes but I wasn’t a huge, die-hard fan of the show. I was of the characters and the mythology that those characters created. So, it was a unique situation because of that.

AV: What was your attitude regarding the original score of 1983, developed then by Shuki Levy and Haim Saban?

MK: I would say that it’s a very different approach from what they did; but also similar, as it’s a classic scoring, with big themes for when the characters are on screen, in the footsteps of great film composers like John Williams. So, it’s very old-school in the sense that the score of the series is heavily based on themes. I’m first and foremost a melodic composer. I believe in the power of melody. It’s not used as much as it could these days, but when it’s done right, it’s unforgettable. The showrunners gave me so much freedom to use melody in huge ways. There’s just so many melodies in the show. It allowed me to get closer to the characters and follow their arcs. So, the score is really my take as an artist, but at the same time, I tried very much to stay true to the soul of the original score when I can.

Take the original transformation cue. It was written in a very specific musical mode. I didn’t use the original melody, but I did use that same musical mode. So, it feels the same since they’re written in the same musical scale but it’s different at the same time.

AV: Your take seems very close the original Wagnerian Leitmotiv approach to music.

MK: Absolutely. Traditional film score Leitmotiv is about hearing the theme of a character when he or she appears on screen. What we did here is slightly different. In the series, the melodies not only represent the characters, but they can also represent a concept. For instance, Adam’s theme is the melody for Adam, the melody for He-Man, but it’s also the melody for Castle Grayskull. And in addition to that, the first few notes of the theme make the motive for the sword of power, and the melody itself also represents the idea of power. That means that I’m free to use that melody when Adam isn’t on screen and we’re talking about the concept of power. That allows me to create additional connections in the story in evoking what each melody represents.

AV: Speaking of concepts, each character represents one power. For instance, Duncan is the Master of Technology and Teela Master of Magic, two opposite domains typically associated in Masters Of The Universe. How did you treat them?

MK: In that matter, it’s more a question of color than a question of melody. For instance, Duncan’s music has very much like a synth-based sound. I have tons of 80s synths which I used for Duncan, because those fun 80s synths vibes capture that sense of technology. For him, I also appealed to a different meter. I mean, usually, for a song, you use a four/four time signature. For Duncan, I used a seven/four time signature. It’s a way to show the complexity of things in his brain.

On the other side, for magic, I wanted to find colors that look ethereal. So, I used much more voice, and bowed instruments. I also did a bunch of experiments, like taking chimes and processing them so that it sounds like stars or the universe, anything that doesn’t look terrestrial, not from this world.

AV: And these two aspects are reunited in the character of Ork-0.

MK: Yes! Ork-0 is the perfect example of magic and technology united in one character. And on the top of that, it was also a matter of trying to find a theme that felt funny, in tune with his personality. In terms of blending many different tones together, that one was maybe the most complex character to treat, but it was great fun.

AV: Then we have Cringer, the Master of the Wild.

MK: Cringer was really fun for me because I’ve been scoring Ninjago for more than 10 years now and that score has so much instrumentation from around the world. Pretty much every season, I buy a new instrument from around the world for the show. In my studio, there are instruments from South America, Asia and many more. For Cringer and the tiger tribe, I liked to play on world colors. That was great fun to use that side of my voice as an artist. So, I tried to tap into the sense of wild in creating that wild pattern for the percussion that feels like galloping, and then we processed it. But the other side of the tribe theme is the idea of family. The fun part of that theme was finding a way to marry the idea of something wild, out of control and untamed with a sense of home, of warmth. That helped create a theme that’s really unique.

AV: How did you treat Skeletor?

MK: It was a really fun melody to work on. It’s actually one of the first melodies that I “cracked the code” and I was so happy about it. I wanted the first note of his theme to look like out of place. It has nothing to do with the key of the piece and it feels very disturbing because of that. And from there, the melody climbs and expresses his thirst for power, just like the theme of Scar by Hans Zimmer in The Lion King. The theme goes stronger and stronger as the series goes, and even explodes at some time. For that moment, I screamed myself into the microphone and recorded that! It’s pure evil! It was really fun to create music for that character!

AV: How did you put all these elements together for the recording?

MK: It’s a really large score in terms of palette. It has three buckets, as I call them. One is very classic orchestra, huge and epic, the other is synths and then the third is more world colored and more experimental sound design. All those three required very different tools to accomplish (my goals). For the orchestral sound, it was me and my computer. I have a pretty crazy computer set up with multiple computers here, and this show pushed it to the limit. When we got through the first episode, we were approaching 500 tracks! I was, like, ‘this is just the first episode and I know there’s a lot more to come with new colors. I don’t know if I’m gonna make it!’ On the production side, I was really trying to push the envelope to make the orchestra sound as realistic as possible.

For the synths, I used lots of custom synths from the 80s, Juno and Moog for instance, and also some more modern electronic sounds.

And then, the third bucket, my favorite, is world music and more experimental sounds. That was more me and my team in the studio recording different things and trying to bring more life into the score. For Teela, I used a dulcimer, which you play like a cello with frets and sounds like a viola. For Evil-Lyn, I teamed up with this very talented cellist and had him play most crazy textures and gestures. That’s another aspect of the orchestration of the series. Each hero has its evil counterpart, like Teela and Evil-Lyn. So, I tried to use the same kind of instrument for both of them, like bowed instruments here, but treated differently. Teela’s sound is more wispy, whereas Evil-Lyn is more violent. And that goes for all the characters. Similar colors but they’re like the opposite ends of the spectrum of good and evil.

AV: For all these reasons, that score really stands out from anything we’re heard in an animated series!

MK: I am so grateful for this project. It came at a time in my career where lots of things converged at once. Netflix, Mattel and the showrunners gave me the freedom to write and experiment in a way that’s unprecedented in my career. I feel like now I’ve really found my voice. I know who I am as an artist much more clearly.

The reason why I took so much time and care into going so deep with the themes and the colors is that everybody else around me in the show was (doing the same). It was infectious. Be it the showrunners, the story editors, the animators, the layout artists… everybody put so much time, detail and efforts in it. You can see that for instance in the facial animation of the characters. It’s so subtle. Even on the side of the screen, you can see so many details. No one will probably ever notice, but I know it because I watched each scene a hundred times. That level of detail is infectious and makes you want to push yourself and do better.

AV: For a series about transformation and coming of age, the journey of the characters seems to have been yours at the same time!

MK: I have thought of this a lot! I really felt like my experience was close to what was going on screen. One of the things that I really love about the philosophy of the show is the idea of teamwork and shared power and it’s one of the life lessons that I really learned from the showrunners. They really entrusted me to do what I do, and I had the same attitude regarding my team. I gave them a lot of trust and they always surprised me. That idea of shared power is very important for our times. That’s also the message of the show for kids: it’s okay to be who they are. The power is already within them. They just need to find it…

With our deepest thanks to Michael Kramer and Kyrie Hood.

To accompany musically that voyage between tradition and modernity at the heart of China, Chris Appelhans appealed to composer Philip Klein. Philip’s music has been heard in film and television projects for Sony, Disney, Pixar, Lionsgate, ABC and CBS. Recent projects include the Roadside Attractions drama The Last Full Measure, and Neon’s Pig. He also penned 18 new orchestral arrangements for Aerosmith’s Las Vegas residency, Deuces Are Wild. As an additional writer, Philip has collaborated with some of the finest composers working in film and TV, including Harry Gregson-Williams, Carter Burwell, Alex Heffes and Fil Eisler. He is also in demand as an orchestrator, having had the honor of working with James Newton Howard, Alexandre Desplat, Ludwig Göransson, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Steve Jablonsky, David Buckley, Stewart Copeland and several other amazing artists. Recent orchestration credits include the Oscar winning Joker, Oscar nominated News Of The World and Disney’s Raya And The Last Dragon and The Mandalorian.

Here’s our conversation.

Philip Klein: I am good friends with one of the Producers. His name’s Aron Warner. He’s done all of the Shrek films. He’s kind of a genius when it comes to animation. He had been working for a while with Director Chris Appelhans, and he thought that I would be a good fit with Chris. I submitted some demos and got some meetings with both of them. Chris and I just got along really well from the beginning, so it felt like a natural fit. It was a joy to work on a film like that. When you get such a nice film, it makes your job easier as a composer.

AV: What’s the spirit of the music of Wish Dragon?

PK: None on the film really wanted us to go down a completely Eastern path, with a completely Chinese score. And obviously, I’m a Western composer. So, what we set out to do was create something that was very layered; use influences from that world, but do it in a more unique way rather than just putting soloists on top of the Western orchestra. So, we got very deep into Chinese folksongs and traditional instruments. It was fun working on those. It made us feel certain emotions. And then I either played them on my own, or I hired soloists from all over the world and started to get audio back. Then, we just kind of manipulated and used it in interesting ways as textural things. For Din, the main character, who is very bouncy and happy, a lot of his music is based on plucked instruments that we used as rhythmic texture things, whereas for the more romantic elements or kind of grand and broad elements, we would take winds or even strings. So, I think it’s a layered score that lives in this Western and Eastern environment.

AV: Can you tell me more specifically about your Eastern inspirations?

PK: You know, when they’re brought on to an Asian score, some Western composers choose to use the pentatonic scale. Even if you’re not a musician, you can recognize the sound of those five notes as being Eastern, Asian sounding. But Chris and I never really thought that was appropriate. So many of the Chinese folksongs are kind of based in that world but we more used them for the harmonic elements and kind of the performance of them, how the instruments were being manipulated to play that way. And then, we said, “Okay, these two instruments work really well together and it makes us feel like we’re with family. These are just two family members in the corner of the room playing together.” For instance, we would have the Chinese moon guitar, which is call the ruan, and then we would have also the guqin playing with that, because those two playing together felt like a very natural duet and are often used in folk music. So, we were taking influences from the orchestration of things and also the mood of that stuff. We never directly lifted thematic material from that. It was more just to inform me of the kind of feelings that you could get from these instruments and how I could use that in the score.

AV: The choir seems also very important in that regard.

PK: Yes. I’m a big choral fan. There’s a lot of fun sequences in the movie, like when Din makes his first wish and he doesn’t even know he’s making his first wish, and suddenly he has this ability – without giving the movie away – to do something very traditional. So, I used a lot of like Asian shouting which the choir had a great time doing. So, the choral shouting and stuff like that seemed pretty natural in that world. And it adds a bit of lightness and kind of fun because of what’s happening on screen, and then there’s also the more traditional choral stuff like near the end of the film as we get into the more grand emotional statements of what’s happening on screen.

A lot of that kind of material in Wish Dragon is also based on Chinese operatic percussion. We did quite a bit of pre-recording with traditional Chinese percussive instruments like gongs and large drums that are bigger than anything we can see here in the Western world. There’s a theatricality to that playing that worked really well when we put it up against the action sequences in the film, and it gave this momentum that just the orchestra couldn’t do on their own.

AV: The choice of the “pipa god” as one of the main characters shows the importance of music in the movie.

PK: He was in the script from the beginning. They didn’t necessarily know the piece of music that he was going to play, and he ends up playing one of the most famous pipa pieces in Chinese repertoire. We found a brilliant pipa player whom we licensed the performance from and then they animated it. I had to take videos of pipa players playing because the animators needed to know how it is actually played in order to animate the first sequence of the movie. Pipa is not played like a traditional guitar; it’s held differently. And then the pipa became a pretty large character in the film. I was using it throughout the score as another element of plucking, rhythm and energy.

AV: The film is set in Shanghai, a city that presents an interesting blending of tradition and modernity. How did you echo that aspect in your score?

PK: You could balance the old and the new in this movie in a lot of ways. Din and his mother still live in an old “shikumen,” which is very old Shanghai traditional housings; and then on the other side, there’s this massive urban growth of the city. So, there’s that sequence at the beginning of the film when we kind of timelapse over Shanghai being built up, and you get a more modern synth-heavy piece of music playing over that, and it kind of thrusts you into this new world. What Chris and I always tried to do on any part of the story that deals with Din and Li Na, which is kind of a friendship-romance-present-day-story, we balanced that kind of thematic identity and that kind of sonic world with more synthetic textures. They have a little thematic motive between those two that’s based on just a little fluttering, pulsing little synth, and that pulls you more into the modern world; whereas when it’s more about Long’s life, the Wish Dragon, we let the orchestra come up a little higher in the mix and it gets a little more grand and traditional. We allowed the Chinese instruments to go a little more forward, too, to sound a little more “old world”, in a way.

The same with the bad guys, the bad goons as they are referred to. They kind of chase Din throughout the movie, and they’re very modern, they look like they’re on the cutting edge kind of guys, and a lot of those textures are very synth-heavy, with heavy basses. Again, using Chinese elements, but processing them to make them sound a little more modern than traditional. So, I think there’s always this kind of dichotomy between the modern story, which is the bad guys chasing the girl and the boy that are somehow falling in love, but it’s more of a friendship thing; and then the grand, traditional story of this Chinese fable that we’re being told, with the three wishes and stuff. It was great, because it allowed the score to live in two worlds without ever feeling that one was too much. You never get sick of hearing all the new because you’re balancing it with the old and vice-versa!

AV: One of the orchestrators of the film, Weijun Chen, is also Chinese.

PK: Weijun has been working with me for a few years now. He’s a brilliant composer in his own right. He definitely sent me to school at the beginning of the process. He wrote a bunch of cheat sheets for me about the instruments. In the beginning, the score was like an open book. Chris and I knew that we could use all kind of traditional instruments, shengs (mouth-blown organ), xiaos (flutes), pipas and guzhengs, and so many more, but I said we had to set certain limits because otherwise it starts to get really unfocused. That’s why I turned to Weijun to help me and give me the basics about range, the traditional use of each instrument, how it’s notated, all this kind of stuff. And he really helped me quite a bit through those initial ideas of, like, “this I think can make sense here” or “this maybe isn’t the right thing for this movie” or “if we put these two together, I think it would be a really nice sound.” He didn’t do any specific writing, but he definitely introduced me to a completely different culture I had not had the fortune of working with in that capacity yet.

AV: The film is also very authentic in its emotions. How did you approach that emotional aspect of it?

PK: Chris was so concerned about always having an emotional core to the story. I think it’s very evident, because you do at the end of the day care so much. I mean, they’re all having these relationships that you’re caring about: Din and his mother, Li Na and her father, Din and Long. There’s a multi-layer of relationships that’s going on and those were always the kind of jumping-off point when Chris and I were starting talking and working together to find thematic ideas for those moments. Because, if we could find the apex point of these relationships, and work to that point, we could de-construct the score and kind of put it together and know that we’re aiming for this moment. For instance, at the end of the movie, Din and his mother share a very, very sweet moment and there’s some beautiful dialogue between them. I always knew that it was going to be the moment when Din’s theme has its most direct and honest statement. The same for Din and Li Na and Din and Long. All the characters have that kind of arc in their relationships. And it is hard as a composer when you get to the end of the movie because there’s these emotional moments happening all the time, and it’s like, “Okay, how do I not just hit the audience over the head with this emotion?” You want to make it feel natural, you want to make it feel earned. And I think that Chris did a really nice job spacing those moments out together so it gave room in-between for the music to allow them to breathe. I’d be nothing without the story and he did such a nice job of developing these relationships through the movie that I was just writing along, and when they needed a nudge to let the audience know that it’s okay to really let it go and feel something, then I could really, you know, get the strings going and let the orchestra do its things. I think it’s the special ingredient in this movie – the relationships. I mean, it’s fun, it’s beautiful to look at, it’s an interesting story and everything; but really, at the end of the movie, what you feel is that attachment to the characters. That’s what Chris is so good at.

AV: You recorded the score with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, which is really brilliant. Can you tell me about your collaboration with that ensemble?

PK: I had actually been there twice before on other films. They recorded some of the original Lord Of The Rings music, they recorded two of The Hobbit scores ; they are a full service film scoring orchestra and they’re incredible. They are a proper orchestra, and the benefit of working with an orchestra that plays together is that they can come together so quickly as an ensemble. It was suggested early on, and I said, “Absolutely!” It’s great fun to be in New Zealand, it’s a beautiful place to visit, and I also think that, personality-wise, they’re a great fit as an orchestra for a film like this because they’re very laid back, they have a lot of fun but they’re incredible impeccable players. We had magical sessions, as you would expect for a film like this. They played their heart. I’d always go back there in a heartbeat, because I love those players and the ensemble. Also, the organization is amazing. They go out of their way to make you feel welcome. You get to record in a beautiful concert hall and just make music, which is a dream! We had a really nice time!

AV: And you conducted it!

PK: Yes. I love being in the room with the players. I think there’s a special kind of energy that you get when you’re in the trenches with the musicians, making music together. I certainly get why some composers prefer to stay in the booth and appeal to a dedicated conductor so they can hear things a little differently in the booth, but I grew up playing in orchestras, so I appreciate being out there with them. I think it just feels more natural, talking about what I need. I am by no means prepared to conduct Mozart’s Requiem. It’s not something I’m interested in doing. I’ve always felt that film conducting is more about being a good communicator than an interpreter. I’ve done the interpretation at that point, I spent so many hours to make the score what I needed to make and, by that time, I’m just communicating what I need. That’s so much easier as a composer if you’re out there with them. And it’s so magical when it all come to life.

AV: So, you’re a composer, a conductor, and also a well-known orchestrator.

PK: When I was in college, I had a fascination with orchestration because I think that, truly, where a piece of music comes to life, it’s in the orchestration of it. I’ve done quite a bit of it in L.A. for other composers early on in my career. So, when I started getting opportunities to actually write my own scores, it’s very hard for me to let go of orchestration completely. I’ll have helpers, because of short deadlines, but for orchestration, my brain works with color. That’s the first thing I see when I hear music. I don’t see notes as much as I see kind of textural things in the orchestra. For instance, the Wish Dragon moves very fluidly, and when I first saw him, my brain went towards motion and color before going to notes. It’s pretty natural for me. As I’m writing, I just think orchestrally. I need help because of time, but I try to do as much as I can on my own. You know, being able to wear a lot of hats is a good thing, but sometimes it can be a curse, because you want to have your hands on maybe more than what is possible. But luckily, on Wish Dragon, we had a healthy amount of time, so I could really dig in to all of the parts and allow myself to really get into each one of them and make the score my own. It’s like I bake the cake and then put all of the frosting on it to make it look nice. French composers are among my favorite because they understood color. They worked in that way. It’s something that’s becoming a little less common in film scoring because it’s so much more about sound rather than color and texture. You know, that comes in waves. That’s the way the world works. If I can do a little bit to bring that back into the world, I’m happy to do it!

AV: Speaking of orchestration, you took part as such in Raya And The Last Dragon, composed by James Newton Howard.

PK: James Newton Howard is a master. He’s one of the greatest film composers. He’s always been an idol for me. So, working with him over the last five or six years as part of his orchestration team has been a dream. I had finished Wish Dragon maybe six months when I got the call that they were gonna need help on Raya. I was a little nervous, and I said, “Man, I’m gonna do a James Newton Howard score about a dragon!” I was feeling so unconfident, but in the end it is a very different film, that takes place in a different area in the world, so a very different score. There’s more bells, some Mongolian instruments. He added some throat singing, too. So, it’s a very different score from Wish Dragon, where we tried basically to stick to the Chinese canon in terms of instruments, whereas Raya is more Indonesian, South East Asia. The lead orchestrator, Pete Anthony, is a genius orchestrator and I adore learning from him. All his team is just amazing, John Kull, Jeff Atmajian and Peter Boyer. How I snuck into that team? I’m not entirely sure still to this day, but I am very grateful. I have so much fun on every score, because working on James’ music is like – it’s all there. We’re just formalizing it, we’re just making it pretty, we’re making very simple traces to make his vision come to life. On Raya, he took a very interesting approach of using a lot of ethnic instruments, but also a lot of synthetic textures as well on top of it. I think it works really well.

AV: You also worked on The Mandalorian, which also proposes itself as an astonishing blending of Western and ethnic influences.

PK: Again, it was Peter Anthony who brought us onto that job. Ludwig Göransson is such a genius with processed sounds and weird, interesting sounds, and in creating these worlds out of these textures you wouldn’t even think of. Obviously, Mandalorian comes from the Star Wars universe where the orchestra plays such a big role. So, the orchestra was always going to be a part of it. The challenging part about that job is that we had to balance an orchestra against all that brilliant madness of sounds you’ve never heard before. They’re coming from things that you know, but he makes them sound like you ‘re not sure what they even are. So, our job is to find a way to make these sounds fit into that world of Star Wars, that kind of grand sweep that you get in all those scores. I think he did such a successful job. For that show it was such an interesting score that fits so well. That’s Ludwig’s M.O. He just pushes the boundaries of everything. It was a very challenging job, but in a good way. He stretches your comfort zone. A lot of orchestrators are traditionally taught. We come from Conservatory education and stuff like that. So, it’s interesting to throw us into that world. You feel uncomfortable at first, but when you work on a full season of a show, by the end of the show, you’re feeling pretty good about it!

AV: A word on Jungle Cruise?

PK: It’s probably one of my favorite scores I’ve worked on with James Newton Howard in the last five years. We really just had a ton of fun. James’ music is just a big blast and I think you’re gonna love it!

With our thanks to Philip Klein, Andrew Krop and Kyrie Hood.

Marvel Studios’ foray into the world of the sitcom celebrates the genre in a big way. “The story imagines Wanda and Vision in a 1950s sitcom — when the show opens, that’s presented without explanation,” says head writer Jac Schaeffer. Then, “we see them move thorough the various eras of sitcoms as the series progresses.”

And music plays a huge part in setting all the moods of the series. The WandaVision filmmakers’ research and detailed examinations of sitcoms throughout television history yielded a common thread: theme songs. The nature and style of the songs changed over the years—creating almost a calling card for each era. This signature element enhanced the authenticity sought for WandaVision, and cemented its roots in classic sitcoms. Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez created unique theme songs for episodes to reflect the eras spanning from the 1950s to the early 2000s. Just as they did on Frozen and Frozen II, they appealed to Dave Metzger, who worked as an orchestrator on The Lion King, Tarzan, Captain America: The First Avenger, Avengers,Wreck-it-Ralph and Moana to name just a few, to arrange them.

A true fan of all those series, Metzger’s versatility and affinity with all kinds of styles and ensemble made him just the right person to turn to in order to bring an authentic, vintage flavor to all these songs, among which is the instant classic “Agatha All Along”.

Animated Views: How did you come onboard this very unique series that is WandaVision ?

Dave Metzger: The main reason why I came is Bobby and Kristen, the songwriters of WandaVision. They kinda make everything special and a lot of fun to be involved in. So, when they got the job, they asked me to be involved. It turned out to be a very interesting series. I didn’t expect that, but I just got really completely wrapped up (in it)!

AV: How do you work with them?

DM: Bobby and Kristen give me a piano part with their scratch vocals, and I use it to do a mock up. So I use my computer and samples to do my arrangement of their songs.

AV: The first song of the series is “A Newlywed Couple”. Can you tell us how you approached it?

DM: That one is very much inspired by The Dick Van Dyke Show, so we wanted to capture that reference sonically just as visually. They tried to make it look like it was from the era. So, we tried to do the same with music.

AV: How did you emulate the sound of the orchestra of the original series?

DM: It wasn’t really too much of a stretch to capture it stylistically, because I’ve watched all these shows so much as a kid. I knew all these themes so well, and the styles of them. I had really grown up with so many of them. So, on all these references, I always went back to the original material. But it wasn’t just a question of style. We also tried to make it sound the same way they recorded back then.

AV: How did you achieve that?

DM: Part of it was the engineer. They used vintage microphones. But today, you know, working with ProTools, there’s no tapes ; whereas, the sound of that period came also mostly from the fact that they recorded on magnetic tapes going through. So, for the demo of that song, I actually used a plug-in. I think it was a tape machine, to add a little bit of a feel of a sound like it was recorded on old magnetic stuff. That was for my sample demo, so the engineer tried to emulate it.

AV: What’s interesting in your approach is that, even if the style and the sound are highly referential, you allowed yourself some liberties.

DM: Indeed, it was really more of a using of the Dick Van Dyke theme as a reference point than recreating it. So, there are some differences because the Dick Van Dyke Show theme didn’t have any singing. I had to adapt a little bit to that. And the way Bobby and Kristen wrote their song, they had a different tempo, so I had to change the drum pattern a little bit.
Also, we wanted to add some comedic elements, so even if I went back to the period, I didn’t want to be completely restricted by the instrumentation. So, I used woodwinds that are not really in The Dick Van Dyke Show, which add another layer. I had five saxophones and I added five woodwinds, flutes and clarinets.

AV: How did you find the right balance between authenticity and creativity?

DM: I had an advantage in this situation because I had new material to work on. Bobby and Kristen did that part by writing new songs. They did the hard work, really, of getting a piece of the era. So, it was just up to me to capture the nuances and the style in the orchestration side of it instead of having to come with a whole new concept.

AV: How did the recording go?

DM: We recorded that material in October. Honestly it was a little bit of a challenge because of Covid. We recorded in London, at AIR studios; and because of the pandemic, we weren’t able to work like we did before with a line of trumpets, a line of saxophones, and a line of trombones. They had to be separated by something like three meters. But David Boucher, our engineer, was really able to get around those problems.

AV: The second episode of the series is obviously a nod to Bewitched!

DM: I watched that series so many times as a kid that I knew it perfectly. But the way Bobby and Kristen wrote that song wasn’t just Bewitched. More of the early 60s vibe that was going on, and Bewitched was kind of the reference point. They did such a great job in alluding to the periods of the songs. For that one, I knew they wanted a jazzish-Bewitched melding of things. So, that was enough direction to really find the right place for that song. The one thing that was so infectious to me was the break with the spoken words “WandaVision!”. I remember the first time I heard the demo, I thought it was just perfect.

At the beginning of that animated sequence, there’s a moment where Wanda and Vision are flying together and are drawing a heart in the sky. Bobby and Kristen hadn’t addressed that in their song, but for me, I immediately remembered when Samantha did that kind of thing in the opening title of the original series. I chose not to use any of the Bewitched elements specifically but I remembered there was that swirling kind of thing. So, I wrote something in the same vein for the woodwinds, a line that I was able to drop in for that very moment.

AV: And then there’s “We Got Something Cooking”, the theme song for the third episode.

DM: To me, it was always The Partridge Family, and also The Brady Bunch. It’s a combination of those two things, which, again, I watched every episode fifty times or so! That’s embarrassing to say now, but at the time, I was like 10-11 years old, and that’s what we were all watching on TV! It was interesting, because it was a chance to catch up with that late 60s – early 70s kind of groove. In that song, we had a couple of passes of guitar, a piano, and a vintage 1960s P-Bass. I think we had a little Farfisa in that, too. I went back and listened to The Brady Bunch, and that was my guiding line, especially on the brass instruments. So, I also put three trumpets and three trombones, but no saxophones.

Also, it was particularly fun to put an harpsichord in it, because that was part of the sonic footprint of that theme song in The Partridge Family, with all these arpeggios. It’s at the beginning in the original song, and on the bridge in ours. Another fun thing is that I’m an adequate bass player and I play the bass in every one of my demos. It’s part of my demo process. And on that version, I also did the tambourine.

AV: That means that every episode required a different ensemble, which is quite unusual in the realm of film scoring.

DM: Absolutely. That was one of the big challenges for sure. But also, one of the things that made it so fun – to be honest, this was one of the most fun (projects) I’ve ever worked on!

AV: The songs of the series are composed mostly for a harmony.

DM: I made some suggestions here and there, especially for the Dick Van Dyke one, but in general the vocal arrangements were done mostly by Bobby and Kristen, which they sang in their demo. For the recording, we appealed to other singers, but as they’re used to singing in most of their movies, they blended in with these singers as well.

AV: Now we jump to episode 5 with “Making It Up As We Go Along” which seems to go back to Family Ties and Full House.

DM: That’s exactly right. That one was trickier for me from the standpoint of finding the right balance of keyboard sounds that kinda match up with the period. In order to do so, like for the other episodes, I tried to go back and remember. Back then, I was very early in my career. Obviously, I sold every vintage keyboard that I had at that time, a long time ago. So, it was more a matter of finding sample libraries that replicating those sounds. For the strings, we used a sample of Mellotron, because that what was used in that era. At that time, also, the guitars were a little bit more getting into electric. That song was the hardest one, as far as it took a lot of back and forth to get to the point where Bobby and Kristen were happy with the sound, because initially I went a little bit too much into electric piano than they had envisioned.

AV: What about “Let’s Keep It Going”, which parodies Malcolm in the Middle?

DM: Actually, for that one and The Office one, they went to specialists of those eras. So, I wasn’t part of them.

AV: And now we come to “Agatha All Along”, certainly the masterpiece of the series!

DM: That was probably the most fun of all. It’s really based on The Munsters, the television series, which again I watched too much when I was a kid! It’s the perfect example of Bobby and Kristen’s brilliance. They can come up with this kind of campy song, but it has such a huge hook to it. And there’s always these four notes, the famous WandaVision motif that you can find in every song since the beginning. The lyrics are so clever, too. So, there wasn’t really much I could do to mess it up (laughs)! I just had to go back to The Munsters and reference what sounds were being used, adding the mute trumpets for the four notes, and saxophones along with the trombone with chords played by the electric harpsichord (and again, that’s me playing that!). The other fun thing was the guitars. On my demo, I played the surf guitar kind of stuff. Very chordly, but it was enough to get the idea of that signature sound. For the recording, the guitar player brought a Telecaster. This guy had like a hundred period vintage guitars. You just tell him what you want and he brings it! So, we had the real Dick Dale kind of surf guitar sound. And we didn’t use any modeling for the amplifiers; he brought in vintage amplifiers, and the real things, not recreations! It really helped us make it sound as accurate as possible to the era.

I also had to find the right drum groove. And it wasn’t just the groove but the overall sound of the drums, so that it sounded like it was from that period. All of it kinda came together in a beautiful way. Again, the bass on that was an old 60s P-Bass which is exactly what they would have used, and I wrote in the score “jam thumb under the bridge,” because that was the real key to 60s P-Bass sounds: to get that sound you take just the thumb and you jam it under the bridge.

AV: And Agatha herself sings in the song, too!

DM: Kristen sang her part in the demo, and then we got Kathryn Hahn to record it. Her schedule is pretty tight, but she got just enough time to do it and she totally nailed it! We recorded the vocals in Los Angeles. So, the men were also recorded there, and Bobby’s voice was mixed in there, too.

AV: During your experience on the series, was it only about music, or did you have a wider scope on the series?

DM: I was able to get a wider scope of what was going on. If you just take these songs out of context, you don’t really understand what they are about, so it was really helpful to have some extra guides as well. In all these projects, I’m involved with the directors to really capture what’s going on. You can’t be working isolated. You must have a sense of what you’re trying to support.

AV: What are your best memories of that experience?

DM: The biggest ones were those treasure boxes every time I got the next song from Bobby and Kristen, to hear what it was gonna be. I’ve been always looking forward to hearing their piano/vocal demo. For me, it was also a lot of fun to do the research, finding the right instruments, and making sure I understood the real techniques to the things that were played, how they were played during the different eras and also, I suppose, the recording process, trying to make the demos sound well.

AV: WandaVision certainly made history as a series. And the music was essential in its success.

DM: I’m so glad to hear you say that, and I agree. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, and there were so many different levels to become engaged in it as well. You have these theme songs, one different for each episode, but still tied in thematically through the WandaVision motif, and the story line. The series engages you and makes you want to figure out what is going on. I’ve been so lucky in my career, and I think that’s just one of those opportunities that just sort fell out of the sky. I’m very grateful.

And there is magic in Onward indeed! In every bit of it. And in every note of the score composed by Mychael and Jeff Danna. The two brothers know how to take us on a musical journey unlike any other, with that mix of classical, traditional and rock influences that they’re known for. To conduct that masterpiece, they appealed to Nicholas Dodd, with whom they’re used to collaborating, and who did some of the orchestrations, too.

Nicholas Dodd is regarded as one of the leading conductors and orchestrators of Hollywood film music. After graduating from the Royal College of Music in composition and orchestration, Nicholas first acted as a music producer, owning a recording studio in London; and it was in those early days that he met composer David Arnold, a fateful encounter. They first worked together on the British movie The Young Americans (1993), followed immediately by the major success Stargate, which took the duo to Hollywood.

Dodd’s feature film credit list is now an extensive one, including Independence Day, Godzilla, Lethal Weapon 4, The Mummy, Shaft, Hot Fuzz, Avatar, The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader, Paul and Wrath Of The Titans.

Furthermore, alongside composer David Arnold, Nicholas has orchestrated and conducted some iconic James Bond soundtracks: Tomorrow Never Dies, The World Is Not Enough, Die Another Day, Casino Royale and Quantum Of Solace.

Onward was actually his second recording with Pixar, as he also conducted the score for The Good Dinosaur, also composed by the Danna brothers.

Nicholas Dodd: Well, I met them separately. The first brother I worked with was Mychael. That was on 8mm, in 1999. We recorded it in a huge hall in New York, on 34th street. So, I’ve been working with Mychael on and off on small projects and not-so-small projects right until Onward. And Jeff, his lovely brother, I started working with him in 2003. He was working on The Gospel Of John and he heard about me from his brother. And gradually from this time, the brothers have been working more together, especially in animation. The Good Dinosaur was good fun to work with. Then, there was The Addams Family, and now Onward. It’s fabulous animation. It’s a great story, beautifully told, and the guys made a superb score!

AV: You’ve been working with them both as an orchestrator and a conductor. As an orchestrator, how do you work with them?

ND: In every cue I get presented by Jeff and Mychael, I recognize their style, and I know their style, so I have an affinity with their style. For Jeff, for instance, I will allow myself more creative orchestration because Jeff likes that. Mychael is more specific, but I will still allow myself some creative orchestration, just slightly less. I think classical music gave me a great base to understand music. They give me a mock-up and a MIDI. Everything is very clear, the emotional direction of the phrase, where it becomes strong, where it becomes what I call quiet music in the background. I think any cue that’s presented well, I have an affinity with, because I know what to do, and this is very rare. Sometimes I get given a cue where it could go a little bit the other way or that way and I’m not quite sure, and then I look at the film and I say, ‘yes, ok, I see!’ But with Jeff and Michael, when I hear their music, I know exactly what they want to say.

AV: How do you describe their style?

ND: They are very much international, western international. They’re not writing in the Oriental or Asian style of music. But they’re international in the sense that I wouldn’t say that they’re Canadian, I couldn’t say they’re American-based or English-based or Middle-Eastern or South American. They are able to turn their hand to all the styles that are needed for the film. So, I regard them as international composers.

AV: How does that international flavor express itself in Onward?

ND: Highly varied! It makes great use of guitars, most of them played by Jeff Danna. It draws on the full orchestral palette, on rock influences, with drums, bass and guitars, and on choral influences.

AV: Was that diversity of influences and of groups of instruments a challenge to you now as a conductor?

ND: If something is clear to me, even if it blends different things and takes from different musical genres, I just enjoy conducting! Somebody asked me that about John Barry: ‘What’s the difficulty of conducting John Barry’s music?” And I answered: ‘What difficulty? It’s very clear.’ With Onward, I didn’t find any difficulty. I found a lot of fun! Once I’ve finished my orchestration, I put that hat off and I put my conducting hat on, and my job is to bring out the best in each cue. Therefore, we talk about balances, what the main lines are, the timing, and put the final craft to the cue, if you will. I just try to inspire the musicians to play their very best. We got such good musicians. We always play to the highest standards. So, if you understand the cue, you know what it says, where and when, then you have a sound picture in your head, and then you mold that cue the best you can according to what’s required by the composers for the film.

AV: How big was the orchestra?

ND: About 85 musicians. But that was just the main orchestra. We had a choir of 30, and there were countless overdubs by Jeff, and the drums, etc. So, I would say it was about 120 people if you put everything together. It was quite big!

AV: How did you record all these different elements?

ND: They were all recorded separately. In a film soundtrack, you have to have a lot of separate elements, be it in the score or in the effects, to control the balance between them. So, we had many sessions with specific instruments, like the lute, the mandolin, and other folk instruments.

AV: How did you work with the Synergy Vocals, which is a very versatile choir, renowned in classical music as well as film music.

ND:When I finished recording it at Warner Bros. in Los Angeles, I immediately got on the plane and fly to England to conduct them at Abbey Road Studios. I have to say, I thoroughly enjoyed them. They were adaptable and they gave it 110%. I’m not saying other choirs don’t, but I asked them things that were different from what there were used to, and they rose to the occasion beautifully. They were just fun to work with, and that came through in the sound. It’s a really good sound. For instance, we worked on the strange pronunciation of the funny Latin words that are in the lyrics to bring things out in the battle sequence against the dragon. And then, I wanted to push a certain phrase, so I asked them to say it slightly above pitch to bring a certain sonority, a certain feel to it. I also pushed the envelope in asking the choir and certain soloists to be very operatic and over the top with their vibrato, like in the Sacrifice scene, with Guinevere the van. I don’t think they’re asked to do that normally. Rather, to pull the vibrato back. So, I got everyone doing over the top vibrato and that was the sound that was recorded. It was different, and it was great! And it just fit the film perfectly.

AV: As a musician, what kind of relationship do you have with Pixar?

ND: Well, I can say with certainty that working with Pixar is just brilliant because they actually do appreciate, as a company, music and musicians. This is not to say with every company. At Pixar they’re out of their way to allow the composer (the composers in this case) as much freedom as they feel is right for the film. And they’re very supportive. Pixar is a very creative company and the people we worked with were really lovely. They just made the recording session special.

AV: What will you keep from the experience?

ND: First of all, I always love the first moment with the orchestra. And then, there’s this cue, right at the end of the film, called Dad, when the father reappears. It’s a fantastic cue starting quietly, with a lovely texture, then it moves to a very intimate moment, and a few bars later it becomes larger and larger and builds to this wonderful, wonderful end. It’s a lovely cue and I really enjoyed orchestrating it. It was also a very special moment in recording it. The whole orchestra felt it. Everybody in the control room felt it. It was a moment of grace. That’s why I sit in a room by myself for 16 hours a day for several weeks: to experience that magic!

With very special thanks to April Whitney (Chronicle Books).

A terrific mix of old and new music, the amazing score of the series was made by Emmy Award and Grammy Award-nominated composer, songwriter, music director, and conductor Ryan Shore, who scored the first series of that kind, Star Wars: Forces Of Destiny.

Rayan’s 60+ scoring credits include Julie’s Greenroom (Netflix, starring Julie Andrews with all new puppets from the Jim Henson Company), The Legend Of Muay Thai: 9 SATRA, Penn Zero: Part Time Hero (Disney Television Animation), Scooby-Doo! WrestleMania Mystery (Warner Bros), Scooby-Doo! And WWE: Curse Of The Speed Demon (Warner Bros), R.L. Stine’s Monsterville: Cabinet Of Souls (Universal), SpyHunter (Warner Bros), and many more.

A familiar of big orchestras, he has conducted orchestras around the world in recordings and concerts including The New York Philharmonic, The Hollywood Symphony Orchestra, The Skywalker Symphony Orchestra, and The Czech Philharmonic, as well as conducting concerts for Pokemon Symphonic Evolutions and Soundtracks Live!, featuring music from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

A versatile musician, Shore’s Broadway and theatre credits include orchestrations and arrangements for Broadway concerts starring Tony Award winners Sutton Foster, Idina Menzel, Whoopi Goldberg, Matthew Broderick, Kristen Chenoweth, Heather Headley, and Faith Prince, as well as music directing the Los Angeles production of Heathers: The Musical, directed by Andy Fickman.

AnimatedViews: What is your personal relation to the Star Wars franchise and to John Williams’ music in particular?

Ryan Shore: I grew up watching the Star Wars films and I’ve been a fan of the franchise and John Williams’ iconic Star Wars music for as long as I can remember. John Williams has been and continues to be one of my biggest musical heroes. He has the complete musical package — from his abilities to compose impactful and unforgettable themes, to his brilliant arranging and orchestration abilities, to the techniques he uses to record his scores with orchestras. He is a true master among masters.

AV: How did you come to work on Star Wars: Forces Of Destiny first, which had relatively the same format?

RS: I was recommended to Lucasfilm through my friends at Ghostbot. Ghostbot was the animation studio for Star Wars: Forces Of Destiny, and we had previously worked together on other projects. After scoring Star Wars: Forces Of Destiny, Lucasfilm then asked me to score Star Wars: Galaxy Of Adventures.

AV: How different is the Star Wars: Galaxy Of Adventures series?

RS: In Star Wars: Galaxy Of Adventures, we are often retelling iconic moments from the films. In that regard, they are very complementary to the films. However, that said, even though we’re retelling many iconic scenes, we don’t always tell them in the exact same way shot for shot, allowing the characters to tell their own stories, and therefore the original recordings from the films don’t always synchronize perfectly. At those times I’ll do my best to utilize the original recordings through creative editing, and then I often compose my own music to weave in and out of John Williams’ music, to create one continuous score where it’s hopefully not obvious where the original recordings begin and end, and where my original music begins and ends.

AV: How did you find balance between being faithful and being creative and original?

RS: When I’m composing for Galaxy Of Adventures, I’m not actively thinking about how to bring my own musical voice to the series per se, although I’m certain by the very nature of composing that my own voice must come through. Instead, I’m fully focused on how to be faithful to the musical vocabulary John Williams has so brilliantly established for Star Wars.

AV: Did you have access to John Williams’ score in order to use his themes?

RS: Yes, Lucasfilm provides me John Williams’ original recordings.

AV: What did you want to bring personally to the musical universe of Star Wars?

RS: When I’m scoring, I do all I can to capture the same feelings I had when I first saw each of the films. I feel if I’m able to do that in a way that resonates with me, then hopefully they will also resonate with audiences.

AV: In the editing of the episodes, different moments from different movie episodes can be quoted. How did you manage to keep that whole musical universe consistent anyway?

RS: I work very closely with Lucasfilm to ensure we are using John Williams’ themes at the right times and in the right ways.

AV: In your treatment of the picture, do you feel more character-oriented or action-oriented?

RS: I would say most often I am composing from the character-oriented standpoint, since it is the characters themselves which are living the stories. That said, I do not seek any distance at all to the picture, and instead I do all I can to completely immerse myself within the picture.

AV: How did you work with director Barry J. Kelly?

RS: Barry and I are in constant communication, and he provides incredible direction. We begin the scoring process for each episode by watching the episode together, talking about what we would like the audience to feel at all the different times, where we would like the themes to be heard, the overall narrative arc of each scene, and the impact of each moment within the context of the greater story.

AV: Do you orchestrate yourself?

RS: I do. I find when composing music for Star Wars that the orchestrations are very much a part of the compositional process. I usually begin by composing music on the piano. When I’m first composing, I often don’t think much about orchestration at first. Instead, I mostly thinking about much higher level concepts of music composing, such as melody, harmony, arranging, dynamics, pacing, tempo, short notes vs. sustained notes, sounds which are higher in pitch vs. lower in pitch, etc. I feel that if I’m able to create a composition solely on piano that speaks to the picture, then once I orchestrate and decide which instruments will play the music, that the scores will hopefully become more impactful and more dynamic from there.

AV: For the recording, you chose the Skywalker Ranch. What do you like in it?

RS: The Skywalker Ranch is one of the most special and unique places I’ve ever been. The scoring stage is immensely adaptable in the way that it has been designed. It is possible to change the acoustics of the room by simply adjusting the panels on the walls. When you’re at the Ranch you feel like you’ve escaped to another world where you are completely immersed in a creative environment and are able to focus completely without distraction on the music you’re creating.

AV: What size of an orchestra did you use? Did you conduct it?

RS: I always conduct my own scores. I compose the music for Star Wars for a full-sized symphony orchestra, which would be roughly 80-90 instrumentalists plus choir.

AV: What’s your favorite Star Wars: Galaxy Of Adventures episode?

RS: I have so many favorite episodes and moments, and so it’s difficult to single out just a few. I really love the episode “Luke vs. The Death Star X-Wing Assault” because of the way I was able to incorporate The Force theme into a moment which was scored differently in the original film.

AV: What’s your best memories of that experience?

RS: It’s always a thrill when there is an opportunity to rethink an iconic moment in a new musical way which resonates.

With special thanks to Ryan Shore and Jordan von Netzer.

To score that incredible short, director Domee Shi appealed to composer Toby Chu, who imagined the most delicate and refined music to accompany that unlikely story.

Toby is a Chinese American film composer, with dual citizenship in the United States and Croatia. Over the last 20 years, he has composed music for over 50 films and television programs including Legends Of Oz: Dorothy’s Return, Surf’s Up 2: WaveMania for Sony Pictures Animation, Warner Bros’ dramatic thriller Unforgettable, and New Line Cinema’s period thriller The Wolves At The Door. He is also scoring BRON Studios’ animation Henchman, NBC’s The Brave, and the Freeform original series Beyond.
After receiving a degree in film scoring from the Berklee College of Music, Toby moved to Los Angeles, where he quickly began working on a number of projects for Golden Globe and Grammy-nominated film composer Harry Gregson-Williams, with whom Toby worked for over a decade.
He also collaborated with Daft Punk, arranging and orchestrating “Adagio for Tron” on the Tron: Legacy soundtrack. His credits also include musical contributions to Man On Fire, Déjà Vu, The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, Domino, and Team America: World Police.

He’s also an artist, very much influenced by painted John Singer Sargeant, and was recognized as a candidate in the U.S. Presidential Scholars Program. His paintings are in a number of private collections and have been displayed at the U.S. Capitol Building.
He was the perfect and most complete artist to participate in such an original project!

AnimatedViews: We first met in the early 2000’s, when you were an assistant to Harry Gregson-Williams, and now you’re an independent composer working for Pixar. What an incredible journey!

Toby Chu: Yes, it’s been an incredibly exciting journey! I started assisting Harry early on in my career soon after moving to Los Angeles. He was a teacher and a mentor. We collaborated on over fifty films, and I learned a great deal during our time together. A little more than five years ago now, I moved into my own studio and have been working independently ever since.

AV: How and when did you come to work on Bao?

TC: Through Tom MacDougall, who is the executive vice president of music for Pixar and Disney Animation. This was in the fall of 2016. He invited me to Pixar for a meeting, where we met the filmmakers, and I was able to see Bao for the first time.

AV: What were your first exchanges with Director Domee Shi like?

TC: I first met Domee at Pixar. She played me an early cut of the film. It was still in storyboard at that point. She had a very good sense of where she wanted to go. We discussed finding the emotion, the overall arc of the film, and incorporating eastern and western instruments together. The mix of east and west was an important metaphor for Domee’s upbringing as a Chinese Immigrant in Canada.

As a Chinese-American, I could easily relate. Bao is a modern-day fairy tale set in a Chinese immigrant community. There’s a timeless quality and universal appeal to the story that anyone can relate to, but because there’s no dialogue in the film, I needed to write a score that could convey the multiple layers of meaning in an authentic way. The music also had to stand on its own to better carry the narrative and to evoke the ups and downs of the parent-child relationship.

AV: How close did you feel to the subject of the film?

TC: The first thing I said after watching Bao was, “That’s me. I’m the dumpling!” I had a good laugh with Domee, Becky and Tom about it. The parallels between the short and my life are somewhat uncanny. My mom still calls me her “Xiǎo bǎo bǎo” (small treasure). When I was a child, she would hug me tightly and say that she wanted to eat me. And in a real case of art imitating life, I also ended up happily married to a beautifully blond Caucasian woman.

AV: When did you start composing?

TC: I started composing early on in the process. Production was for about a year and a half. The story and music informed and evolved together, which I think is a great thing.

AV: Since you’re an artist yourself, can you tell me about your personal connection to the very art for the film?

TC: I grew up loving John Singer Sargent, who was a contemporary to all of the big impressionist painters (e.g., Monet, Degas). A lot of those guys were obsessed with Japanese art and design, and I think you can see a similar east meets west with the influence of Hokusai and others in their work. I’ve always been very visual. Probably the biggest aspect I draw inspiration from is the visual content of a film.

Bao’s visual aesthetic was inspired by traditional Chinese folk art. Rona Liu, Bao’s production designer, who also had a personal connection with the story, was a big part in inspiring the music. She did an absolutely brilliant job.

AV: Your score is based on one beautiful theme. How did you create it?

TC: The theme is the heart of the score and the voice of the story. It serves as a thread and develops throughout the film. It was important to me that the theme spoke on many levels. I wanted it to be nostalgic and whimsical like Domee’s story.

The theme was the first thing I focused on when I started. I knew I wanted the entire piece to be based on a single theme. There was a lot of trial and error involved before I landed on the right one. It also had to be flexible and work in different arrangements and orchestrations to convey the emotional journey.

It is based on a major pentatonic scale, the scale used in traditional Chinese music. I also set it as a waltz, which is less common. It’s built on two phrase groups, symbolizing Mom and Dumpling.

AV: Can you tell me more specifically about that intriguing mix of western and Chinese instruments that you used in your orchestrations?

TC: The music of Bao is a mixture of Chinese traditional instruments (i.e., erhu, guzheng, yangqin, dizi, pipa, liuqin, sanxian) and a 60-piece orchestra. Traditional Chinese music is intimately linked to poetry and to various forms of lyric drama, and is more or less poetry without words. For example, glissandos on the guzheng representing waterfalls or thunder. Each of the instruments have thousands of years of history, so I tried to feature each instrument in a way that honored its tradition and range. One of the most challenging aspects of combining east and west was that many of the traditional Chinese instruments are tuned to play in only certain keys and to play a specific scale. Blending the two wasn’t easy. The western side of the music moved to many keys developing and evolving alongside the story. I ended up developing a few custom tunings based on the piece for the guzheng and we used a large assortment of dizi’s to cover the changing musical landscape.

AV: and then, toward the end of the score, enter just the piano and the clarinet, which sounds very different from the rest of the score. A very special moment.

TC: There’s a beautiful and quiet moment (around 5 minutes in) when mom’s real son comes home and they make up for the time apart. The music is sparse. I purposefully didn’t use any Chinese instruments here. I felt it was a universal moment and the piano and clarinet felt transparent, an intimate family moment and a mother’s love for her child.

AV: How was the recording of that score?

TC: We recorded for two days at Eastwood Scoring Stage at Warner Brothers. A day with the orchestra and a day adding the Chinese instruments.
I did a lot of recording over the year and half I was working on Bao, a lot of which was used in the final piece.

AV: Now that the film is so well-received by audiences and critics, how do you see the overall experience of working on it?

TC: I was honored to work on it. The warm public reception has been both overwhelming and humbling. I grew up watching all of Pixar’s movies and shorts. There’s a tradition there that you instantly become a part of. Working with Domee, Becky, and Tom was a fantastic experience, and the story is a special one. In one sense, it’s a Chinese tale, but in another it’s about the broader human themes of love, loss, family, and relationships. Because of this, it transcends all cultural barriers.

AV: Now, what are you up to?

TC: I just returned from recording orchestra for a feature animation called Henchmen. It’s fun, action packed, and chock full of superheroes and villains. Keep your eyes out for it!

Listen to Toby Chu’s score for Bao here

With very special thanks to Toby Chu, Chris Wiggum (Pixar), Bryce Buckmaster (Toby Chu Music) and Jordan von Netzer (Impact24). Recording session photos by Deborah Coleman/Pixar