Review Summary: The perfect mix of orchestral grandiose and quaint, french street music.
As far as the animated feature film goes,
Up is one of the best made in a long time. It dabbled with the high risk mixture of child friendly cinema and deep thinking adult viewing, which had hardly really been done before with this much appeal. Yet this is what made
Up so wonderful, as it was able to convey this mixture perfectly. Although this isn’t a film review, these aforementioned components have a great connection to how this film was scored, and Michal Giacchino (Lost soundtrack, Recent Star Trek, Speed Racer plus many other TV Shows and Video games), has been able to create a subtle yet, intoxicating musical canvas to conjure both these views in
Up.
This isn’t your standard soundtrack as the music for
Up encompasses waltzes, ballroom style period music and the obligatory evocative visually stimulated pieces that get your heart racing. The music successfully captures the adventure that the movie has, yet not with high intensity, overzealous or upbeat scores, but with a simple harpsichord, French based melody that is played over again in many different themes and phrasings. This one phrasing – while being changed – is able to add to the humour, bittersweet memories and of course high paced scenes.
Of course, the French sounding melody is not the only theme that is played on. Large orchestral swills and swirls – mainly that of the woodwind section - used in many textures, are a favourite of Giacchino, as it complements the lofty heights that
Up takes, although Giacchino uses a very heavy brass based sound when the tumultuous parts of the film come into play. Giacchino has quite the knack when it comes to these kinds of scenes, as he fills the viewer with quite a large amount of evocative emotion and uses fantastic French horn layering techniques and subtle tempo changes to push the viewer to the edge of their seat, like what can be found on “Escape From Muntz Mountain”.
While Giacchino may be able to mix the quaint with the quirky, he has the annoying ability to be quite repetitive with his composing. Sometimes this is a good thing as it makes the score to a film run very simplistically – like Howard Shore’s scores to Lord of The Rings (while being far from simplistic), which were the same themes being added to and enhanced from film to film for each character, though Giacchino doesn’t quite get this kind of writing down pat – albeit
Up is not a trilogy... Yet. A lot of the darker parts of the score, or as dark as the score gets in
Up become quite monotonous, which take away from the action that is happening on screen, although this is a very small inkling as it only happens once throughout the whole composition in “Canine Conundrum”.
Giacchino has done extremely well scoring
Up, as it would have definitely been a difficult film to compose, since getting the mix of simple French street music and the grandiose of an orchestra to combine together is not an easy task, it has been done superbly and it has really captured the emotive pictures that are being projected onto the screen.
Up is truly a sensational film and the score that goes with it is also expertly done.
