“Music is a moral law,” wrote Plato. “It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination… and life to everything.”
That includes computer-generated imagery.
While my distaste for the overkill of CGI in alleged “live action” movies is quite well known, I have to concede that, when shelling out the clams for a big-budget movie, one stands a better chance these days of getting a quality ride if one banks on the solely computer-animated feature. Put an action hero in a computer-animated landscape, and everything looks incredibly fake. But integrate the characters, by creating them in the computer as well, and the result is often much more absorbing, imaginative, and even wittier than your run-of-the-mill Hollywood blockbuster.
Furthermore, in a day when so many movies sport scores made up of droning electronics punctuated by colorless action cues, the computer-generated feature seems to attract composers who still understand how to write music.
This week on “Picture Perfect,” we’ll listen to enlivening scores from four computer-generated films.
We’ll hear selections from the first installment in the “Ice Age” franchise, by David Newman (son of Golden Age heavy-hitter Alfred Newman, brother of Thomas Newman, and cousin of Randy Newman).
We’ll also have some of John Williams’ music from “The Adventures of Tintin,” after the comic book adventurer created by Belgian artist and writer Hergé. Tintin’s popularity in Europe failed to translate into big domestic box office, comparatively speaking, but the score is Williams’ best of its kind – an exciting adventure piece full of leitmotifs and great action cues – since the first of the Harry Potter films.
We’ll round out the hour with two projects scored by Michael Giacchino for Pixar Animation Studios. Giacchino’s break-out success was the sly superhero satire, “The Incredibles,” for which he composed in the swinging ‘60s espionage style popularized by John Barry when writing for the James Bond films.
We’ll also hear selections from Giacchino’s Academy Award-winning score to “Up.” “Up” was nominated for Best Picture at the 82nd Academy Awards, only the second animated feature ever to be included in the category.
I think we can all use a little animation, can’t we? I hope you’ll join me for an hour of selections from computer-animated adventures, on “Picture Perfect,” music for the movies, this Saturday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.