Thursday, January 10, 2013

I've got 99 problems but Disney ain't one of them

It's true that my childhood was filled with ball sacks of Disney movies. Like, tons, but a few of my favorite animated movies when I was a kid (and now even) weren't Disney at all. Instead, I watched The Road to El Dorado (2000, Dreamworks), The Prince of Egypt (1998, Dreamworks), and Anastasia (1997, 20th Century Fox). These movies have basically two things in common: their awesome soundtracks and blatantly obvious historical inaccuracy.
Take, for instance, the story of Miguel and Tulio, two Spaniards in the sixteenth century looking for the Lost City of Gold, El Dorado. They find it, are mistaken by the natives for gods, and reap the rewards. Then there's the movie interpretation of the Book of Exodus, the second in the Bible, which takes some liberties in changing a few things. And lastly, the story of the last Romanov, Anastasia, which is actually based on an urban legend which says that the last emperor of Russia's daughter survived the whole family's execution.
I mean, I think the stories are really cool and fun and also slightly misleading but who cares? No one wants to watch a boring documentary about an urban legend that's totally fiction; they want to watch an adventurous movie about two people who find a city full of gold or a lost princess who's reunited with her grandmother in Paris or, you know, Moses doing crazy shit.
The thing I love doing with children's movies, besides watching them again and again, is singing all parts of each chorus song in my best impression of each character. Not only is it super fun to do, but I'm pretty sure it's completely painful to listen to.
These three movies are made through their songs. Elton John worked on TRtED and helped write my favorites: "The Trail We Blaze" and "It’s Tough to Be a God". Composer Hans Zimmer worked on The Prince of Egypt and arranged both instrumentals and some songs with lyrics, like "Deliver Us" and "All I Ever Wanted". Anastasia pretty much had no one of recognition arrange or compose anything, but it still had some darn good songs such as "Once Upon a December" and "In the Dark of the Night".
So there's probably a great, decently poetic and moving, message to come out of this post and I'm just too lazy to get it into words. Let's just keep it with:
You should definitely not judge a movie by it's obvious flaws but instead by it's amazing music.
Beautiful.

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