I’ve been meaning to post this for awhile, but didn’t get around to tracking down the excerpts I wanted until I had the breathing time between contract-nightmare-hours. Anyway.
I know some of you on my flist are fans of Naruto; for those who aren’t, it’s a Japanese fantasy/action series that revolves around the story of a young man, Naruto, who lives in a ninja community. His goal is to become the village’s strongest ninja, and if anything sums up Naruto’s personality in one go, it’s this: he’s a ninja who wears orange. Bright, dayglo orange. (Obviously, stealth is not his strongpoint.) So here we have a story about a young man who’s pretty much characterized from the get-go as bucking the trends/traditions to make it to the top despite everything against him. Nothing really that new in the plotline, if you think about it, other than a few minor twists in the treatment.
Okay, then. The soundtrack is done by Toshio Masuda, who also did the soundtrack for Mushishi -- a gentle, self-restrained slice-of-life series that’s the radical opposite of Naruto. That contrast is in the soundtracks’ respective musical styles as well -- at least, at first glance. The Mushishi soundtrack is heavily influenced by traditional Japanese instruments and melodies, while the Naruto soundtrack sounds like your average boys-action-series, replete with a theme for every character (of which the majority are chirpy, cheerful, almost goofy melodies). Then one day I was listening to whatever CP had put on the stereo, and not long after that my iPod skipped around and delivered the main theme to Naruto, and suddenly I realized why Masuda’s theme seemed so familiar.
( Naruto, Transformers, and don't just give me a final battle, but give me a price and let me see it paid, twice over. )
Not sure what you might’ve taken away from this, other than the awareness that I tend to focus a bit more on the background music than most folks might (or maybe that’s just thanks to the hearing damage from those hardcore shows when I stupidly thought it would be just fine to be sitting on the stage with one ear pressed to the double Marshall stacks, damn it, and now I’m ultra-sensitive to dynamics since too low and I can’t hear and too loud and, uh, I can’t hear). Or maybe, hopefully, the next movie you watch, you’ll also find yourself paying attention to the score, to see how the themes and instruments and mixing come together to imply the series of movements that echo what you’d find in a good story... or maybe you’re still back on the whole monkey-king thing. Could be.
I know some of you on my flist are fans of Naruto; for those who aren’t, it’s a Japanese fantasy/action series that revolves around the story of a young man, Naruto, who lives in a ninja community. His goal is to become the village’s strongest ninja, and if anything sums up Naruto’s personality in one go, it’s this: he’s a ninja who wears orange. Bright, dayglo orange. (Obviously, stealth is not his strongpoint.) So here we have a story about a young man who’s pretty much characterized from the get-go as bucking the trends/traditions to make it to the top despite everything against him. Nothing really that new in the plotline, if you think about it, other than a few minor twists in the treatment.
Okay, then. The soundtrack is done by Toshio Masuda, who also did the soundtrack for Mushishi -- a gentle, self-restrained slice-of-life series that’s the radical opposite of Naruto. That contrast is in the soundtracks’ respective musical styles as well -- at least, at first glance. The Mushishi soundtrack is heavily influenced by traditional Japanese instruments and melodies, while the Naruto soundtrack sounds like your average boys-action-series, replete with a theme for every character (of which the majority are chirpy, cheerful, almost goofy melodies). Then one day I was listening to whatever CP had put on the stereo, and not long after that my iPod skipped around and delivered the main theme to Naruto, and suddenly I realized why Masuda’s theme seemed so familiar.
( Naruto, Transformers, and don't just give me a final battle, but give me a price and let me see it paid, twice over. )
Not sure what you might’ve taken away from this, other than the awareness that I tend to focus a bit more on the background music than most folks might (or maybe that’s just thanks to the hearing damage from those hardcore shows when I stupidly thought it would be just fine to be sitting on the stage with one ear pressed to the double Marshall stacks, damn it, and now I’m ultra-sensitive to dynamics since too low and I can’t hear and too loud and, uh, I can’t hear). Or maybe, hopefully, the next movie you watch, you’ll also find yourself paying attention to the score, to see how the themes and instruments and mixing come together to imply the series of movements that echo what you’d find in a good story... or maybe you’re still back on the whole monkey-king thing. Could be.