P O P S P RO G RAM NOTES PIXAR IN CONCERT saturday, MAY 2, 2015 The 14 films that Pixar Animation Studios has produced, and The Walt Disney Company has distributed, have changed the way we look at animation for the big screen. Critics across the country have remarked on the quality of storytelling, the cleverness of the scripts, and the increasingly lifelike look of the computergenerated imagery that the Pixar team employs.
additional depth with the introduction of yodeling cowgirl Jessie and Buzz’s intergalactic enemy Emperor Zurg, prompting Randy Newman to add Coplandesque roundup music and John Williams-style space-opera sounds to his score. The Oscar-nominated song “When She Loved Me” remains among the most poignant of all the Pixar tunes.
One of the distinguishing aspects of the Pixar films is serious and respectful attention to music and its role in that storytelling. All 14 scores have been written by just four composers: Randy Newman (b. 1943), Michael Giacchino (b. 1967), Thomas Newman (b. 1955) and Patrick Doyle (b. 1953). Collectively, this music has won three Academy Awards, received 10 additional Oscar nominations and won 10 Grammy Awards.
Monsters, Inc. (2001) was another big boxoffice hit, the story of a parallel universe where a monster world is powered by the screams of children. Monster pals Mike (Billy Crystal) and Sulley (John Goodman) discover a little girl has accidentally infiltrated their workplace and must hide her from the authorities. Randy Newman added a strong jazz element to his fourth consecutive Pixar score, and won his first Academy Award for the film’s song “If I Didn’t Have You.”
“Music, to me, is one of the most important things to give a movie emotion,” John Lasseter, chief creative officer at Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios, told Variety during a Hollywood recording session last year. “Lighting, color and music are all things I use as a storyteller. I’m in absolute awe of the talent of these musicians... the fact that they have never seen this music before and yet play it perfectly, with feeling and interpretation.” Toy Story (1995) was the first of the Pixar films. Its clever story of a child’s playthings, including the rivalry of cowboy doll Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) and astronaut action figure Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Tim Allen), were embraced by young and old alike. It became the year’s topgrossing film and won a Special Achievement Oscar as the first feature-length computeranimated film. Its lively orchestral score, and three original songs – including “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” now a standard – were composed by Randy Newman, the Los Angeles-born pop songwriter and respected film composer (whose earlier films included Ragtime, The Natural and Parenthood). Randy Newman returned to score A Bug’s Life (1998), the story of an ant inventor named Flik (Dave Foley) who recruits a troupe of bug circus performers to help rid the ant colony of its grasshopper oppressors. Newman’s score employed a variety of styles from mock-heroic to Gershwinesque big-city jazz and remains among the composer’s most delightful scores. Pixar’s third feature, Toy Story 2 (1999), found Woody declared a valuable collectible and stolen for eventual sale. The toys’ saga gains
Finding Nemo (2003) takes place mostly underwater, with its story of clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) and regal tang Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), who suffers from short-term memory loss, on a search for his kidnapped son Nemo. Director Andrew Stanton said that he wrote the entire script while listening to the music of Thomas Newman (composer of The Shawshank Redemption, Little Women and American Beauty, and Randy’s cousin) and so decided to hire the younger Newman for the Nemo score, which adds synthesizer textures and exotic instruments to the traditional symphony orchestra. Nemo became the first Pixar film to win the new Oscar category of Animated Feature Film; the second was The Incredibles (2004), a comedy about a family of superheroes who must conceal their powers from the public (Craig T. Nelson and Holly Hunter are the voices of the adult heroes). Michael Giacchino, composer of the Medal of Honor series of videogames and the TV series Alias and Lost, scored the film with a lively pastiche of 1960s spy and caper music; he cited such influences as John Barry, Henry Mancini and Hanna-Barbera cartoon composer Hoyt Curtin. Cars (2006), the seventh Pixar feature, was inspired by the sights and sounds of the American West’s Route 66. This time the characters were all motor vehicles, including racecar Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and former racer Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), stuck in the forgotten town of Radiator Springs. For music, Lasseter returned to Randy Newman, an
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