The Best Original Score category at this year's Oscars contains one of the most wildly varied slates of nominees: it includes French composer Alexandre Desplat for the stately "The King's Speech," film music mainstay Hans Zimmer for the portentous, dramatic "Inception," Bollywood vet A.R. Rahman for "127 Hours" and industrial rock icon Trent Reznor and co-composer Atticus Ross for the tense, itchy "The Social Network."
The last member of the group is John Powell (left), whose music for the DreamWorks animated film "How to Train Your Dragon" is the most unabashedly sweeping, dramatic and varied score in the field. It's grand and stirring and jaunty and fun and bombastic and gleeful – music that draws from a broad range of influences to create the kind of epic soundscape you need when you've got a film full of dragons and Vikings.
I talked to Randy Newman recently, and he said it was more difficult to write for an animated film. You have to do a lot more work, and use a lot more notes.
There's a lot of programmatic music, in the sense that it's descriptive. Doing that in a live action film is incredibly dangerous – I know, I've tried. In animation, I have the freedom to be more connected with the action of the film. If you do it too much, everybody uses the pejorative of Mickey Mousing. But that's a style, and at its best it’s Carl Stalling in the Warner Bros films.
Some movies just do it endlessly, and it gets exhausting. And there's no need for it. So we tried to take a more sensitive role in that, and allow things to have a wit and a fun to them sometimes. And other times, I really do score it like a live action movie.
You've done a lot of animated films. Do you have to get into a different type of mindset?
Yes, I'd say you do. There's definitely more detail, because the filmmakers are more detail oriented, to the point of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. They are moving things around one frame at a time and getting the perfect acting, the perfect body movement, the perfect visuals. Everything has to be really perfect for them, so when it comes to the music, you have to be willing to join them in that madness. And I enjoy that.
And the other thing about animation is that you get to write music with more joy. That's why I keep coming back to it.
"How to Train Your Dragon" is really a grand, large-scale adventure score. What were you going for when you wrote the music?
I was certainly trying to get a bit more epic. I just felt the animation and the visuals were giving me a broader palette to play with. As a kid I remember watching "The Vikings" with Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, and I always liked that score.
