There have been some weird Oscar goings-on around the music categories over the years, starting with Erich Wolfgang Korngold not officially winning the Oscar even though his score for “Anthony Adverse” did win in 1936, back when the statue went not to the composer but to the Warner Bros. Studio Music Department that hired him. Then there was Charlie Chaplin winning for his score to “Limelight” in 1973, even though the film was released in 1952 but never played in Los Angeles, making it eligible for the Oscars when it finally played L.A. 20 years later.
(Chaplin’s two fellow composers were both dead by the time they won, and Chaplin himself was a no-show.)
And now Kris Bowers can add his own wrinkle to the list of oddities in the Best Original Score category. Bowers makes his living as a composer but directs short films in his free time with prolific short-doc filmmaker Ben Proudfoot, with the two landing nominations in 2021 for “A Concerto Is a Conversation” and winning last year for “The Last Repair Shop.” This year’s nomination for writing the score to “The Wild Robot” gives Bowers one of the strangest one-two punches in Oscar history: winning for a short one year and nominated for a score the next.
Score and doc short? “It’s a very small niche,” Bowers said, laughing.
And by the way, it’s all Kobe Bryant’s fault, going back to when Bowers collaborated with the late basketball star on the 2015 documentary “Kobe Bryant’s Muse.” “We worked very closely together up until he passed,” Bowers said. “He was such an avid, voracious studier of filmmaking, and I observed that very closely. That’s when I started getting into the idea of storytelling.”
But composing was still his “day job” — and even though he’d gone through a stretch as a kid when he wanted to be a cartoonist, “scoring films was always the goal.”
Still, that childhood fascination with animation did make it sweet when he got the chance to score “The Wild Robot,” a giant animated epic from four-time nominee Chris Sanders. “It was pretty wild,” Bowers said. “A lot of the animation I used to watch when I was a kid didn’t have any dialogue — it was like ‘Tom and Jerry’ and Looney Tunes and ‘Silly Symphonies.’ That’s when I started to realize the power of music to help tell a story.”
“And Chris believed in the possibility of having long sequences without dialogue. There were times where he would remove dialogue once he heard the cue because he felt like a lot of what needed to be said emotionally was being said in the music,” he added. “That definitely made me feel like the childhood version of myself was super excited and proud.”
However, the adult version of himself had to work hard, because animation can be an exhausting medium for composers. “There needed to be a level of engagement with the music,” he said. “Every visual detail is so intentional and so important, and the music has to operate in a style where you’re commenting on a lot of things that are happening. Every few seconds, something new pops up. It was a lot more work, a lot more paying attention to detail and definitely a lot more music.”
The most difficult cue to write, he noted, was the enormous migration sequence when robot Roz has to say goodbye to the young goose she’s been raising. Bowers tried to channel how he thought he’d feel when his daughter went off to college — but since his little girl was a newborn at the time, finding the right emotional tone took more imagination and soul-searching than he was initially able to do.
“The process was difficult, but the piece of music that came out flowed pretty easily based on the emotion I got to,” he shared.
Now he’s part of the film that landed more Oscar nominations, three, than any other animated feature, and the one that swept the Annie Awards with nine wins, including one for Bowers. And now he’s been recognized by the Academy for his main job, not his side job. Given that, is Bowers still looking to return to that side gig as his career goes forward?
“A hundred percent,” he said. “For me, music is always going to be the clearest way that I can express myself. Like, I almost learned how to play piano at the same rate I was learning how to speak, and in some ways, I spoke more through piano than I did verbally. So I always want things to be musical, whether it’s filmmaking or making music.”
“But Ben and I are working on other things together. We’re hoping to make a feature film out of ‘The Last Repair Shop.’ And there’s other ideas that I have — but for now, it’s just kind of seeing what comes.”
This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
