There is a piece of film music that is played twice every year at the Cannes Film Festival: during the opening and closing ceremonies. Evoking childhood memories, it is the work of prolific composer James Horner, who passed away in June 2015 and also composed the soundtrack for Titanic. Less well known for its connection to the festival than Camille Saint Saens’ “The Carnival of the Animals,” which precedes each screening, “The Land Before Time” is nevertheless one of James Horner’s most accomplished works.
The French pianist Camille Saint Saëns, with his work Le Carnaval des Animaux, is the eminent representative of classical music at the Cannes Film Festival, introducing each screening since the 1990s. James Horner, meanwhile, is responsible for representing film music but also for opening and closing the festival each year with music.
The score, written for the animated children’s film The Land Before Time by Don Bluth (1988), produced by Steven Spielberg, has all the hallmarks of a work for adults. An embodiment of emotional gigantism, this ode to maternal love oscillates between drama and optimism and carries within it the courage to carry on despite adversity. It is, in short, a metaphor for the creative act and, even more so, for life itself.
A project bigger than life
Long before the success of Braveheart, Titanic, and Avatar, James Horner made a name for himself by incorporating choirs and electronic elements into his classical orchestrations.
With an impressive knowledge of the classical repertoire, he was recognized and sometimes criticized for his “free associations,” which bordered on plagiarism. He even went to court over the music for Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which was attacked by the heirs of Italian composer Nino Rota, who claimed it contained elements of Amarcord.
“The repertoire as a whole is in itself a fertile ground that I use like Prokofiev or any other composer. Richard Strauss considered himself someone who was ‘passing the baton’, an expression I find very apt,” he said during the promotion of the film Sneakers (1992). He added, “Film music has a particular structure that allows the repertoire to evolve. You know, I’ve always considered our profession to be a contemporary metaphor for the time when Bach and Haydn composed scores for kings or for liturgical events on commission.”
In 1986, James Horner worked on Don Bluth‘s new animated film, The Land Before Time. Bluth is a former Disney animator who worked on Sleeping Beauty and Robin Hood before founding his own studio.
Initially, producers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas (with Amblin Entertainment and Universal Pictures) wanted to make a feature-length animated film without dialogue, similar to the sequence Le Sacre du printemps in Disney’s Fantasia (1940). Faced with the divisive nature of the approach, they backed down and opted for a more conventional film.
Click here to read the entire article on Luxus Magazine
Featured photo: Cannes Film Festival
