In today’s LA Times “The Envelope” section (a special section that comes out a few times before Oscar season, aimed at Academy voters and full of ads and barely-even-fluff-journalism pieces on various movies and crew), there were articles on Up and Giacchino’s score for it.
Some of it is on online.
Here’s an article about Giacchino composing for “Up”:
[i]In approximately four minutes, composer Michael Giacchino had to reflect a lifetime. Early in Disney-Pixar’s computer-animated “Up,” the film’s main character, Carl, experiences marriage, loss and all the highs and lows of the decades in between.
A sort of mini-movie within a movie, the scenes get specific. Capturing in music, for instance, the emotions of a husband and wife immediately after they find out they won’t have children isn’t an easy task, especially when one must do so in just a few seconds of a family film.
It was a struggle, Giacchino said, but he ultimately crafted an elegant waltz, letting the violin lead a path around wistful brass notes one instant and a reflective piano the next.
“It was very hard to find a balance,” Giacchino said. "When is it OK to be sad? When is it OK to be big and small? There are moments that could have been treated like a big, emotional, overbearing kind of a thing.
“But for me,” Giacchino continued, “it was about going in the opposite direction. I looked at it as if, ‘If I were in this room at this moment, what would I say to them?’ I would probably be as quiet and gentle and as soft as possible.’ So that’s what I wanted to do with the music, as opposed to grabbing the person and screaming, ‘I’m so sorry! This is awful!’”[/i]
There are other articles about the top condenders for original score (including Randy Newman, another Pixar composer). You can see them all by going here:
latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/
Scroll down a ways to see the “Up” article.
There’s also another “articles” about the various contenders for best animated picture, and there’s on on “Up” as well:
theenvelope.latimes.com/la-en-an … ory?page=3
[i]"Things keep looking ‘Up’
Pixar Animation Studios has successfully tackled all sorts of tricky plots: talking cars, cooking rats and trash-compacting robots among them. But not until writer-director Pete Docter’s “Up” did the animation kingpin wonder if it really had an unfilmable movie on its hands.
“There was nothing known in this one – there was nothing to lean back on, no sexy hook,” says Docter, who has credits on Pixar’s “Wall-E,” “Monsters, Inc.” and the two “Toy Story” movies. “It was just a bizarre idea.”
Even though the film – like any Pixar production – went through countless rewrites, overhauls and false starts, “Up’s” core premise didn’t drift too far off course from conception to completion: An old man floats away on a bunch of balloons, propelled by great dreams but weighed down by unfulfilled promises.
"We wondered, ‘Is this idea too weird?’ " Docter says. “It was certainly difficult to get green lit.”
It turned out to be a good decision to make it.
“Up” not only stands as one of the most commercially successful Pixar releases of all time (it trails only “Finding Nemo” on the box-office charts), but also among its best reviewed: While “Up” seems a lock for an animation Oscar nomination, several Academy Award prognosticators say the film has a shot for best picture, particularly since the field is expanding to 10 movies. “Even to hear talk of that,” Docter says, “is mind-blowing.”
It’s due, in part, to the little things. There’s little debate that the film’s four-minute montage – in which the lives of Carl and Ellie Fredricksen are recounted without a line of dialogue – stands as one of the year’s most accomplished snippets of storytelling.
“We just tried to make sure that every single thing was in there for a reason,” says Docter. “It’s either setting something up, or paying something off.”
Still, Docter knows animation is seen by some as an artistic ghetto, a lesser form of cinema – a cartoon, in other words. “There’s a certain section of the voters who are not likely to want to watch it,” Docter says of “Up.” “We want them to see it as a film, not as animation.”
Maybe that day is at hand."[/i]
Finally, it’s interesting to note that in this section full of ads targeting Academy voters, the two-page color spread for “Up” has 6 quotes from critics talking about how good a film it is. And quote #2 talks only about the score (“Mr. Giacchino has written some marvelous scores… this one, though, is something else – touching, lilting, swooping, stirring, heartbreakingly elegiac… altogether original, and irresistible.” – Joe Morgensterm, The Wall Street Journal) The two-page ad itself has “THE BEST REVIEWED FILM OF THE YEAR” across the top, and at the bottom says “For Your Consideration in All Catagories, including Best Picture, Best Animated Feature, Best Original Score.”