ONCE UPON A FOREST – AN ANALYSIS OF THE COMPLETE SCORE

Notes on the movie Once Upon A Forest opened to mixed reviews on June 18, 1993 and was not the financial success that the filmmakers had hoped for – of course, there was the small matter of Spielberg’s dinosaurs crowding the marketplace back then. None of this, however, kept Forest from being nominated for an Annie Award for Best Animated Feature in 1993 and winning an MPSE Golden Reel Award for Best Sound Editing. A quick internet search does not reveal very much about the production, but there is an informative Wikipedia page. It has this to say about the production. Once Upon[...]

ONCE UPON A FOREST – AN INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR CHARLES GROSVENOR

Hot on the heels of A Far Off Place and just prior to Searching For Bobby Fischer (both 1993), James Horner was asked by producer David Kirschner to score a modestly budgeted animation movie called Once Upon a Forest. Kirschner and Horner had first joined forces on An American Tail (1986) and they went on to collaborate on Fievel Goes West (1991), The Pagemaster (1994) and Hocus Pocus (1993). (James Horner was originally slated to score Hocus Pocus but had to bow out due to scheduling conflicts, handing over scoring duties to John Debney, who was barely a blip on[...]

ABBEY ROAD STUDIOS

Oxyman [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons Abbey Road Studios (formerly EMI studios) are recording studios in London,England, founded in the year 1931. Their current name is a tribute to the eponymous album of The Beatles who recorded most of their songs there in the 1960s. Several famous bands have recorded there, such as Pink Floyd, and more recently, Oasis and Radiohead. Legendary music composers like John Williams used the studios to record the scores for five films of Star Wars starting with ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ in 1980, and composer James Horner has used Abbey Road Studios many times as his recording[...]