(L) Karigurashi no Arrietty

[TinyRedLeaf]

Originally Posted by Shiroth

Also, i'm probably crazy enough to say the film has my favourite Ghibli score.

My first impression of Cecile Corbel's score was echoed by a number of other bloggers who felt that the music was too jarring, distracting viewers from the movie instead of supporting it.

On further listening, however, I too came to love it. On its own, the soundtrack works almost like an image album, hinting at and developing especially the relationship between Arrietty and Sho — it didn't occur to me, for example, that Sho had a crush on Arrietty until I listened to the songs Sho's Lament, Forbidden Love and Goodbye My Friend. To a certain extent, his feelings were also reciprocated by Arrietty, which was quite sweet, I felt.

To be sure though, the Arrietty score doesn't do justice to Corbel's talent — it's generally lighter than her earlier works in Breton, her native language. Take La Fille Damnee and Ma Zat for example: her songs typically feature an undercurrent of melancholy, and sound a lot more exotically Celtic.

La Fille Damnee

Ma Zat

[Shiroth]

Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

On further listening, however, I too came to love it. On its own, the soundtrack works almost like an image album, hinting at and developing especially the relationship between Arrietty and Sho — it didn't occur to me, for example, that Sho had a crush on Arrietty until I listened to the songs Sho's Lament, Forbidden Love and Goodbye My Friend. To a certain extent, his feelings were also reciprocated by Arrietty, which was quite sweet, I felt.

Exactly . I had a similar conversation with my friends after leaving the cinema. Saying that personal, i found that this is the first time a Ghibli score has had such an impact role on the story and it's characters.

I especially like Ma Zat. Do you happen to know which albums these two are from?

[TinyRedLeaf]

Originally Posted by Shiroth

Exactly. I had a similar conversation with my friends after leaving the cinema. Saying that personal, i found that this is the first time a Ghibli score has had such an impact role on the story and it's characters.

I especially like Ma Zat. Do you happen to know which albums these two are from?

Ma Zat is from a rock opera called Anne de Bretagne by Alan Simon.

La Fille Damnee is from Cecile Corbel's Songbook Vol. 2.

[Shiroth]

Thanks a bunch. Shall work on purchasing both of those albums.

[YuriEcchiGirl]

I can't wait for this to come out on DVD over here in the UK

[Shiroth]

Originally Posted by YuriEcchiGirl

I can't wait for this to come out on DVD over here in the UK

Should be early 2012.

[YuriEcchiGirl]

Originally Posted by Shiroth

Should be early 2012.

Thank you so much, that's really helpful to know...ROLL ON PRE-ORDERING!

[TinyRedLeaf]

I found an interesting interview that the Los Angeles Times did with Cecile Corbel. It revealed some insights into how Studio Ghibli combines music with its storyboards.

The fairy tale in Arrietty's music

Los Angeles (Feb 17, Fri):

...Corbel's harp work draws on Celtic and folk traditions, and it gives The Secret World of Arrietty, the directorial debut of Hiromasa Yonebayashi, a far more subtle backdrop than a traditional orchestral score. It's also very exact and tiny, reflecting the world of the film, which is based on The Borrowers, Mary Norton's 1952 children’s book about the minuscule people who live in the nooks and crannies of big people's homes.

"When I first saw the movie I was kind of surprised," veteran producer Frank Marshall of Walt Disney, which brought the movie to the United States, said of the music. "It's so unusual for the movie. It's not Japanese instruments, yet it completely works because this world that we're watching could be anywhere."

Corbel said she received a letter back from director and Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Miyazaki, who co-wrote the Japanese screenplay for the film. He asked Corbel to write one song, the theme for the film's main character of Arrietty. Upon enthusiastically accepting her assignment, she was given a series of sketches for the film, as well as character and plot summaries in the form of short poems. One song soon turned into 20.

"They sent a lot of their intentions in the form of poems, small poems, just a few lines," Corbel said. "They wanted me to write one song for each of the poems. Each of the poems was relating to one particular part of the movie. The creative process was really free. I just had to feel out the emotions that were described in the poems..."

...She said: "One of the hardest things was to stick to what they liked in my music and not try to make it film music. I wanted to remain very simple and subtle in the arrangements. They didn't want it to have orchestral music, which they had in many other Ghibli movies. They wanted something more acoustic..."

...Helping both her and the film, she believed, was the fact that the score and animation were done concurrently. "The basic idea from Ghibli was to have all the emotion and feelings already inside the music, and then you bring that to the movie," Corbel said.

LA TIMES

The take-away message is that Corbel's music does, in fact, offer a canonical perspective on Arrietty and Sho's relationship. They were in love. The audience is meant to feel that, and it was not something from Corbel's own imagination.

Incidentally, despite my initial misgivings, I have to say I quite enjoyed both the American and British voices of Arrietty. It's interesting, because they offer different interpretations of the character that — surprisingly — work. American Arrietty is quite perky, and you can easily hear the tomboy in her, while British Arrietty has a warmer and more "authentic" tone.