The Daily Spin, June 6
Hans Zimmer | The Little Prince OST
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
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Album: The Little Prince (OST) (2015)
Artist: Hans Zimmer
Link:
On my Mount Rushmore of film composers, there are two men who, above and beyond, have earned their spots in that hallowed pantheon. One is John Williams, known for such incredible scores as the original Star Wars films, the Jurassic Park franchise, the first couple of Harry Potter films, and the Indiana Jones series. The other is Hans Zimmer, whose towering orchestral compositions have backboned Inception, Interstellar, and the Dark Knight trilogy, among others. His penchant for heavy organ use and sparse instrumentation make him devastatingly effective in tense situations, with a knack for illustrating devastation in its many forms through music, or a lack thereof.
Noting that, I must say I went into this score with a bit of trepidation - while I don’t know that I earnestly believe Zimmer capable of making a bad soundtrack, this is a movie I’ve never seen, some animated film depicting the story of the Little Prince, one of the most popular stories of all time.
I shouldn’t have been worried, of course. Though the score gets off to a slow start - and indeed, the first six or seven songs through ‘Le tour de France’ are significantly weaker than the rest of the score, once it begins to take off, you really feel it. Glimmering piano shines alongside strings that ebb just this side of uneasy, lending a darker tone that never truly disappears, serving its role fantastically to underlie any positive sentiment that the piano and woodwinds may bring.
Lacking in percussion, there’s not a lot of tremendous drive to this score, but it doesn’t need that, instead falling back on the perpetual nature of sound to keep moving forward. Exactly as one song ends, the next begins, surprisingly natural for a score that, understandably, will have dialogue interspersed between it.
As the film reaches what feels to be its climax, you feel the energy build, as the strings pick up a little, a brass accompaniment makes itself heard with a little more oomph than it has in the film up to this point, and even the lower strings, which have been groaning with the weight of terrors unknown, reach up to swell under it all in a triumphant rise as the rest of the noise dances and flits around it, lightning bugs to a light-laden porch, big noise underscored and surrounded by little sounds that only serve to build around it.
Rating: 8.1/10
Best Tracks: Trapped Stars; Ascending
Worst Tracks: Le Tour de France