Two Worlds is evidently the
centre piece song and it (like the others) bounces along at a
fair old pace. In fact, all of the songs are very upbeat indeed.
Son of Man and Strangers Like Me are favourites, but both are
arranged in a very similar fashion. Indeed, those two and Two
Worlds are mainly done with close harmony with Collins providing
his own backing vocals. They have a very 80's sound to them,
which is fine for me since I quite like that kind of thing, but
it may put others off. You'll Be in My Heart has a brief bit of
Glenn Close singing as well as a small bit of Collins singing,
but evidently the film version was designed to be very short.
It's rather a shame, as the pop version that Collins sings later
on is much longer and certainly turns into a fairly appealing
song. Collins' more poppy rendition of Two Worlds is very similar
to the film version and is perhaps a little redundent. Trashin'
the Camp builds from typewriter keys clicking away with a
vocalised scat backing. Difficult to describe well; put it this
way, there are no lyrics, just single syllables. There is another
version feating N'Synch (whoever they are), which is also
redundent. Liking of the songs basically depends on whether you
like Phil Collins or not. I do, but I would have liked the songs
to have more variable arrangements and there are really too many
versions of the same songs and too many reprises. They are all
good when taken seperately, but in a row, they end up blurring
into one too much. Songs Rating ~ Although not having many
stunningly good projects to work on, Mark Mancina has always done
pretty well to produce some decent music for pretty weak movies (Twister
has an extremely enjoyable action/Americana score for example). Tarzan
gives him a chance to recreate Hans Zimmer's success with his
stupendous score to the Lion King.
While Mancina's score is by turns primitive (wooden percussion),
exciting and introverted, it doesn't really approach Zimmer's in
terms of quality. Zimmer's unique grasp of idiomatic African
music certainly gave him a head start. Mancina really tries to
evoke the jungle with drums and chorus, but to nowhere near the
same spectacular level. There are no great set pieces either. The
Gorilla's is a thundering action cue in typical pseudo-Zimmer
style (although Mancina has enough of his own to just about
remain interesting.) The other problem is that there are no very
strong themes in the score. Zimmer didn't really use Elton John's
themes, but created and used many of his own, Mancina has a motif
or two that is always helpful, but nothing that will stick in the
mind all that much. I can imagine that with the apparently
stunning visuals in the film, it will work superbly well, but on
CD it just comes across as a bit more non-descript than it ought
to. The very brief running time for the actual score portion
doesn't help at all either. Overall, an enjoyable CD as long as
you like Phil Collins songs, but for score-only fans, I really
don't think there's quite enough to warrant purchasing the entire
disc due to the short running time and lack of many memorable
moments. Score Rating ~ Total Time ~ 41:01As with The Lion King and
Mulan, Disney have once again opted to employ
the services of different composers for the score and the songs.
In this instance, the songs composer of choice is ex-Genesis
member Phil Collins. While I'm convinced I read that Phil Collins
was the UK's most successful solo male artist, he is apparently
not all that well known elsewhere. Anyway, his style is usually
quite recognisable and these efforts are no different. Whereas
Elton John wrote songs for characters to sing, Collins performs
all of the songs as more of a narrator - although the result is
that the sequences come out more like a pop video in the film.
