About the Music

James Newton Howard has worked extensively with Disney and Disney-owned companies, creating soundtracks for "Dinosaur," "Atlantis: the Lost Empire," and recently movies like "Signs" and "Treasure Planet." An eclectic composer, he uses a different style for evey movie, even though certain elements, such as instrument or note combinations, is repeated in much of his work. (I somehow managed to recognize his work in "Waterworld" after listening to the "Atlantis" soundtrack enough.)

The music of Atlantis is varied, fluctuating between a military feel of 1914 to the spiritual notes of a lost civilization. It breaks away from the typical music of a Disney movie, returning to what was used in "The Rescuers Down Under": no one sang. As a result, a composer was needed to bring the sheer feel of the moment into the picture.

James Newton Howard used a combination of drums, chimes, bells, and the human voice to create the music of the lost empire. In fact, the chanting is in Atlantean, the language created for the movie. In fact, his work was so powerful, a piece he had written for the Crystal Chamber sequence not only became final product, but influenced the scene to the point it was animated to it! Howard had this to say from the Collector's DVD:

"In the case of Atlantis, I've approached it largely as a live action film largely in terms of all the sensibilities, and in that regard they are exactly the same for me in terms of the initial inspiration, the initial ideas of what the music's going to feel like and what it's going to be like."

"What I'm trying to do is to establish the difference between the surface world and the Atlantean world, and there's a number of ways of doing that. The way we chose or that we talked about early on was sort of referencing to a very distant extent Gamelan, which is the Indonesian orchestral sound. It’s made up of a lot of tune, chime, bells, and gongs and it’s a wonderfully rich tradition of music.

I think the idea is to combine sounds as such a way, juxtapose it against the picture in such a way that the totality of what your experience is [is] a unique and wonderful event, mush more so than any individual sound."

"If you’re a composer and an animator, [there is a] feeling you really have to assume the roll of a team player. I enjoy that. I really enjoy feeling sort of being a team."

Disclaimer: Atlantis: the Lost Empire, and the characters, language, symbols, storylines and titles are property of he Walt Disney Company. This site has been created for entertainment, non-profit purposes only. See sources.Questions? Comments? E-mail me at Like_A_Star8800@yahoo.com.

A proud member of TheFanlistings.org.