Soundtrack Review: Porco Rosso (1992)

Posted by Jon Blough

October 15, 2009

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This is a review of the motion picture score Porco Rosso by Joe Hisaishi.

“Beautiful at times, but it lacks the cohesive, definite personality of its predecessors”

What was spectacular about Joe Hisaishi’s first four Miyazaki scores is that each one managed to remain unique despite being firmly rooted in the composer’s lush orchestral style. Nausicaa soared right out of your speakers, Laputa overwhelmed you with its choral statements and propulsive action, Totoro charmed with its childlike innocence, and Kiki’s Delivery Service pleasantly flew along with, for the most part, a surprisingly dense texture. Porco Rosso appears to have all the elements in place to equal all those scores. It contains a number of romantic, beautifully performed themes and a playful spirit throughout, shown best in the delightful energy of “Madness (Flight)”. Yet the score is the first of Hisaishi’s Miyazaki scores to be, at times, distractingly familiar, and the lack of thematic focus does set it a notch below its two similarly lighthearted predecessors.

Enjoyable Themes

Despite all of the themes in the score being enjoyable, you can’t shake the feeling that a lot more could have been done with them. A peppy motif gets bounced between brass and strings in the opening three cues and suggests the rest of the score will have a racing upbeat nature throughout, but the rest of the score is curiously absent its personality. The main theme for the score is one of the composer’s best, a jazzy piano perfect for the WWI era of the film and picturesquely beautiful when played on strings in “Porco e Bella” and the all-too brief “A Sepia-Colored Picture”. Alas, it only shows up on a handful of cues, and most of them are piano performances that are roughly reprises of “The Bygone Days, save for the soaring ensemble performance in “Porco e Bella (Ending)”. A stronger score could have developed the theme into a more fully-realized identity for the era, crafting a 20s jazz feel in the same way the music for Kiki’s Delivery Service embodied its seaside locale. One only has to listen to the big band performance of the main theme in Hisaishi’s 2008 concert at Budokan to wonder just how good this score could have been. The theme is an undeniable winner, but its application leaves a little to be desired. A reflective, whimsical theme in “To The Adriatic Sea” is nice but is so dependent on the style of Kiki’s Delivery Service you’d swear it was temped in.

Conclusion

Absent a definitive thematic collection, the majority of the album remains enjoyable but fails to stand out like the underscore of Hisaishi’s other Miyazaki scores. The stately “Serbia March” and “Flying Boatmen” are appropriate enough for the film but lack definitive statements or rhythms. The strumming guitar and waltz meters of “Fio-Seventeen”, “Women of Piccolo”, and “At the End of Summer” are, as with “To The Adriatic Sea”, certainly pleasant as a background listen but retain too much of the texture of Kiki’s Delivery Service to stand out on their own. The electronics in the middle of “Lost Spirit” are also recycled from Totoro, albeit with much less innocence in their performance. The only cue in this section that sticks is “In Search of the Distant Era”, a wonderful recorder solo that calls back to the days of old, but as with the main theme you end up wishing it had received more performances. On the whole, Porco Rosso is not a poor score or even a mediocre one, in fact there’s not a single annoying moment in it, a nice shift from the intrusive synths moments of Nausicaa, Laputa, and Kiki’s Delivery Service. It is beautiful at times, but it lacks the cohesive, definite personality of its predecessors and thus stands with Nausicaa as one of the few Hisaishi scores that has left me wanting just a little bit more.

Album (49:02)
1.   The Wind of Time (When a Human Can Be Human) (2:51)
2.   MAMMAIUTO (1:21)
3.   Addio! (0:37)
4.   The Bygone Days (2:16)
5.   A Sepia-Colored Picture (0:48)
6.   Serbia March (1:04)
7.   Flying Boatmen (2:36)
8.   Doom (Cloud Trap) (1:23)
9.   Porco E Bella (1:06)
10.   Fio-Seventeen (2:05)
11.   Women of Piccolo (2:05)
12.   Friend (3:05)
13.   Partnership (2:28)
14.   Madness (Flight) (2:39)
15.   To the Adriatic Sea (1:50)
16.   In Search of the Distant Era (2:18)
17.   Love at First Sight in the Wilderness (1:11)
18.   At the End of the Summer (1:27)
19.   Lost Spirit (4:12)
20.   Dogfight (2:11)
21.   Porco E bella (Ending) (2:36)
22.   The Time of Cherries (2:53)
23.   Once in a While, Talk of the Old Days (3:57)