Buy it... if you have longed to hear Alan Menken start his engines once again and produce a Disney musical equal to some of his previous work.

Avoid it... if only the best of Menken will do, and nothing less than the quality of his original trilogy of musicals will interest you.

Menken

Home on the Range: (Alan Menken) Oh, the woes of Alan Menken. If you were to study a film composer's rapid ascent into stardom and equally hasty descent back into obscurity, then Alan Menken would be your perfect subject. Winning 8 Academy Awards (more than Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Hans Zimmer, Danny Elfman, and half a dozen other major composers combined) in the late 1980's and early 1990's, Menken has a distinguished place in both the history of Hollywood musicals and film music legend. His vast popularity in 1992 was hard to measure; after The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, Menken was all the rage to kids, teens, and many adults. The entire concept of the animated musical was reborn, leading to a "best film" Oscar nomination for Beauty and the Beast as a whole. It was not uncommon in those years for Menken to have three of his songs from any given film nominated for Oscars as well, and he alone caused the AMPAS reaction of creating separate score and song award categories for several years. But after sustaining interest with Pocahontas 1995, the animation world was changing from 2-D to 3-D, and the musicals were giving way to straight animated features. After suffering from lackluster support for The Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1996 and producing the disastrous Hercules in 1997, Menken's reign over Disney's 2-D musicals came to an end. Other composers began rotating in the duties of this genre, with even scoring legend Jerry Goldsmith making an entry for Mulan in 1998. Alan Menken almost fell off the face of the earth after 1997, with a career stalled in limbo (although he had made enough money to support himself for a lifetime). Granted, his output declined in his later scores, but if you are of the generation of movie-goers who also believes that Menken will always have his place in the animation industry, then you'll be intrigued, if not completely surprised to see his return to Disney for the 2004 animated musical Home on the Range. Even if you were never a Menken fan in the first place, the film showcases champion Western yodeling in ways you never thought possible.

Once again, Disney claims that this will be the "last 2-D animation" from their studios (but we've heard this before), and it is perhaps fitting that Menken be brought back for one last cookie-cutter 2-D musical. At 76 minutes, Home on the Range may have best gone straight to video, but Menken enthusiasts from a decade ago will enjoy another opportunity to hear him in action. Mainstream critics have put a lashing on the film, a comedy in which talking farm animals help save their farm by taking matters into their own control (not exactly in Animal Farm fashion, but rather in a Wild West in which yodeling is used as a brainwashing technique on cows). Menken seems to embrace these ridiculous comedy styles with great pleasure. The Western swing that he creates for Home on the Range has all of the upbeat style of old 1940's singing cowboy films starring Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. The pace of the rhythms, the whistling in the background, and quotations taken from famous Western pieces of past generations are thrown at the viewer/listener in a rapid-fire format consistent with a modern 76-minute film, though. On quick glance, the songs and score seem to be identical in progression to Menken's previous efforts, with seven songs followed by an equal score selection and song reprises mixed throughout. Still, the difference here is that the characters themselves aren't performing the songs as they always had in the past (who says Judi Dench, Cuba Gooding Jr., Steve Buscemi, and Roseanne Barr can't sing?); only Randy Quaid has the token 'badguy' performance in a song. An interesting analysis appeared in the Boston Globe in response to the film: "...while Alan Menken's songs are as catchy as ever, it's been a long, slow descent from the grace and spirit of The Little Mermaid to this. Where a Disney movie once used songs to deepen the characters or dazzle the audience, now they're just stunt interludes for such marquee names as Bonnie Raitt, k.d. lang, and Tim McGraw to move units of the soundtrack CD." Indeed, where Home on the Range is lacking is in exactly this respect. Menken has created a hybrid in which a Phil Collins-type of collection of narrators sings about the story rather than having the characters create the magic themselves.

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The best aspects of Home on the Range are those which actually better follow Menken's winning formula and add to it for comedy purposes. The opening chorus song is a throwback to the prelude of The Little Mermaid, and is appropriately repised. The heartfelt primary character song has been replaced by "Little Patch of Heaven," the film's best song, performed adorably by k.d. lang once in full and as the finale reprise. The 'badguy' song is hysterically conceived as a mad-yodeling piece in which famous tunes with Western affiliations are performed by yodelers (no that's not actually Randy Quaid doing the yodeling!), and you can either receive this with head-shaking humor or the horror of contemplating the depths of despair for Menken's career. The only intolerable song is the modernized version of "Anytime You Need a Friend," performed by The Beu Sisters and standing out like a very sore thumb. The score itself has all the charm of Menken's previous efforts, with pieces of Beauty and the Beast, The hunchback of Notre Dame, and a Western theme with hints of "Colors of the Wind" from Pocahontas. Listening to this score is a refreshing taste of innocence on one hand, but a ghostly reminder of better glory days for the genre on the other. Snippets of that old Menken magic show through in portions of both the score and songs for Home on the Range, and it's difficult to compare it to Menken's others after seven years of absence. He does spice up the equation with several (credited) statements of Ennio Morricone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and a few uncredited influences from Elmer Bernstein as well. Menken's own end title song, performed by himself vocally and on solo piano, seems to try to borrow an idea from Randy Newman's recent success. In the end, Home on the Range succeeds the best when Menken follows the formulas that brought him his best successes. Unfortunately, Home on the Range may not have been the best of films with which to make a comeback, but it does show that Menken has the potential to dazzle us with another major dramatic animated music if the right film arises at Disney and is presented to him. Just to hear him starting his engines once again gains this score a long-awaited fourth star. ****

Bias Check:

For Alan Menken reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.44 (in 9 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.58 (in 46,497 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.