• Composed by Howard Shore
• Howe Records / 49m

A light fantasy for children, The Lost Prince is directed by The Artist‘s Michel Hazanavicius and sees a father and daughter go into a fairytale every night as she falls asleep. Howard Shore only tends to score one movie a year these days and it’s been quite a while since we’ve heard anything light from him, with nine years having passed since Hugo. Go a few years further back and you arrive at the essentially forgotten The Last Mimzy – and this new score is superficially somewhere in the middle of those two, both in terms of style and indeed quality. It is for the most part genuinely light like Hugo and almost continually playful; there are French flavours in the instrumental palette, and some sprightly orchestral jazz which is quintessentially gallic. There are a handful of themes which are heard several times, the opening cue introducing the dominant main theme which is very pretty even if it doesn’t really stick around in the memory for very long.

For a while we hear one pretty happy piece after another and the album threatens to just be a bit too slight to be truly satisfying before things do get a little more serious. “Earthquake!” around the midway point is quite an engaging piece of fantasy action music (and if you’re wondering if it sounds like you-know-what, well it does, a bit). There’s certainly substance to the music – one would hardly expect anything less from Howard Shore – but a score like this really stands or falls on the quality of its melodies and I’m not really sure there’s any in here genuinely memorable enough to make this more than a middle-of-the-road effort. It’s a score of energy, with a delightfully playful spirit (which is why I prefer it to The Last Mimzy, which I found too dour), and is engaging enough while it’s playing – I’m sure the composer’s more devout fans will find more than enough to savour – but it could do with a spark of magic (like Hugo‘s) to elevate it to top-tier Shore and that only really appears in the wonderful final score cue “C’est l’histoire des Oubliés” (with slight hints of Danny Elfman in its brilliant first half). Having said all that – there is certainly enough here to make it an engaging album which is worth exploring – and like a lot of this composer’s music there is depth to it which ultimately rewards frequent returns.

Rating: ***

facebook.com/moviewave | twitter.com/MovieWaveDotNet | amazon.com