The evolution of music in Disney films over the last decade or so is interesting. The studio's revival started with The Little Mermaid and composer/songwriter Alan Menken is often given much of the credit. He worked for the studio for a few films in a row and won Oscar after Oscar. One film he didn't do was The Lion King, which featured a very entertaining score by Hans Zimmer and excellent songs by Elton John; at the same time, Randy Newman was writing his music for the first Toy Story and contributing a lot towards its success. After a couple more Menken projects, Disney started working with a different array of composers, probably aiming to recreate the success of John and Newman. Scores were written by Jerry Goldsmith, Mark Mancina, James Newton Howard, John Debney; songs by Phil Collins, Sting. They never really quite recaptured the magic of that which they were trying to emulate however, and the choice of Sting to write the songs for The Emperor's New Groove in 2000 was a peculiar one.

Expectation is a funny thing. Listeners rarely have little idea of what they are going to hear when they first put on a CD. With soundtracks it can be a little hard to guess at times when you haven't seen the film, but given its subject-matter (and title), it was fairly natural to expect The Emperor's New Groove to be, well, groovy. But it isn't. Sting's songs are pleasant enough ("Perfect World" sung by Tom Jones sounds just like Elton John's songs for The Road to El Dorado for Dreamworks) without being outstanding (or mildly groovy); Debney's score is lovely and great fun, but more generic than I'd have expected. (The original composer on the film, Marc Shaiman, would seem to have been a perfect choice and I'm not sure what circumstances resulted in him being replaced by Debney, but I'd be intrigued to hear what Shaiman may have written.)

There are only six score cues, but they are quite lengthy and add up to almost half an hour's music. They fall into two camps - vaguely amusing action/adventure music for full orchestra and surprisingly laid-back romantic music with absolutely lovely passages for acoustic guitar. Every composer of animated films always claims to treat them as live action films (but they rarely actually do that) but Debney really seems to have done so and it is a great irony given the usual state of scores for animations that his music is probably more coherent and better-developed than much of his scores for live action films in the last few years. The finale is deserving of particular attention.

This is not a major work by Sting and nor is it a major work by Debney, but the latter's enthusiastic contributions make up for the slightly disappointing work by the former to create a recommended album.

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