After the phenomenally-successful partnership between Disney and Alan Menken ended for whatever reason, the songs in the studio's movies suddenly became considerably worse.  Perhaps in a response to both this and calls from various people to produce animated movies that weren't musicals, they decided to try out a few films without character-driven songs in them.  Signed up to score all three was James Newton Howard.  The first, Dinosaur, was successful, but the two others - Atlantis, and now Treasure Planet - are Disney's least successful movies since their post-Little Mermaid renaissance.  

Howard's scores for the three are somewhat variable.  Dinosaur made for a terrific album, but at the back of my mind for the entire running-time was that I'd heard all the music before in various Jerry Goldsmith scores; Atlantis featured some fine moments but a little too much Mickey Mousing to be wholly enjoyable.  Now there's Treasure Planet to consider, Disney's "updating" of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic.

The album does open with a couple of kiddy pop songs which are utterly disposable, before a rather generous helping of score (running to 15 tracks - well over 45 minutes in all).  The first couple of tracks are most promising - the electric guitar in "12 Years Later" is a little off-putting, but the anthemic theme is great.  "To the Spaceport" is really very good, a cracking piece of action music.  But after that... well, think of Randy Newman's Pixar scores, only worse.  Howard's orchestrations are probably not as precise and impressive as Newman's, but they're decent enough, but Howard just doesn't seem to be able to give his music the same infectious quality as Newman can.

You know what it sounds like - when someone falls over, the music falls over with them, and so on.  I think this can only work in the most extreme circumstances - even a composer as talented as Newman hasn't been able to completely satisfy.  And given that Howard has nothing like as strong a musical personality as many of his peers, frankly the music just gets irritating after a while.  Dinosaur was a very coherent effort (despite the shortcomings I mentioned above); Atlantis slightly less so; and Treasure Planet rather less so still.  It certainly has its moments, but they are punctuated with too much boring stuff - when the music isn't Mickey Mousing, it just tends to be dull.  The quiet sections just don't have the kind of impact they were designed to - the lack of emotion is surprising.

I feel that it's quite disappointing, given that Jerry Goldsmith, Alan Silvestri and others have written very strong scores for Disney in the recent past, that they turned to Howard to write the music for the most obviously inspirational (from a musical point of view) of their films just lately.  Howard's written some good stuff on the right kind of film for him, but just doesn't seem the best composer for this.  As his music amply demonstrates.  Quite why Disney never asked Goldsmith back after he gave them the best score they ever had, with Mulan, I don't know.

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