• Composed by Christopher Lennertz
• Varese Sarabande / 2011 / 54:24

The Easter Bunny’s nephew decides he doesn’t want to take over the family business and chooses instead to move to LA and try to become a rock star.  “It’s rubbish!” cried the critics.  “I want to see it!” cried the kids.  And so, it’s made a fortune.  The film is a blend of live action and animation; the score, by Christopher Lennertz, is composed very much in the style of most scores for animations these days, apart from Disney (including Pixar) ones – nice tunes, a pleasant orchestral palette, above all a sense of fun – but also not a great deal which is particularly original or, frankly, distinguishes it from any of the others.  Lennertz made his name with full-bodied old-school action/adventure music for video games, but here he is writing in the vein of all those scores for animations since the turn of the century by all the Hans Zimmer associates.

As with virtually all of those, it really does make for a very pleasant album.  It’s very easy to listen to – bright, breezy, very cheerful, full of charm.  There’s a nice main theme, and there’s almost always a decent tune just around the corner.  In short, it’s hard to find anything bad to say about it.  (I guess there’s a bit too much mickey-mousing for some listeners, but it’s hard to complain about that in music for animation.)  Having said that, there’s no escaping from the fact that, while the music hits the target in the way that all those Zimmer-associate animation scores do, actually the target isn’t set all that high – I appreciate that the film almost certainly doesn’t give him nearly so much to work with, but comparing this with the work that Lennertz’s one-time video game composing peer Michael Giacchino has done for Pixar doesn’t do this any favours.  Overall, though, anyone who loves the style used for modern animations is bound to enjoy it.  I guess the only question mark is how many more trips to the well people will take before starting to wonder how much of the same type of thing they really want.  ***

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