Blog
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Album: 魔女の宅急便 サントラ音楽集 In the summer of 1989, composer Joe Hisaishi faced an impossible deadline. Fresh off a plane from New York, he had just two days to prepare for recording sessions that would complete one of Studio Ghibli’s most beloved soundtracks. Among the pieces he crafted during this whirlwind period was ‘Shigoto Hajime’ (Work…
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Album: Symphonic Suite “Kiki’s Delivery Service” When Joe Hisaishi first composed the music for Kiki’s Delivery Service in 1989, he crafted something deliberately light and European in character. Thirty years later, the challenge of transforming those intimate melodies into a full symphonic suite left the composer wrestling with fundamental questions about musical identity and artistic…
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Album: となりのトトロ サウンドトラック集 Sometimes the most powerful musical moments in cinema come from what composers call their ‘hidden themes’ – those secondary melodies that weren’t meant to steal the spotlight but end up defining entire films. Joe Hisaishi’s ‘Kaze no Toorimichi’ (The Path of the Wind) from My Neighbor Totoro represents exactly this phenomenon, a…
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Tetsuo Shinohara’s 2017 film ‘Flower and Sword’ stands as a contemplative meditation on art, power, and spiritual resistance during Japan’s transformative late 16th century. Set in the aftermath of Nobunaga Oda’s death, the narrative follows two remarkable figures: Senko Ikenobo, a master of ikebana whose delicate flower arrangements become vessels of hope, and Rikyu, a…
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Album: 風の谷のナウシカ イメージアルバム 鳥の人… When Joe Hisaishi composed “Path to the Valley” (Tani e no Michi) for the Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind image album “Bird Person,” he was unknowingly setting the foundation for one of cinema’s most revolutionary approaches to film music. This seemingly gentle composition, with its Celtic-inspired melodies and pastoral…
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Album: となりのトトロ サウンドトラック集 When Joe Hisaishi sat down to compose the music for Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro in 1988, he faced a peculiar challenge. How do you create a soundtrack for a film about forest spirits and childhood wonder without falling into the trap of saccharine children’s music? The answer, as documented in the…
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Album: 天空の城ラピュタ イメージアルバム ～空から降ってきた少女～ The year 1986 marked a pivotal moment in Japanese animation history, but perhaps more quietly, it also witnessed one of Joe Hisaishi’s most introspective creative journeys. Working on the image album for Hayao Miyazaki’s “Castle in the Sky” (Tenkuu no Shiro Laputa), Hisaishi found himself grappling with both artistic pressure and…
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In 2021, Norwegian director Bjorn-Erik Aschim created something truly remarkable with ‘Dear Alice’—a film that dares to imagine agriculture not as a relic of the past, but as a beacon for our future. The story unfolds as a deeply personal letter from a grandmother to her granddaughter, exploring themes of legacy, hope, and the transformative…
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Album: となりのトトロ イメージ・ソング集 Picture this: you’re composing music for one of Japan’s most beloved animated films while simultaneously creating haunting melodies for a dark theatrical production about demons. This was Joe Hisaishi’s reality in the late 1980s during the creation of My Neighbor Totoro’s companion album, and it’s precisely this creative tension that makes ‘Cat…
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Album: 紅の豚 サウンドトラック In the world of film music, few collaborations have proven as creatively fertile as that between composer Joe Hisaishi and director Hayao Miyazaki. Their partnership on Porco Rosso in 1992 represents a fascinating case study in how musical and narrative sensibilities can align through pure coincidence, creating something greater than the sum…
