Disney’s recent animated spectacle dinosaur has been years in the making and marks a new standard in the combination of computer generated characters and live action settings marketed with a stunning two minute teaser trailer last winter, the film features the talents of composer James Newton Howard, who quickly discovered that this type of feature required almost literal wall-to-wall scoring. “I think the movie is 82 minutes with 80 minutes of score,” Howard points out. “Usually in a movie you’re deciding how long a piece of scoring is going to be and it’s a question of when you’re going to come in. In this movie it was very much a question of where you’re going to get out—where we could get out for a moment and give it a breath. We tried getting out for long sections and we just always came back and put music in. We even tried a couple of songs, not dinosaurs singing obviously, but just playing over a montage, and every time we did the lyrics commenting on the action of the movie it didn’t work so well.”
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