Ice Age: Continental Drift

John Powell has long since graced the world with awesome music for animated movies like Shrek, How To Train Your Dragon, and Kung Fu Panda. A lesser known contribution by him was for Ice Age 2 and subsequent movies. These movies have demonstrated the kind of hyperactive and imaginative ingenuity that highlight most movies. Now entering its forth movie the series is demonstrating a lack of imagination, and as thus Powell's score suffers for it. He provides his typical flare and because the movies involves pirates Powell gets real creative with the swashbuckling type. sticking to keeping it for the villains the theme, and its subsequent variations, the pirates music is played with 20 bass accordions substituting the bass trombones. On album though the bass accordions make a good impression on first listen but as it wears on it becomes harder to discern them from the rest of the frantic action. In fact, Powell almost forgets the pirates theme latter in the movie in favor of combining the instrumentation for on the spot scenes rather than for thematic identity. It does play very nicely in Land Bridge Trap, which actually is my second favorite cue from the album. Also on album its hard is the notorious cue Scrat's Fantasia based on a theme by Ludwig Von Beethoven. This is the kind of hyperactive cue that puts off some listener's even more so if you are a fan of Beethoven. But I personally find this cue to be a rather unique take on the song, complete with Didgeridoos, accordions, banjos, guitars, frantic strings, and a whole chorus singing about acorns. Yes it is that kind of cue, but it is rather nicely placed throughout the movie and does adorn the comedic scenes just nicely. With the Pirates theme and Scrat's fantasia as the highlights though it is not enough to keep this score afloat because most of it is a rehash of The Meltdown. Which is nice at first but wears down after a bit. I did however find Herd Reunion to be the best rendition of the herd theme and it is a great way to end the movie. Alas it is not enough to get the feeling that there is a lot of recycled material and it is hard not to get the impression that Powell is losing steam. Then again this is a movie series that has been losing steam and Powell provided what he could to try to keep this movie afloat.