![]() But I came up with the theme and then I started applying brush strokes. “It was more like I had to use my personal view of and interpret that into my score. “I wanted to use the traditional instruments so you could hear the textures ,” she explains.īut how do you incorporate magical realism - a literary genre and technique that incorporates fantasy, dreams or surrealism - into music? “I didn’t have any examples of it,” says Franco. She bought a Colombian harp and marimba from the South American country and had them shipped to her home in Los Angeles. She incorporated bambuco, a traditional Colombian rhythm similar to the European waltz. But otherwise, they left Franco to her own devices.įranco continued her research and began to formulate Encanto’s musical themes. The film’s writer/director Jared Bush, director Byron Howard and co-director/writer Charise Castro Smith gave Franco the guidelines: infuse the score with traditional Colombian beats stay away from typical “Hollywood Disney” composition and get more intimate, more complicated and less romantic. “I got tons of books on Colombian history and listened, watched videos, documentaries from Indigenous all the way from the 1500s to now.” “I got my Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende and read them in Spanish,” says Franco. The bold and energetic music of Encanto is full of rhythms that bring to life the philosophies and artistry of Colombian literature and music that Franco dedicated herself to in building the film’s score, especially as it pertains to magical realism. In it she collaborates with the film’s songwriter and lyricist, Tony winner Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose ‘Dos Oruguitas’ sees his second original song Oscar nomination. In addition to her many credits, such as Pixar’s Coco (for additional music, working alongside composer Michael Giacchino), Dora And The Lost City Of Gold, Little and animated TV series The Casagrandes, it is percussion that made Franco the perfect composer to score Encanto. “My parents kept asking me, ‘Can’t you play the flute or the violin? The clarinet?’ And I said, ‘No, I’m playing the drums.’” “I just got completely obsessed with ,” she says. “We weren’t a musical family, but we were always encouraged to do creative things.”įranco began taking lessons and joined her school band, where she fell in love with the drums. “I had a brother and two sisters, and we used to listen to music, and we had a piano that I started tinkling on when I was young,” recalls Franco. Franco makes history as not only the first Latina, but the first woman of colour to be Oscar-nominated for an original score. “That was my first influence,” says the composer, who is Oscar-nominated for the first time in her 30-year career for scoring Disney Animation Studios’ Encanto, the story of Mirabel, a Colombian girl struggling to find her place in a big family as the only member without magical powers. Growing up in El Paso, Texas, on the US side of the southern border, Germaine Franco crossed into Mexico every week with her family to shop, go out to eat, and listen to music played by musicians peppering the streets of Ciudad Juarez. Germaine Franco in an ‘Encanto’ recording session
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