‘Spirit Untamed’ composer Amie Doherty is okay with making parents cry [EXCLUSIVE VIDEO INTERVIEW]
For the Dreamworks Animation film “Spirit Untamed,” composer Amie Doherty had to straddle a difficult line: writing a musical score that worked for both the feature’s target audience of young kids and also their savvier and more emotionally mature parents.
“That’s something we talked about a lot. In particular, in some of the scarier scenes,” Doherty tells Gold Derby during our “Meet the Experts” composers panel. “Sometimes I would pull back and ask those questions. Like how scary can we go with this? It’s a family film but targeted to that younger audience. There are moments where we pulled back the tension a little bit because you have to be aware of the emotions of the children who are watching it. Similarly for some of the sad moments. Particularly the goodbye scene, without giving spoilers, just trying to calibrate the exact amount of how far we should push it without overdoing it — you don’t want kids sobbing their eyes out.”
She adds with a laugh, “Parents are okay, but we don’t want to traumatize any little ones.”
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Featuring beautiful animation and an all-star vocal cast including Jake Gyllenhaal, Julianne Moore, Andre Braugher, Isabel Merced, Mckenna Grace, and Marsai Martin, “Spirit Untamed” exists in the same universe as the 2002 animated film “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” and is an adaptation of the Netflix series “Spirit: Riding Free.” The film focuses on a young girl, Lucky Prescott (Merced), who encounters the title horse during a summer spent with her father (Gyllenhaal) in the frontier town of Miradero. For the music, Doherty mixed genres — including contemporary folk-rock in the spirit of Fleet Foxes — with more traditional music, such as the lullaby that Lucky’s mother sings to her as a baby. That tune, “Fearless,” threads through the film and features a melody written by Doherty.
“We wanted it to sound like a lullaby that a mother would sing to her child and was passed down through generations,” she says of the song. “It was very simplistic and has an innocence to it. When I first came on, we weren’t sure if I was going to write ‘Fearless’ but I just asked, ‘Can I take a stab at this song?’ Because I wanted to honestly have control of the melody because I wanted to use the melody from the song throughout the film. The melody kind of becomes the mother’s character, who we lose in the first minutes of the film.”
She adds, “Every time she’s alone or vulnerable or scared we have that theme there to kind of remind Lucky and to remind our young audience that her mom is looking down on her and taking care of her.”
“Spirit Untamed” is streaming now on Hulu and is available to rent via numerous digital providers.
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