Napple Tale: Arsia in Daydream Soundtrack, Yoko Kanno, 2000
Occasionally legend is indeed more intriguing than reality. One such case is Napple Tale: Arsia in Daydream, a Japan-only Dreamcast title that initially made waves for supposedly having been developed by a predominantly, or even exclusively, female team. A glance at the credits quickly shows that this was not actually the case, although women did occupy key creative roles. In truth, Napple Tale never needed this sort of urban myth to distinguish itself. While not especially challenging, the game created a wonderfully whimsical, dream-like 2.5D world that mixed platforming with RPG elements. Around that framework, developer Chime Corporation built a narrative concerned with the way the passing of seasons affects the personalities of its characters.
Although the game never left Japan, it still acquired a degree of popularity in the West, and that is due largely to Yoko Kanno’s involvement. By the time she composed the Napple Tale: Arsia in Daydream soundtrack, Kanno had fully cemented her reputation as one of Japan’s finest anime composers. Her most recent triumphs included the musical tour de force of Cowboy Bebop and Turn A Gundam, perhaps the greatest score written for that long-running franchise. What drew Kanno back to game music after she had so firmly established her screen career is unclear. What is clear, however, is that Napple Tale is every bit as outstanding as her other work from this period.
Given the game’s Alice in Wonderland inflections, comical characters, and colourful dreamscapes, Kanno approaches the score more or less as one might expect. There are no mind-bending experiments here, no aggressive challenges to genre convention of the kind heard in Turn A Gundam. That is not to say that the Napple Tale: Arsia in Daydream soundtrack lacks surprises. On the contrary, Kanno draws on a cornucopia of influences to bring the game’s world to life. But Napple Tale may well be the score in which she achieves the most perfect balance between stylistic variety and overall coherence, because its genial, sunny disposition effortlessly binds all of these disparate strands together.
Things begin in predictable but perfectly judged fashion. Tracks such as “Flowers of Yesterday’s”, “Stroll”, and “Cecil’s Garden” offer all the pastoral beauty and melodic warmth one would expect from a Kanno score underscoring Napple Tale’s welcoming world. Interestingly, “Flowers of Yesterday’s” and “Cecil’s Garden” seem almost to avoid making grand statements. Instead, they tug at the heart through melodies that, by Kanno’s standards, are surprisingly simple, yet immediately affecting, recalling the melodic economy of a master such as Ennio Morricone. While Kanno reduces the technical complexity of her melodic writing, her orchestrations remain as sophisticated as ever, and the emotions she evokes are no less multifaceted. She is simply achieving them here through more direct means.
This melodic approach also allows Kanno to integrate her pop songs seamlessly into the soundtrack’s overall design. The feather-light vocal lines of “Dreams in a Pie” drift by in intricate layers above a gently propulsive, swooning string accompaniment that gives the choruses real lift. With its “la-la” vocals and hushed string writing, “Rabbit Bed” unfolds like an extended, exquisitely emotional lullaby. Yet admirers of Kanno’s trademark orchestral luxuriance will still find plenty to savour. “Chocolate Forest” launches in pseudo-Baroque fashion with astonishingly dense contrapuntal writing, as excitable strings and woodwinds tumble joyfully over one another. Like the equally substantial “Skipper”, it produces new delectable ideas and lightly sprung rhythms every few seconds, turning both pieces into showcases for Kanno’s inventiveness.
Kanno also takes obvious pleasure in the creative licence granted by the game’s dreamlike setting. Even so, her genre-hopping is gentler and less bracing than usual, never compromising the music’s dainty, overflowing charm. Examples abound. “Rain Waltz” begins as the softest of waltzes, as though afraid its feet might touch the ground. At first it is a poignant duet for saxophone and piano, before gradually gathering momentum and arriving at a rambunctious climax. “Jumping Cracker” feels like an affectionate nod to Carl Stalling’s frantic Warner Bros. cartoon scores, while “Snow Queen” and “Dual Tango” see Kanno write more than convincing flamenco and tango, respectively. Finally, the salsa rhythms of “Summer’s Squid” further energise the soundtrack and give Kanno another opportunity for one of her ingenious hybridisations when she folds in a jazz-inflected saxophone solo.
While none of this stylistic variety feels overtly disorienting, it quietly prepares the ground for those pieces that more openly bring out the game’s surreal side. In Kanno’s assured hands, however, such oddities never fracture the score’s flow. Instead, they help turn the world of Napple Tale into a strange yet endearing place populated by humorous characters and curious situations.
The first vocal piece, “Tail Song”, quickly announces Kanno’s intentions, with a sweetly unpredictable melody that darts all over the place. Maaya Sakamoto’s voice leads a track that changes genres on a whim while preserving its childlike wonder and nervous energy. Cues such as “Toy Train” and “Fjorland”, with their odd, faintly creepy harmonies and disorienting rhythms, feel like gently warped versions of children’s-music staples. Taking a slightly different tack, “The Green Caterpillar” and “The Man in the Hole” are humorous exercises in bombast. The former almost plays like Kanno’s answer to Banjo-Kazooie’s bumbling bassoon writing, while the latter gently satirises overblown operatic splendour.
Beneath all this playfulness runs an undercurrent of nostalgia and melancholy, which is hardly surprising given how insistently the game’s narrative circles around the passing of time. “Slow Water” hints at these emotions through an impressionistic, beautifully meandering clarinet solo that rings out like birdsong beneath a clear autumn sky. But it is the consciously old-fashioned piano writing of “Paffet Room” that more explicitly crystallises the score’s concern with the past and our relationship to it. “Circus” presents the soundtrack’s most complex and intriguing emotional mixture, combining the upbeat gestures of circus music with chromatic metallic percussion and strangely yearning trumpet and string melodies set far in the distance. Kanno returns to a similar effect on the penultimate “Sonnet”, where the score’s most romantic string writing is made to sound as though it were coming backwards through an old transistor radio.
A return to the past thus remains a fundamentally futile undertaking. Yet in the end, melancholy is swept aside by the life-affirming optimism of “Wild Wind” and the beguiling Celtic lilt of its flute writing. The cue seals Napple Tale’s status as another game music classic from Kanno’s pen, unlike any other game soundtrack in its blend of joyful eclecticism and sheer sophistication.
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