Planet of Lana

With its striking visuals inspired by Studio Ghibli, Planet of Lana is a platforming video game featuring a girl and her cat which achieved positive notices on its release in 2023. Notable to readers of this website is its stirring music composed by Takeshi Furukawa, one of my favourite scores of the year. It starts off with a very Thomas Newman-like main theme in “Progeny” (the kind that Newman himself doesn’t really do any more – orchestral, warm, a whimsical melody) but from there Furukawa engineers a full-blooded orchestral adventure score. The theme briefly appears again at the start of the second cue, “Tailo Village”, before a wonderful, sweeping secondary theme emerges. The pair of themes go on to dominate the score but never in a way that feels repetitive: the composer does a lot with them, and there’s always some standalone set-piece just around the corner.

The first of these is the pretty intense action cue “Invasion”, based around a catchy little motif which endlessly repeats as the orchestral forces grow around it. “Peculiar Encounter” is like a playful variant on the sand people music from Star Wars, and then there’s a delightful theme for the cat in the brief “Meet Mui”. “Cave Murals” is a great cue, contrasting ethereal vocals with much darker orchestral colours; then there’s a film noir (specifically, Goldsmith noir) feel in the mournful “Shipwreck”. There are a couple of songs on the album too, blending seamlessly with the score, Siobhan Wilson’s beautiful voice complementing Furukawa’s orchestra very nicely. The best cue, the one which people are going to play a lot, is “Desert Chase” – it begins innocuously enough with a gentle rendition of the main theme before the orchestra soars away and treats us to a rousing action/adventure cue. Really though, the whole album is a delight – the best game soundtrack I’ve heard in quite a while – its 55 minute run time seeming to disappear in no time really. It’s a gem.

Buy from Amazon: https://amzn.to/3woxcdk

The post Planet of Lana first appeared on movie-wave.net.