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Saturday, April 29, 2017

Song of the Week! 29 April 2017


Since the inception of the movie Frozen, the quota of songs coming from English-speaking countries in Taiko has seen a small bump thanks to the porting of popular tracks from the most recent animated Disney movies.

While this very week has seen the introduction of a Japanese song cover from the recently-released Moana, let's take one slight step backwards for today's feature...

 Try Everything (トライ・エヴリシング) Zootopia
Version
Allx2 (63)x3 (130)x4 (164)x3 (203)
 Taiko 0 R
 99-115.5
 none
 ???


After the release of a couple of tracks for the aforementioned smash hit movie Frozen, a few years had to pass in order for another Disney movie to experience major popularity in the Oriental market and -in turn- become eligible for the Taiko no Tatsujin treatment. That one movie was 2016's Zootopia, Disney's 55th Animated motion picture and one of their in-studio 3D computer-animated works.

Premiered in Denmark on February 11th with the rest of the world following suit in the later months, the movie tells the story of Judy Hopps, a rabbit from the rural city of Bunnyburrow who manages to fulfill her dream of becoming a police officer. For the first task in her designated area of competence, the titular animal-inhabited metropolis of Zootopia, she gets relegated to parking duty chores, coming to know more about the city, its inhabitants and an unusual disappearing trend of predatory animals inside the city that may or may not have some deeper links behinds the scenes...

Zootopia (the movie) managed to win the trust of both public and critics all over the world as the many nominations and accolades received may testify on an objective level, including Best Animation category awards received for 2016's Academy Award, Golden Globe, Critics' Choice Movie Award and Annie Award. The movie also had a sizable amount of popularity in Asia, with the Chinese market -where it's known as Crazy Animal City (疯狂动物城)- netting an over-235 million dollars at the Box Office (1/3 of the worldwide sales alone!), with Japan being a distant 2nd-place at nearly 70 million. Overall, the movie made over a billion dollars worldwide with box office sales alone, currently ranking at the 27th place of all-time highest grossing movies.

Just like Let It Go was for Frozen, Zootopia had one distinctive song of the soundtrack -Try Everything- as one of the media-related pieces that is attached to the movie the most. Unlike for the rest of the movie's score, which was single-handedly composed by Micheal Giacchino, the break-out hit originally sung by pop star Shakira is composed and lyricised by the Australian songwriter Sia Kate Isobelle Furler and the Norwegian songwriting team Stargate, consisting of Tor Erik Hermansen and Mikkel Storleer Eriksen. Just like in America, the Japanese popularity of the movie was achieved due to a strong word of mouth from its audience, as well as the Try Everything song itself, whose Japanese version was reannanged and performed by pop singer Ami 'Dream Ami' Nakashima (中島麻未) who, just like Shakira, dubs the character of the movie (Gazelle) who performs the song.

Notecharter Sentai member Shika@ni~San (しか@に~さん) handled the Taiko notechart porting of the Japanese cover, creating yet another low-difficulty song for the current rating standard that is devoid of any note clusters of sort while bearing more than 3 stars for its Oni difficulty rating!