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The
Importance of Being Inglis
- An interview
with Anthony Inglis, by Oliver Barder
The scores for Japanese animation (or "animé")
are often overlooked by Western film music magazines. Mainly because it
is considered to be too obscure, too niche and not worth the coverage.
Hence the reason why many film music fans often dismiss it. Due to all
this very little is known about animé music. Obviously more information
is needed to fill this chasm in our our collective knowledge, but where
do you start. Getting interviews with Western film composers is hard enough
let alone trying a Japanese animé composer. What is more there is the
obvious language barrier between the interviewer and the interviewee.
So we are unfortunately left in a bit of dilemma, well almost...
About a year ago I was leafing through a few animé CD inserts only to
see an English name, Anthony Inglis, popping up in conjunction with a
lot of the orchestral conducting. Understandably I was curious as to how
this person had got to where he was. So I thought about trying to get
an interview, and ask him myself. An English speaking insider in on the
inner workings of the animé music industry is a very rare thing to come
by. An interview would be a wonderful thing indeed. For the obvious reason
that the information would be first hand and in English, thus increasing
the accessibility to this grey area of film music.
Anthony Inglis has a pretty impressive list of Japanese composers and
productions that he has worked with and on. His Japanese connections started
with the famous Japanese composer Akira Senju in 1989 when he recorded
the score to a Japanese film called "226" . He then went on
to conduct (and play the piano) in the 1992 re-orchestrated score for
a 1986 computer game called "Walküre no Densetsu" (released
as "Walküre Story - for Orchestra"), again working with Akira
Senju. Shortly after this Inglis conducted the score for the last animated
instalment of the Gundam saga, "V Gundam", in 1993 (again with
Senju). As if this wasn't enough in 1994 he conducted the score to the
seminal classic "Macross Plus", composed by the immensely talented
Yoko Kanno. Following that in 1995 he again worked with Akira Senju and
conducted the score to the animé film "Silent Service". In 1996
he conducted probably the finest animé score of recent years,"Tenku
no Escaflowne", composed by Yoko Kanno.
I met up with Anthony Inglis late in 1998 at his home in a leafy suburb
of London. I was rather surprised (and extremely glad) that he had kept
the handwritten scores that he had used while conducting the recording
sessions. It was also apparent in our correspondence up and till the interview
that he hadn't seen any of the music he had conducted in its intended
context (that of the actual animé itself). Ironically I seemed to know
more about what he had done than he did.
[On
to the Interview...]
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