Mimi and the Mountain Dragon
Michael Beek on the BBC’S new musical animation
Even the very best get writer’s block. Michael Morpurgo, however, knows just what to do if he finds himself at a dead end. ‘If things aren’t going very well,’ says the War Horse author, ‘I have one or two ways of getting myself feeling slightly less depressed about it. One is to go for a walk, the other is to absent myself completely from anything to do with the story I’m writing – and listen to music.’
Music inspires his words, then, but it can also play a crucial role in the storytelling. This is evident in Morpurgo’s charming tale Mimi and the Mountain Dragon, which comes to television screens this Christmas. Based on Morpurgo’s 2014 book of the same name, and adapted by Owen Sheers, Mimi and the Mountain Dragon is a story with music at its heart and the BBC, which commissioned the adaptation, hopes it will introduce children to the world of orchestral music.
In the tale, a shy little girl called Mimi uses music to communicate with a baby dragon she finds sleeping in her woodshed. It’s up to Mimi to return the baby home to its mother, the much-feared Mountain Dragon.
The film, which has been years in the making, follows in the great tradition of animations like 1982’s The Snowman. Save for Morpurgo’s own narrated introduction, there’s no dialogue in the film, just the visuals and the music, composed by Oscar-winning Rachel Portman. The writer seems delighted with the results. ‘The animation, based on Emily Gravett’s illustrations, is beautifully drawn and the way they have adapted the story for the screen has been unbelievably perceptive,’ he enthuses. ‘They’ve got the spirit of the story and to have someone of Rachel Portman’s calibre doing the music is just extraordinary.’
I catch up with the composer herself a week after the recording of her music, which took place in Salford with the BBC Philharmonic. ‘Oh, they were absolutely fabulous!’ she tells me, evidently still buzzing from the experience. ‘We also had a wonderful young singer, aged about nine singing for Mimi, and the
children’s choir and chorus from the Hallé as well. So we were blessed with quite large forces and a really great line-up.’
That line-up is with Mimi every step of her journey and, without dialogue, Portman’s music is front and centre, carrying the weight of the drama. But she relished the challenge. ‘It was always going to be a very music-led project, like Peter and the Wolf. It’s thematic and follows the drama, but not in the same way as a traditional animated film. There, the music is very much in service to the action – although the soundtrack to Mimi and the Mountain serves the story, it’s also music in its own right. It doesn’t have to stop and start around the visuals.’
In the book, music is described as being ‘the language of dragons’, and so Mimi sings a village carol to soothe the baby and again, later, to let the Mountain Dragon know she comes in peace. For the film version things are done a little differently, as Portman explains. ‘The villagers make instruments to bash on Christmas Eve for the “Drumming of the Dragon” festival but, with Michael’s blessing, we made it so that Mimi makes a little flute instead. She plays her pipe to the little dragon and they communicate that way.’ But surely a Christmas film still needs a carol? ‘There is a carol at the end, but it’s a carol that comes out of the drama,’ the composer tells me. ‘When Mimi sings at the feet of the big dragon, who’s come down to scare the villagers, it has real power because no one has ever heard this little tiny girl say very much.
So it’s a story about how she saves her village with a song and the importance of singing together.’
The coming together of story and music is the very essence of the job, according to Portman. ‘I’ve always thought that the music I write is telling stories. Quite a lot of film music nowadays is much more about creating an atmosphere, almost like sound design. My interest is more in the heart and soul, the story and the emotion. I’ve always loved writing melodic music and having strong melodies is akin to storytelling.’
For Morpurgo, telling stories with music has become part of his job, too, as he continues to tour with musicians across the UK. ‘I love doing concerts; I think I get more pleasure out of telling stories alongside music than I do writing the silly story in the first place,’ he says. ‘The more I work with quartets, or soloists, or folk singers, the more I love that interweaving of words and music. In fact, when I do a reading on my own, I sometimes think “where’s the music?” I almost miss it when it’s not there.’
‘Mimi and the Mountain Dragon’ will be broadcast on BBC One this Christmas.
For precise details of its broadcast time and date, see the Christmas issue of Radio Times
‘I get more pleasure out of telling stories alongside music than I do writing the story’