Composition
The Shermans were brought into the film by Walt Disney due to his feeling that the film was keeping too true to the Rudyard Kipling book. In a deliberate effort to keep the score "light", this song as well as the Sherman Brothers' other contributions to the score generally concern darker subject matter than the accompanying music would suggest. "Colonel Hathi's March" was the first song written by the siblings. As the elephants were "big clunky animals, crushing everything as they march through", the Shermans thought the best song for them would be a "heavy and ponderous" military march, with feeble lyrics only describing how the platoon tramples what is in its path.
Read more about this topic: Colonel Hathi's March (The Elephant Song)
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“Boswell, when he speaks of his Life of Johnson, calls it my magnum opus, but it may more properly be called his opera, for it is truly a composition founded on a true story, in which there is a hero with a number of subordinate characters, and an alternate succession of recitative and airs of various tone and effect, all however in delightful animation.”
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—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)