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:
“The composition of a tragedy requires testicles.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)
“Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed.”
—Oscar Cullman. Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament, ch. 1, Epworth Press (1958)
“Pushkin’s composition is first of all and above all a phenomenon of style, and it is from this flowered rim that I have surveyed its seep of Arcadian country, the serpentine gleam of its imported brooks, the miniature blizzards imprisoned in round crystal, and the many-hued levels of literary parody blending in the melting distance.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)