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:
“Those Dutchmen had hardly any imagination or fantasy, but their good taste and their scientific knowledge of composition were enormous.”
—Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890)
“Every thing in his composition was little; and he had all the weaknesses of a little mind, without any of the virtues, or even the vices, of a great one.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Modern Western thought will pass into history and be incorporated in it, will have its influence and its place, just as our body will pass into the composition of grass, of sheep, of cutlets, and of men. We do not like that kind of immortality, but what is to be done about it?”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)