‘Emperor’s’ New Composer

Composer John Debney was a latecomer to “The Emperor’s New Groove,” the Disney animated feature that opens today.

He had just eight weeks to score the film, a comic buddy movie set in an imaginary kingdom best described as the Disney version of Incan Peru.

It was Debney’s first animated movie for Disney, but, in a sense, he had been preparing his whole life for it. Debney grew up in the shadow of the Mouse. His dad, the late Louis Debney, worked for the studio for decades.

“My dad sold newspapers to Walt Disney every morning,” Debney says, recalling how his father had become a newsboy after he was forced, by the Depression, to drop out of high school. Disney would stop his car en route to his studio on Hyperion Avenue and get his paper from young Debney. And every morning the fair-haired Debney would ask Disney for a job.

“OK, Whitey, one of these days,” was Disney’s standard reply, until the day he finally hired the elder Debney as a clapper boy on “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” Eventually, he became a producer on two of Disney’s most popular TV series, “Zorro” and “The Mickey Mouse Club.”

“I have mouse ears and a little T-shirt,” the younger Debney confesses, with a laugh.

‘Seeing How the Music Fit the Pictures’

Debney remembers going to the studio with his dad when he was no more than 5 or 6. Disney was often the only other person there, and, yes, he tousled young John’s hair.

One of the perks of working for Disney in those days was you could bring home 16-millimeter prints of Disney films, at a time when there was no such thing as a rental video. (Another perk was being able to pull the occasional Captain Hook cel out of the trash.) John, who had taught himself to play the piano when he was 6, would watch such favorite films as “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” with the score on his lap.

“I always loved seeing how the music fit the pictures and what that was all about,” he says. “My passion was always to write music that would accompany visuals.”

As he grew up, Debney discovered the work, not only of such great Disney composers as Leigh Harline, who wrote “When You Wish Upon a Star,” but of the composers of movie music’s Golden Age, including Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Now 43, Debney went on to get a degree in classical composition from CalArts, where he knew John Lasseter and many of the other gifted young animators who dominate the field today.

A three-time Emmy winner, Debney has scored such live-action features as “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and “Liar, Liar.” But doing a Disney animated movie was “a dream I always had,” says Debney, who lives with his family in Glendale.

“The Emperor’s New Groove” has had a long, even tumultuous evolution. When begun in 1994, the film was titled “Kingdom of the Sun” and was conceived as a dark epic drama based on pre-Columbian legend. In 1998 it was transmogrified into a comedy with David Spade voicing the arrogant teenage emperor who is turned into a llama by the evil Yzma and befriended by kind, long-suffering Pacha (John Goodman).

When Debney came aboard, the movie already had a number of songs written for the project by Sting and David Hartley. One of the reasons Debney was sought out for the film, producer Randy Fullmer says, was he “struck us as a super collaborator.”

A less secure composer might have balked at incorporating another person’s music into his score. But when Debney heard Sting’s “My Funny Friend and Me”--the song that reflects the unlikely friendship that grows between the young emperor and the older peasant, Pacha--Debney’s response was: “That’s beautiful. I’m happy to use it.”

Debney says he especially enjoyed writing for Yzma, the over-the-top villainess voiced by singer Eartha Kitt. “She’s so funny, so broad, and what a wonderful voice she has,” Debney says in praise of Kitt.

“What we responded to in John’s work,” Fullmer says, “is he has enormous range. He’s able to be really big in the big moments and able to go down and be really sweet in the smaller moments.”

Creating Harmony From Dissonant Echoes

Debney’s ability to accentuate the film’s emotional side was especially valuable in a movie that had originally tested as overwhelmingly comic. And he was able to create a whole out of many different styles, from Latin music and jazz to echoes of Rimsky-Korsakov.

Both Debney and Fullmer see “The Emperor’s New Groove” as a departure from what many think of as a classic Disney movie. Fullmer and his fellow filmmakers were encouraged by their bosses to think fresh (“outside the box” was the unfortunate term actually used). There is, Fullmer says, a tendency among people who work for institutions as august as Disney to self-edit; instead, the movie makers took creative chances. “We tried to do things that really entertained us,” he says.

Exercising Restraint, Expressing Emotion

One aspect of their risk-taking was to simplify backgrounds and other aspects of the film that would distract from the character-driven, dialogue-heavy story. By using theatrical-style lighting and other devices, the filmmakers tried to direct the eyes of the audience to what mattered most in any given frame.

Debney was an important collaborator in this effort to make the film as lucid as possible, Fullmer says. Debney was able to write music that clarified the story as well as expressed emotion, and he knew how to exercise restraint. Good movie music has to make the story more intelligible, not drown it out.

Debney was “so knowledgeable about how not to step on dialogue,” Fullmer says, citing one example of the special art of the film composer.

Spotlight runs each Friday. Patricia Ward Biederman can be reached at https://valley.news@latimes.com.