Vintage Soundtrack: "Windaria" OST + Bonus

Hi, peeps ! This time I wanted to upload for you the soundtrack to the 1986 anime film "Windaria", a.k.a. "Once upon a time". This music really takes me back. I must have seen this film when I was around 12 years old and I still remember how "shocked" I was when it was over: I had just seen an intense drama with an actual message... in animation ! Watching that film on my own one boring Sunday afternoon on TV is one of my earliest memories of realising that animation can be a means for narrating ANY story and that anime existed under many other guises than Giant Robot series...

"Windaria" tells the story of two pairs of young lovers who become embroiled in a war between two rival kingdoms. The action takes place in a fantasy world where haunted woods and legendary animals are commonplace, yet the issues dealt with in the story are very real and regrettably close to human nature. Topics including greed, loyalty, love, betrayal, etc are carefully balanced in this tragic tale of the consequences of our weaknesses. It is not an uplifting movie at all. You get to see the outcome of a senseless war in every level -from the ecological to the personal- but as harrowing as the script is, or as outdated as the animation may look, I recommend it. Don't be fooled. There are some harsh reviews on it around, but those are for the Americanized version of the movie. In fact, the same company that bought "Macross" and rewrote that series (turning it into "Robotech" once pasted to two other unrelated anime TV series), performed the same kind og "makeover" to "Windaria". The results were less than spectacular...

The soundtrack to the movie was composed by Satoshi Kadokura, whose other credits include the music to the Gundam F91 movie and the Wataru TV series. You can tell that Windaria is an anime from the mid-80's by listening to Kadokura's use of synths -typical of the period- turning some of the tracks into video-game sounding pieces of music. I enjoy a lot more the instrumental tracks with orchestra on them, such as track 1 -"Theme from Windaria"-, which sets from the start the tone for the whole movie. Other nice tracks are 6, 7, 10 & 12. You have here the original 14 tracks of the score released in 1986, plus 4 others that were released some years ago in a reissue of the soundtrack in a double CD package together with the OST of the OVA film "Birth". Tracks 4 & 14 are an IS & the ED song of the movie, sung by my girl Akino Arai. This would be Akino's first work in an animation project and actually "Yakusoku" would become the first single of her professional career. Her voice sounds a bit different from what you hear now, but of course this is the case for anybody that has been singing non-stop for the last 20 years ^_^.

Here you have the clip of the scene where the IS "Promise" is playing, courtesy of amyj17uk at YouTube:

Kadokura is still active as a composer. One of his recent projects was the soundtrack to the J-horror movie "Shikoku", which I also recommend in case you dig ghost stories à la "Ringu" or "The Grudge"...

Enjoy the album and leave your comments below !