Award-winning Michael Morpurgo-based animated film, Kensuke’s Kingdom with score by Stuart Hancock now on BBC iPlayer

The animated feature film Kensuke’s Kingdom had its British network TV premiere earlier this month on Sunday, 3 August on BBC One, which means that it is now available on BBC iPlayer until next year!

Adapted from the Michael Morpurgo novel of the same name the film was part of the BBC’s programming to mark the 80th anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with the latter featuring in the backstory of the old Japanese soldier Kensuke (voiced by Ken Watanabe).  

It is a stunning hand-drawn animated adventure from Lupus Films, directed by Neil Boyle and Kirk Hendry, also starring the voice talents of Sally Hawkins, Cillian Murphy, Raffey Cassidy and Aaron Macgregor.

Most notably, the film features a terrific symphonic score by Stuart Hancock, and the score picked up 15 awards , including at last year’s British Animation Awards and International Music+Sound Awards.  And the IMFCA (International Film Music Critics Association) voted it one of the Top 5 Scores of the Year across all new film and television productions in 2024. 

Looking ahead, Hancock is composing the music scores for two contrasting new feature films: the sci-fi adventure Stargazers for director Jonathan Brooks, and the action film Bad Day at the Office, starring John Hannah and Radha Mitchell, for director Chee Keong Cheung.  The short films Largo and A Friend of Dorothy, featuring his scores, are now playing festivals so keep your eye out for them.

Kensuke's Kingdom is available on BBC iPlayer.

UK premiere of Ludwig Göransson’s suite from Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer at the Royal College of Music

Christopher Nolan's enormously successful 2023 film, Oppenheimer (seven Oscars, seven Golden Globes, five BAFTAs) about the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who helped develop the first nuclear weapons during World War II, featured a score by Ludwig Göransson. Unusually, Göransson began writing before filming started and Göransson has described the process as open and very collaborative, so that Nolan began filming with two or three hours of music that he could reference and the film never used temp track. The soundtrack was recorded by the Hollywood Studio Orchestra.

Göransson was born in Sweden and studied at the Stockholm Royal College of Music before studying on the University of Southern California Scoring for Motion Picture and Television program. Soon after graduating, he began work assisting Theodore Shapiro, a composer known for films such as The Devil wears Prada.

On 7 November 2024 there is a chance to relive the magic in a different form as Göransson's Oppenheimer Suite receives its UK premiere at the Royal College of Music when Ben Palmer conducts the RCM Philharmonic in a concert which also features John Adams Doctor Atomic Symphony and Takemitsu’s luminous Spirit Garden, one of his last works.

John Adams' opera Doctor Atomic premiered at San Francisco in 2005 and deals with some of the same themes as Oppenheimer, though Adams and his librettist Peter Sellars with Oppenheimer as the leading character. Adams' Doctor Atomic Symphony was premiered in 2007 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the BBC Proms with the composer conducting, though Adams later revised the work, reducing it in length by nearly half.

Full details of the concert from the RCM website.