Composer John Powell has been presented with the International Film Music Critics Association Awards for Score of the Year and Best Score for an Animated Feature in 2010, for his Oscar-nominated work on How to Train Your Dragon, by IFMCA members Jon Broxton and Oscar Flores.
Powell overcame strong opposition from Hans Zimmer (Inception), Daft Punk (Tron: Legacy) and two scores by Alexandre Desplat (The King’s Speech and The Ghost Writer) to win Score of the Year, and was up against Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, David Hirschfelder’s Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, Alan Menken’s Tangled, and Randy Newman’s Toy Story 3 in the Animation category. Including this year, Powell is an 17-time IFMCA Award nominee, and previously won for Best Score for an Animated Film for Happy Feet in 2006 and Best Action/Adventure score for The Bourne Ultimatum in 2007.
Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon, directed by Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, is an animated action-adventure following the adventures of a young Viking named Hiccup, the son of the Viking chief Stoick the Vast, who lives on an island where fighting dragons is a way of life. Hiccup is a brainy outsider with a smart mouth who would rather not grow up to fight dragons; however, in an attempt to impress his father, he seeks out the most dangerous dragon of all: the Night Fury, intending to capture and kill it. However, rather than becoming the fearsome warrior his father intended, Hiccup inadvertently saves the life of and befriends the dragon he was supposed to slay… The film stars the voice talent of Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, America Ferrara, Christopher Mintz-Plasse and Jonah Hill.
John Powell was born in London, and studied at London’s Trinity College of Music, before becoming an assistant to fellow composer Patrick Doyle in the early 1990s. Powell relocated to the United States in 1997, and worked extensively with composer Hans Zimmer at Media Ventures on scores such as The Thin Red Line and The Prince of Egypt, before emerging as a talent in his own right following the releases of Face/Off and Antz in 1997 and 1998. Since then Powell has become one of Hollywood’s major composers, with box office successes such as Shrek, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Robots, X-Men: The Last Stand, Happy Feet, Ice Age: The Meltdown, Hancock, Kung-Fu Panda, Horton Hears a Who, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs and the Jason Bourne trilogy to his name.
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