CHRISTOPHER WILLIS

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Emmy Award-winning composer, arranger, songwriter, and pianist Christopher Willis enjoys an unusually diverse career that spans film and television soundtracks, interactive media, popular music, and concert works. He trained as a concert pianist at the Royal Academy of Music in London, and later as a musicologist, earning a PhD on eighteenth-century music from Cambridge University. 

 

Building on the success of his collaboration with Armando Iannucci on the hit HBO comedy series Veep, his acclaimed Soviet-inspired score to Iannucci's dark political satire The Death of Stalin won Best Original Score for a Comedy Film by the International Film Music Critics Association. Their third collaboration, The Personal History of David Copperfield, starring Dev Patel, was awarded IFMCA's 2020 Film Score of the Year. 

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Known for his insatiable curiosity and for the depth and commitment of his research into every project, he has written in nearly every musical genre imaginable, particularly in the field of animation. For ten years, Willis was the musical mastermind behind Paul Rudish's Mickey Mouse cartoon shorts. His work on those shows earned him five Annie Awards and three Emmy nominations. But it was another cartoon project, Charlie Brooker's interactive Netflix show Cat Burglar, that won Willis the first ever Children's and Family Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Direction and Composition for an Animated Program.

 

Continuing a songwriting collaboration that began on the Mickey Mouse shorts, Willis and his wife Elyse co-wrote "Nothing Can Stop Us Now," the centerpiece song of Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway, a major new ride-through attraction at Walt Disney World and Disneyland. Willis composed and arranged all the underscore and area music for the ride as well. 

 

His eclectic body of work also includes Apple TV+'s Schmigadoon! (Primetime Emmy nomination), Disney Junior's The Lion Guard, Netflix's Black Mirror, Bill Burr's directorial debut Old Dads, the Rumi-inspired animated feature Lamya's Poem, and an album of new orchestral arrangements of songs by the late Eva Cassidy, I Can Only Be Me, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. 

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