[Read Part I: The Walt Years.]
After years of successful animated musical films, the films of the late
1970s and early 1980s were becoming more infrequent and less — well
— musical. But a new hope was rising in Burbank.
In 1984, the Walt Disney Company was reorganized, and Michael Eisner
took the helm. Unfortunately the first animated film released after that
was the dark, dismal, nonmusical, PG-rated Black Cauldron (great-grandparent
to the equally awful Emperor’s New Groove, Atlantis and
Treasure Planet, but more on that later).
After that, the music slowly began to return to the Disney label, which
took on a Rent-like persona with the release of Oliver & Company
in 1988. Then, five years after Eisner took over, the world was graced
with a new wave of animated features — beginning with the fairy tale
The Little Mermaid. But would going back to the formulaic Disney
movie of the company’s heyday be enough to restore the fan base for Disney’s
animated movies?
Lyricist Howard Ashman and composer Alan Menken took up the challenge.
Both had the same roots as some of the great musical teams throughout
history: Jewish with an Eastern European and German background. Both liked
pop music and rock ‘n’ roll, and incorporated this love into their songs.
“Two key elements in the storytelling make The Little Mermaid
stand apart from lesser recent animated work,” wrote Roger Ebert
in his review of the film. “One is that Ariel is a fully realized
female character who thinks and acts independently, even rebelliously
instead of hanging around while the fates decide her destiny. The second
element involves the tricky and clever plot.”
“The Little Mermaid contains some of the best Disney music
since the glory days,” he added.
In 1992, Ashman and Menken came up with the movie that cemented Disney’s
role as the best around when it came to the melding of song and story.
Beauty and the Beast accomplished something that few musical —
and no other animated film — had done, even Snow White: it
was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. By incorporating
computer animation into many of its scenes, Beauty and the Beast
took the concept of the musical film further than it had ever gone before.
The graphics added a three-dimensional aspect to the film and, for the
first time, the audience could really feel like a part of the movie.
“There are some wonderful musical numbers in the movie, and animation
sets their choreography free from the laws of gravity,” Ebert wrote
in his review. “’Be Our Guest’ is a rollicking invitation to Belle
from the castle staff, choreographed like Busby Berkley run amok.”
Ashman and Menken went for simplicity in creating haunting title
song sung by Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Potts.
“Music is of tremendous importance in animation, not only in sustaining
the film as a musical, but also supporting the fantasy, which is the very
essence of these films,” Menken said.
“Beauty and the Beast” also became the first Disney song in
decades to be played frequently on the radio and even reached No. 1 on
the Billboard charts, due largely to a pop-style recording of the song
by Peabo Bryson and a then-little-known singer named Celine Dion.
People were coming back to the movie theater in droves and spending millions
at the box office. “To state it bluntly: Broadway died and went to
Disney. Pop went sour, and Disney smartly sweetened it. With [Alan] Menken
and lyricist Howard Ashman importing their Broadway savvy for The Little
Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, Disney reopened the franchise
that Walt founded with Snow White’s dreamy ‘Some Day My Prince Will Come,’”
Richard Corliss wrote in the Time article, “The Mouse Roars.”
“Beauty and the Beast” would go on to spawn one of the most successful Broadway hits of all time,
receiving a Tony nomination for Best Musical and an award for Best Costumes (Ann Hould-Ward).
The fairy tale trifecta would end with Aladdin, and, as of 2002,
became the last “princess fairy tale” film released by Disney.
The movie’s ballad, “A Whole New World,” followed in the footsteps
of “Beauty and the Beast” and received a “pop makeover”
in the form of a rerecording by Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle.
Aladdin was also the last musical that Menken and Ashman worked
on together. After Ashman’s death from complications from AIDS, the tone
of the Disney musical took a dramatic shift.
In 1994, The Lion King became the highest-grossing animated film
ever. The songs by Tim Rice and Elton John told the story through animals
in their natural habitat, in this case, Africa. Unlike Bambi, the
last animated film to do this, the characters were well-defined, the scenery
was lush and the songs were filled with emotion, including the Oscar-winning
“Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”
One of the great ironies of the post-Lion King era was that “once
upon a time” began to actually pinpoint a time. Disney reworked history
for Pocahontas, adapted a literary work of the 1800s for The
Hunchback of Notre Dame and put a little soul into a Greek myth for
Hercules.
Many critics were wary of the rewriting of history in Pocahontas,
but the music remained strong. The nature-themed ballad “Colors of
the Wind” (sung for radio by Vanessa Williams, and written by Menken
and Stephen Schwartz) won an Oscar for Best Song.
Menken and Schwartz collaborated again for Hunchback, which again
had strong songs, but took on a darker tone than Disney fans were used
to. Take for instance when Judge Frollo sings “Hellfire,” in
which he tells of his lust for Esmerelda, “Destroy Esmerelda, and
let her taste the fires of hell, or else let her be mine and mine alone.”
Despite beautifully crafter songs, Hunchback became the first film
since The Little Mermaid to not receive a nomination for Best Song.
With Hercules, the humor was there and the music was not the problem,
In fact, the songs, written by Menken and David Zippel, included a fabulous
doo-wop ballad sung by the leading lady and the Oscar-nominated song “Go
the Distance,” which was given some airplay with its version sung
by Michael Bolton. The problem was that it was almost too modern. It would
have made a great stage musical, but an abundance of characters and some
scary scenes in hell, made it more geared to teens than to children.
In 1998, Disney came out with a beautifully animated musical based a
Chinese folktale. Mulan had elements of a fairy tale, but instead
of the heroine trying to get a man, she tried to bring honor back to the
family. Disney had finally created a heroine that little girls could be
proud to model themselves after. The music, written by Zippel and Mathew
Wilder, even received some nominations for score and song, although it
didn’t win.
This also marked the first movie in several years that did not involve
Alan Menken. A then little-known former Mouseketeer named Christina Aguilera
performed the movie’s “what-I-want” song, “Reflection.”
One year later, singer-songwriter Phil Collins was responsible for the
Golden Globe-winning music behind Tarzan. The movie was a first
for Disney in that a majority of the songs, with the exception of the
Oscar award-winning ballad, “You’ll Be In My Heart” and the
rollicking “Trashin’ The Camp,” were sung “off-screen.”
However, because of Collins’ popularity, the songs continue to be played
on the radio, with “In My Heart” an oft-heard “Loveline”
request from mothers to their children.
Disney has been making musicals for almost seven decades, but the past
few years have not been looking great. Someone in feature animation must
have forgotten the importance of songs to the animated film. Three films
in three years had different plots and different characters, but all shared
two common traits: few songs and a male as the main character. Now this
wasn’t the first time Disney had created an animated film featuring a
boy, but unlike Peter Pan, Pinocchio and Aladdin,
The Emperor’s New Groove, Atlantis: The Lost Empire and
Treasure Planet could be classified as animated films with musical
instead of musical animated films.
Emperor was quite possibly one of the funniest animated films
Disney has ever created, and even had an Oscar-nominated song written
by Sting, “My Funny Friend and Me” and an opening number sung
by Tom Jones But with a story no one had heard and characters with forgettable
names, the film will probably not be the first movie that comes to people’s
mind when they think “Disney animated film.”
The other two films were so poorly done that they have to be grouped
together. Diane Warren wrote “Where The Dream Takes You,” the
lone song for comic book-looking Atlantis. The futuristic Treasure
Island, Treasure Planet, had its song “I’m Still Here”
written by John Rzeznik of The Goo Goo Dolls. But neither of those two
songs have been heard anywhere outside of the CD. They have even been
dumped from the playlist of Radio Disney, which is known for being loyal
to the company’s songs.
The solo standout was 2002’s Lilo & Stitch. Even though Elvis
wrote most of the songs years ago, and none of the characters sang a single
note, the music was used in a way not seen since 1999. The Academy award-nominated
film was also a big hit among toy-buying little girls (unlike its predecessors,
which catered to boys who tend not to buy Disney toys once they reach
the age of 8).
From what box offices have shown, audiences appreciate the work more
if it has great songs, a good story and well-thought-out characters. Whenever
Disney hit a slump, they revived with a good old-fashioned fairy tale.
Why not go back to that? There are so many stories like Rapunzel,
Rumplestiltskin and The Frog Prince that have yet to be
“Disneyized.” I think future generations deserve better than
Atlantis. Disney has kept the modern musical alive for more than
70 years, and there is no reason to think it won’t continue creating them
for another 70 more. Maybe if we all wish upon a star, a new crop of lyricists
and musicians will return harmony to the kingdom.
