A MUSICAL RENAISSANCE
Oliver & Company represented a modest yet significant step for Disney animated films: a return to full-scale musical features for which the Studio had become known throughout the years, but which had become increasingly rare in recent decades.
The movie featured five tunes, all adhering to an old Disney maxim: the songs should play an integral and prominent part in the story without overshadowing or disrupting it.
“Music should come out of the dialogue,” said the film’s director, George Scribner, re-emphasizing a point Walt Disney had made many times many years before. “The best music advances the story or defines a character. The challenge was to figure out areas in our film where music could better express a concept or idea.”
Perhaps no one knew this better than a New York-based lyricist named Howard Ashman, who with Barry Mann wrote “Once Upon a Time in New York City,” performed by Huey Lewis over the opening credits of Oliver & Company.
When Ashman was approached about working on the next Disney animated feature, The Little Mermaid (1989), he jumped at the chance.
“Animation is the last great place to do Broadway musicals,” said Ashman, who wrote the off-Broadway sensation Little Shop of Horrors with his writing partner Alan Menken. “It’s a place where you can use a whole other set of skills and a way of working which is more the way plays and musicals are made. With most films, the story seems to come first and the songs are an afterthought.”
“Coming from a musical theater background,” he continues, “Alan and I are used to writing songs for characters in situations. For The Little Mermaid we wanted songs that would really move the story forward and keep things driving ahead.”
To do this, both writers felt it was important for them to be involved in the project from the start. If this sounds familiar, there’s a good reason. In the Disney Studio’s early days, staff musicians routinely worked with the animation team during the formative stages of an animated feature and the results were such films as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio and Bambi.
“In the old days,” explained Menken, “the music was written before they began animating. Even some of the background music was written first. We wanted to go back to that tradition in The Little Mermaid by laying the songs out early in the story development process.”
What Ashman and Menken wanted to achieve with The Little Mermaid was nothing less than the classic style of those early Disney animated features. The success of the film, both critically and commercially, seems to indicate that they reached their goal. Not only did The Little Mermaid break all box office records for an animated feature, it won Academy Awards for Best Song and Best Original Score.
The seven songs heard in the movie took Ashman and Menken 18 months to write and fine tune.
“Writing the songs is usually pretty easy,” said Ashman. “The hard part is what we call ‘routining,’ which means deciding how many times to repeat a part, if at all, or whether to cut it out entirely.”
“Part of Your World,” sung by Jodi Benson as the voice of Ariel, is used to introduce the character and articulate her dreams.
“In almost every musical ever written,” said Ashman, “there’s a place, usually early in the show, where the leading lady… sings about what she wants most out of life. We borrowed this classic rule of Broadway musical construction for ‘Part of Your World.’”
Of course, such a scene was nothing new to Disney animated features – Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty had done the same thing long before Ariel – it’s just that no Disney heroine had done it in 30 years.
For the character of Sebastian (voiced by Samuel E. Wright), who sings the Academy Award-nominated “Kiss the Girl” and the Academy Award-winning “Under the Sea,” Ashman and Menken introduced a Caribbean flavor to the music that allowed for both a rhythmic edge and a contemporary feel.
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Sam Wright literally jumped at the chance to do the voice of Sebastian the crab in The Little Mermaid. Asked to improvise some movements to help inspire the animators during the recording sessions for “Under the Sea,” he got a little out of control. “I lost myself and went a little wild,” he remembers. “I was doing barrel turns, flipping over, jumping about and things like that. When it was over, all these people were staring at me.” But then Wright always has thrown himself into his work, be it playing legendary musician Dizzy Gillespie in the movie Bird or being a bunch of grapes in the Fruit-of-the-Loom ™ underwear commercials. Still, the role of Sebastian has had special meaning to Wright, who has turned the lobster-red crustacean into something of a cottage industry with a number of TV specials and CDs. “This was something I’ve been dying to do all my life,” he says. “In fact, it’s the most important thing I’ve ever done. I’d always read how they selected the voices and how picky they were and I’m proud to be part of what has become a classic. I get a big smile on my face every time I think about it.”
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“We came up with the idea of giving Sebastian a Caribbean flavor,” said Ashman, “so that we could have a whole range of calypso and reggae styles to play with in the music. It was a way of adding energy, spice and a little bit of contemporary pop feeling.”
For an encore, Ashman and Menken wrote the songs and music for Beauty and the Beast (1991) and, by all accounts, they managed to surpass the success they enjoyed with The Little Mermaid.
The movie broke the box office records set by Mermaid and the songs written by the duo were inundated by awards, including Oscars for Best Song and Best Original Score, and plaudits, such as this one from Newsweek magazine: “The most delicious musical score of 1991 is Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s Beauty and the Beast. If the growing armada of the titanically troubled Broadway musicals had half its charm and affectionate cleverness, the ships wouldn’t be foundering.”
Before Ashman and then Menken became involved in the film in 1989, Beauty and the Beast was a serious drama with little music and no humor. According to producer Don Hahn, Ashman was the person who convinced the creative team to steer the film in another direction.
“He came up with the idea of turning the enchanted objects into living creatures with unique personalities,” said Hahn. “That was a big breakthrough. He was also the driving creative force in terms of musicalizing the script.”
With Ashman and Menken aboard, production on Beauty and the Beast began in late 1989.
“One of the first things Howard and I did when we began working on this project was to sit down and toss around some musical ideas,” said Menken. “He usually had a basic idea of the style of the song he wanted to write and sometimes even a title or some completed lyrics. Then he would ask what the music might sound like if we were going to write a certain kind of song and I would sit at the piano and let fly. Howard had the ability to find what he liked and then write to it. We had a kind of shorthand between us and we each shared a background of loving musicals and growing up with many of the same influences.”
The two wrote six songs for the film, including the Academy Award-nominated “Be Our Guest” and the Academy Award-winning “Beauty and the Beast.” (A third song, “Belle,” was also nominated, making Beauty and the Beast the first motion picture to have three songs from the same film nominated for an Academy Award. The film was also the first animated feature to be nominated for Best Picture.)
“Be Our Guest” was originally intended to be sung to Belle’s father Maurice. “The song had already been recorded and the sequence partially animated when we decided that it would be more meaningful if it was directed towards Belle,” said Gary Trousdale, one of the film’s directors. “After all, she is one of the two main characters and the story revolves around her coming to the castle. We had to bring all the vocal talents back into the studio to change all references to gender that appeared in the original recording.”
According to Menken, simplicity is the key to the song “Beauty and the Beast.” “We wanted it to be gentler and smaller, as opposed to some ballads that are large and heroic in scope. The song was written with Angela Lansbury in mind and we kept imagining her voice and what a fine actor she is, as well as a singer.”
Menken also admitted he and Ashman had an ulterior motive. “In all our projects, we had never achieved the liftable ballad,” he told Newsweek. “We were determined to have it this time.”
They got it. In addition to Lansbury’s rendition in the movie (and in this collection), a pop version of the song was recorded by Celine Dion and Peabo Bryson (it’s heard over the closing credits and, yes, it became a hit, reaching the Top 10 on the Billboard magazine Hot 100 chart.)
