Jim on Film: Something More
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Jim on Film: Something More
by Jim MIles

In one of the recent controversial moves John Lasseter has made in his role as the new head of Walt Disney Feature Animation, he removed Alan Menken and Glenn Slater from The Frog Princess and replaced them with Pixar favorite Randy Newman.

Now, I love Alan Menken’s work as much as anyone else, as evidenced by the number of CDs of his work I own. Plus, I am extremely excited to see Enchanted and can’t wait to hear the new songs for the stage adaptation of The Little Mermaid. I could not possibly say enough great things about Menken and his work for Disney.

As much as this is true, I can’t be happier with Lasseter’s decision.

The problem with the releases Disney made in the later 1990s, as far as I can see, has little to do with quality, but it was the perception that these movies were the same. With the exception of The Lion King, these were all either fairy tale stories or stories with humans, and all of them were musicals infused with Menken and Ashman’s signature style, even when he wasn’t writing the music.

I don’t even think the fact that they were musicals was a problem—of the sixteen single-story features released through 1977, fourteen of them were essentially musicals, and the remaining two had several songs in them (One-Hundred-and-One Dalmatians and The Rescuers). These films have all been perennial favorites and rightfully so.

Several years ago, I wrote a column analyzing the use of music in the Disney films of the 1990s, including all the Menken films, The Lion King, and Mulan. I stated then exactly what I feel now, which is that there is nothing cookie-cutter about these movies, that there really seems to have been no attempt at formula beyond what musical storytelling genres share in general, which is what these movies have in common with stage musicals like Oklahoma!, Guys and Dolls, or Annie.

That said, I think it’s also important to acknowledge that every writer or artist has his or her own personal stamp. For example, if you see Edgar Allan Poe or John Steinbeck or Maya Angelou on the cover of a book, you have a good feeling for what it’s going to be like. And if you see Shania Twain or Johnny Mathis on a CD, you shouldn’t be too surprised by what’s inside. Again, this is not about falling into familiar patterns or being lazy. It’s simply about their style.

Alan Menken is extremely talented, and he has a brilliant knack for telling stories through music, but Disney needs to incorporate other voices into its musical oeuvre to prevent making the same mistakes. As it is, the studio is already releasing two consecutive animation fairy tales with Rapunzel and The Frog Princess. Hopefully, both will be wildly popular with audiences, but they are risking sending the signal that they can’t do anything else. They are basically making the same mistake they made before. And if they are going to return to the fairy tale format, then they need to make sure that these films are nothing like what’s been done before, which means finding new musical voices and allowing those talented people to show the way to other methods of structuring musical storytelling in the animated film.

An animated musical film can take any number of different forms. Both Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan are musicals, and yet look how different they are in how they use music to tell those stories, and they were released only two years apart. Disney should never abandon musical storytelling, but they need to find new ways to use music to tell different kinds of stories in different ways. The musical style of Lady and the Tramp is very different from the musical style of The Jungle Book, both of which are very different from the musical style of Beauty and the Beast, which is also different from the musical style of Tarzan. Because of the success Disney had with musicals in the early 1990s and the popularity of those songs, critics have come to see that animated films are either musicals or non-musicals. I don’t think audiences couldn’t handle a new Disney animated musical every year, but there needs to be variety. Each film should not only be different in story and appearance (i.e. not all fairy tale-like stories), they should appear to be different from a promotional standpoint.

Even within the world of the animated fairy tale, there is a lot of room for different uses of music. To demonstrate this, let’s take four very different animated films—both Disney and non—Cinderella (1950), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Don Bluth’s Anastasia (1997), and DreamWorks’s The Prince of Egypt (1998).