Alan Menken and Howard Ashman Gave the Disney Renaissance Its Voice

The post Alan Menken and Howard Ashman Gave the Disney Renaissance Its Voice appeared first on Consequence.

In the lead-up to the release of the live-action The Little Mermaid, Consequence is taking a look back at the Disney Renaissance and how it shaped our culture. This time, we’re exploring the legacy of its two pioneering contributors, composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman. 

At the end of 1991’s Beauty and the Beast, a message appears onscreen that reads: “To our friend Howard, who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul, we will be forever grateful.” Beauty and the Beast premiered in November of that year, just months after the film’s lyricist Howard Ashman passed away at the age of 40. The dedication is apt — it doesn’t feel like an exaggeration to say that Alan Menken and Howard Ashman were once-in-a-generation collaborators. While remarkably talented individuals, lightning struck when the composer and lyricist worked together.

In the late ’80s, Disney Animation Studios fell in a major slump. 1985’s dark, moody The Black Cauldron received largely unfavorable reactions from critics and bombed at the box office, while rival studios made their mark with commercially successful alternatives like The Land Before Time. So, as the Mouse House sought a way to reinvigorate their primary product, a project that had been floated for decades resurfaced.

The Little Mermaid became a turning point for Disney. For its first fairytale project in over 30 years, the team behind the movie imagined a headstrong, curious heroine more independent than any of her predecessors. At the time, then-head of Walt Disney Studios Jeffrey Katzenberg had his eye on Menken, a Broadway composer who had scored a home run with Ashman already on Little Shop of Horrors, but faced a setback with his follow-up, 1986’s widely-panned Smile. Willing to take a break from the New York theater scene, Menken signed on to the project.

Meanwhile, Disney had already enlisted Ashman to provide lyrics for Oliver & Company. Reuniting for The Little Mermaid allowed the two theater experts to center Ariel’s emotional journey on one of the most time-honored traditions of the stage: The great “I want” song, in which a character expresses their goals or desires for the sake of the audience.

Menken and Ashman’s impact on the film cannot be overstated. Ashman first pitched the idea that Sebastian be Jamaican, opening up a world of steel drums and vibrant energy in other parts of the film — but their touch extends directly to Ariel’s characterization. While directors Ron Clements and John Musker envisioned a song in which the mermaid expresses her romantic feelings for Prince Eric, Menken and Ashman turned in a tune about leaving the safety of home, wanting to explore, and an insatiable interest in all things new.

Still unconvinced, Katzenberg initially asked for “Part of Your World” to be removed, but the songwriting duo and the directors of the film drew a hard line, and a successful test screening of the film finally won over the studio head. In a recent press conference for the upcoming live-action adaptation of The Little Mermaid, Menken acknowledged the difficulty around this process, sharing, “You just have to be free to both create and react and create and react until you go, ‘Oh, I’m in love with this.’ I’ve thrown out beautiful ballads.” Thankfully, “Part of Your World” isn’t counted among them.

The Little Mermaid became an enormous critical and commercial success, and can now be pointed to as the start of the Disney Renaissance. Over $200 million and three Academy Award nominations later, the film set up Menken and Ashman for even more creative control. For the next project in line, Aladdin, the duo personally wrote a treatment before setting to work on the music.

Ashman’s original vision for the film, said to be a passion project due to childhood connections to the story, was quite different from the version that landed on screen. Even so, the songs Ashman worked on that did land in the final cut — “Arabian Nights,” “Friend Like Me,” and “Prince Ali” — are some of the most memorable tracks in the entire Disney canon, with “Friend Like Me” receiving an Academy Award. For the titular character, the two also wrote a stirring song, “Proud of Your Boy,” that ended up cut from the film but received a new life in the 2011 Broadway adaptation.

Meanwhile, around the same time Aladdin was being developed, the team was tapped to help reinvigorate a story of a French woman and a young man cursed as a beast, set to be released before the Genie’s adventure. The music in both films is remarkable, but while Aladdin is clever, energetic, and incredibly fun, Beauty and the Beast is a masterpiece. From the colorful opening in Belle’s village, to her desire for “adventure in the great wide somewhere” in the meadow, the unforgettable chaos of “Gaston,” the Broadway-style hypnotic joy of “Be Our Guest,” and the tender romance of the iconic ballroom scene, there’s not a musical moment in the film out of place.

Beauty and the Beast became the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture, a historic first for the craft and for Disney Animation. During the production of The Little Mermaid, though, Howard Ashman had been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS; he wrote the lyrics to “Prince Ali” from a hospital bed. While he was able to experience Beauty and the Beast through a private screening, he didn’t live to see the 10-minute standing ovation at the 1991 New York Film Festival, where one of the most famously high-brow film audiences in the world found themselves enchanted by the sweeping romance.

Howard Ashman gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul — because it feels like he gave them a part of his voice, and a part of his soul. Ashman and Menken didn’t treat animation as any lesser of a form, and imbued these characters with three-dimensionality, nuance, and agency that live-action filmmakers would envy. And it’s with that voice and soul that the Disney Renaissance began, and why the legacy of these films remains intact.

Of course, so many other incredibly talented people came together to make the Disney Renaissance happen, including visionary animators, some of the most memorable voice-acting performances of all time (Robin Williams! Angela Lansbury!), and thoughtful screenwriters.

But so much of the era’s legacy is intertwined with the music, and it was Menken and Ashman, together, who made it happen. In 2020, Beauty and the Beast co-director Kirk Wise even said, “If you had to point to one person responsible for the ‘Disney Renaissance’, I would say it was Howard.”

Alan Menken and Howard Ashman Gave the Disney Renaissance Its Voice
Mary Siroky

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