How Disney Liberated the Musical Genre

 

Anytime I’m getting ready for a new musical film, I generally try to put off listening to the soundtrack until after I’ve seen the movie. It’s just my way of ensuring that I experience the narrative in its full context upon its important premiere viewing. Most of the time I’m good about sticking to this, but nowhere is this feat harder than with the arrival of each new Disney musical. (I admit here and now I was not able to abstain with Encanto.)

So, why am I talking about Disney musicals?

    When I premiered my Jungle Book essay earlier this year, I decided that going forward I was ready to expand how I talked about Disney. Owing to Disney fans constantly having to justify their fandom, a lot of Disney discourse tends to be purely defensive. Disney fans only ever get to use their platform to try convincing the cool kids that--for the last time!--it's okay for adults without kids to go to Disneyland. There's so much about the Disney legacy that's interesting, and yet we only ever seem to land on "5 Reasons Cinderella isn't Sabotaging Your Daughter's Plans for Law School." While these discussions are sometimes fun and often necessary, I wanted to start giving space for Disney essays that are more exploratory than defensive. 

 

     These thoughts have intersected with my own observations about the musical genre. Musicals are kind of always on my mind, but this has been a monumental year for musicals in the modern age. Hollywood actually gave musicals a try this year. This lineup was really exciting when it looked like we were going to find a renaissance of musical films, but then it became really disappointing when all of these offerings stumbled at the box office, especially since a few of them were quite good. It's given me a lot of time to think about what makes a good musical, which inevitably has me thinking about why so many of the best musicals come from the Disney tradition.

    While Disney animation has produced quite a few gems outside of the musical realm, society bonds "Disney" and "musicals" on a molecular level. Over the last thirty years especially, Disney films are generally a viewer's first exposure to the concept of a musical. Owing to this, the concept of "the Disney musical" is really easy to take for granted.

Musicals transport the viewer into a world unfamiliar to the one they live in yet where everything seems somehow truer to how they feel. So it is with Disney films, which speak to the part of us that hasn't been worn down by a world that conditions cynicism. Disney musicals synergize these forms into something really special, a nexus between fantasy and truth, and that's something worth talking about.

We'll go about this in two major phases. First, we'll dig into the mechanics of both the musical genre as a whole and the Disney musical specifically. Second, we'll look at how the histories and legacies of Disney and live-action musicals have interacted.

ACT I Form and Function

The Bare Necessities

         Before we get too far, we need to ask ourselves something: What makes a musical anyways?

        There’s the low-hanging answer—if the characters are singing, it’s a musical—but there’s a lot more that goes into a genre. There are also recurring themes, plot structures, plot devices, character types, and so forth, and we need to understand those as well.

Let’s start by talking about the function of “singing” in a musical film and the continuum of musical number styles. Remember that offscreen, people don’t sing in real life, so if you’re going to stage an entire film with people singing, you need to be prepared to justify why. (This is one of the reasons why it's important for musicals to decide where exactly they sit on the stylized/naturalized continuum, as we discussed in the Les Miserables essay.)

    Styles of musical numbers fall somewhere along a spectrum with “realistic” songs on one end and “fantasy” songs on the other. You have the hyper-grounded musical numbers that take place on a stage in front of an audience and microphone. These are fairly straightforward and don’t really ask a lot of the audience. But music also carries us to a far more ethereal plane than we find in “real life.” We need a space for that too.

    So we also have musical sequences that are so soulful and wonderful that they can’t possibly be contained by the fences of reality, so they take place in a dream world, a sort of stage within the mind and heart of the performer or the audience. Because these numbers are “imaginary,” they don’t have to make logical sense, which opens the door for them to do some really cool stuff like having your characters fly. (This second brand will be especially important for this discussion, and we’ll get to that in the next section.)

Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933)

         In the earliest days of film, musicals were actually pretty strict about keeping their musical numbers more in that first group. Songs were almost always performed on a stage in front of an audience, and these songs weren’t necessarily the kind that appeared in the mind of the singer spontaneously in a burst of emotional inspiration while they were walking down to the market. Funny enough, those musical numbers didn’t start regularly appearing until one specific movie musical—wouldn’t you know, the OG Disney musical, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

         “Snow White” actually did a lot of things for the feature film musical. It not only fused musical storytelling with the medium of animation in a big way, but it also brought the genre to a new location. Similar to how westerns are always set in the wild frontiers, musical films tend to take place in a specific milieu, one stuffed with stages or screens where we already expect to find music. Think about the most recent original live action musicals we’ve seen—La La Land and The Greatest Showman—and note how both are set against this backdrop of showmanship and performance. There are exceptions to this rule, especially if the film is adapted from a stage show, but for the most part, musicals don’t like to wander too far from the stage. Even a musical like Dear Evan Hansen, which takes place mostly in a high school, leans heavily on stage imagery and indeed centers on a “performance” of sorts by a main character.

    “Snow White” seemed to indicate that the musicals could look to broader horizons. This musical brought songs far beyond the world of footlights, curtains, and stage mics into the far-off realm of forests, castles, and magic spells. The success of “Snow White” no doubt encouraged MGM to greenlight The Wizard of Oz as a musical project. The finished film not only has spontaneous musical numbers, but it’s also an adventure film with Dorothy journeying to a far off land that isn’t Hollywood. But when “Oz” flopped at the box office on its first release, that seemed to put the thought of similar musicals out of the minds of filmmakers.

         This brings us to the plot templates for musicals. Most Judy Garland or Gene Kelly pics just follow two stage singers/radio stars/movie actors falling in love. These stories often include an in-universe show being staged, and this show creates a sort of excuse for fantastical musical numbers to arise. As I explained in my Moulin Rouge! essay, your classic MGM musical often anchored on some kind of untruth or misunderstanding, a sort of echo of the innately deceptive nature of performance itself. According to musical theory, musicals hinge on that kind of illusion because it’s only in this make-believe kind of world where people sing to begin with.

    For some reason, we don’t ask for these kinds of signifiers or quid pro quos in other types of fantastical stories. We don’t, for example, expect Tony Stark to wake up at the end of The Avengers and realize that his time as a superhero was a fantastical but impossible dream. After all, superheroes are just for the movies, right? This caveat is somewhat specific to musicals, like you have to prove you're a functional adult by showing you understand that this is all just pretend and people don't sing in real life.

         As for why that is, I would guess it has to do with the thing that actually makes us uneasy about musicals: they’re just so optimistic. They ask us to believe in things like true love and dreams coming true. For most of the ticket-buying audience, this sentiment is a little too treacly to swallow, so we keep musicals within the parameters of “just a dream.”

        

A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes

        The overlap between musicals and fantasies is demonstrated in one of the most famous musical sequences, the climactic dream ballet of An American in Paris. The majority of the film has Gene Kelly pursuing Leslie Caron, and about twenty minutes before the end titles, Leslie Caron drives off with another man, and it looks as though things won’t end well for them. And so, Gene Kelly starts staring off into the distance pensively. So intense is his longing to be with her that he starts to daydream, and this daydream takes on the form of an extended musical-dance sequence in which he chases his love through an everchanging lyrical playground. After about twenty minutes of this, the sequence ends with Gene Kelly symbolically letting go of his true love, but immediately after he awakens from his dream, Leslie Caron runs back into his arms, their love willed into existence through sheer sincerity. This is what one might call the musical dream fantasy.

Musicals and dreams are a natural pairing in part because watching a musical can feel like stepping into some imaginary plane of existence, into a world where color and motion feel governed not by the laws of reality but by music and longing, where people bursting into song is just part of the fabric of this world. In this way, the audience is not so different from Gene Kelly in this scenario. We flock to the movie theater and gaze pensively at the spectacle unfolding before us with the same longing in our eyes that we see in Gene Kelly as his fantasy starts to unfold around him in dazzling array. Whatever our situation outside the theater, we can forget about it while the lights are down. In this space, in this dream, for this moment, we all feel free.

    Already we can see where the musical format and the Disney ethos are synergistic elements. Note the way that Cinderella's intrinsic ability to dream her way out of her depressing reality is made literal in the film's centerpiece, "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo." All it takes is a little faith for something as mundane as a garden pumpkin to become a beautiful carriage, or for a handful of scrappy mice to become handsome stallions. This combination of hope and imagination literally lets this neglected girl escape her troubles for one night and eventually for good. This is where musicals in and out of Disney find their most earnest appeal, and also their greatest detractors.

Musicals, like the dreams they emulate, are fantastical and cathartic, but are they likewise transient and non-substantive? Maybe it’s too good to be true that Leslie Caron and Gene Kelly would find each other again after all. According to Professor Jane Feuer, it’s no coincidence that Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron aren’t reunited in the dream sequence itself. She explains in her book, “The Hollywood Musical,”

“The experience of the film may provide an emotional catharsis or an escape for the viewer, as the dream does for the dreamer within the film. But when the musical also implies that dream ballets resolve the very real problem of the narrative, and by analogy, that movies fulfill our wishes in ‘real life,’ the parallels between movies and life breaks down. MGM musicals of the 1940s and 1950s don’t dare to question their own logic. To do so would be to deny the promise of entertainment itself. For genre films serve the culture by working through (in symbolic form) conflicts that can never really be resolved outside the cinema.”

         Musicals have warning labels, curtains that signal that this is, after all, just a performance and tell viewers not to take the film too seriously. Sometimes these caveats manifest in the form of entire plot devices. The Wizard of Oz goes to great lengths to diffuse this tension. It does this first by ousting the great and powerful Oz as nothing but a clever showman. “He’s not like a real wizard, guys.” In case that wasn’t enough, the film adds an extra curtain by implying that Oz was all just Dorothy’s trauma induced dream, one that she from which she awakens by the end of the film. (Note: this plot feature is unique to the movie musical adaptation.) After all, it’s only in Dorothy’s mind that such glorious landscapes are possible.

In short, popular musical theory says that if musicals are allowed to display our deepest desires, it’s only because we know and accept that our deepest desires can never really be met in a world that is so unlike the world of the musical. People don’t sing in real life, and dreams don’t really come true. 

         That's all good and fine, but what does this have to do with Disney musicals? Well, movies like Tangled and Peter Pan differ from movies like An American in Paris in one significant way, and it's even more obvious than you think. These aren't just regular musicals. They're animated musicals.

A Whole New World

         Maybe now's a good time to ask, “Why animated films?”

    Animation’s backdoor into the world of musicals stems from the animated short films that introduced the world to animation. Such shorts included The Three Little Pigs, Steamboat Willie, and The Wise Little Hen. These short little films preceded feature-films and centered around a 7-minute storyline. Once sound became part of the equation, the storybook nature of these narratives lent itself to short little jingles that explained the action in a concise and entertaining way. And you’ll never guess which mad genius was obsessed with animation back then … 

It’s commonly accepted that Walt wanted to tell feature-length stories through animation right from the start, but you don’t go from zoetropes to feature-length films overnight, and it was through his Silly Symphony shorts that Walt and his team explored the intersections between art, technology, story, and music. And forth from the unbridled ambition of Mr. Disney, an empire of animated musicals was born. 

So there’s already a historical context for why music and animation ever connected in the first place, but there’s also something about animation as a medium that lends itself to musical expression.

Song of the Sea (2014)

   Consider that nothing onscreen in an animated film is “real.” It imitates reality, sure, sometimes very closely, but by nature, every visual element within an animated film is a fabrication, and that fabrication never replicates reality exactly. Not in the way that live-action film, which photographs real subjects, does naturally. Animation presents the world not the way it is, but the way it feels.

This blanket of fabrication is the primary reason why we’re not bothered when an animated character starts singing. They already exist in this performative world where things aren’t exactly the way they are in real life. You could say that animation is itself a dream and a curtain all in one.

         It's for this same reason that we're not bothered when songs show up in the most random of stages in animated films. Where your standard live-action musical has stage performers Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers playing stage performers, the cast of the animated musical has singing mermaids, bears, marionettes, pirates, snow queens, and everything in between. And while sometimes their songs are performed literally on stage (e.g. Pinocchio's "I've Got No Strings to Hold Me Down"), their music follows them to many exotic locales. They can be singing as they are drifting down a jungle river, flying a magic carpet around the world, or building an ice castle atop a blizzard-covered mountain, not a stage mic to be seen. In a universe where anything is possible, there are any number of reasons why a person/lion/candlestick might start singing their feelings. Writer Richard Barrios wrote in “Dangerous Rhythms: Why Musicals Matter,”

“… where flesh and blood people required a reason to sing and dance, excuses were superfluous for animated characters, or objects, or anything that could be made to move. When Mickey does his Astaire bit in Through the Mirror, he doesn’t need to scramble for a top hat and cane, nor is he required to be part of a putting-on-a-show plot. It just happens, as things do in cartoons. Disbelief need not be a factor, and song and dance can come out of anywhere for any reason and for no reason at all. Mickey, after all, should be a great tap-dancer in a kind of world where anything can be a vocalist and the most graceful ballerina might be a hippopotamus. It’s so easy with ink and paint.” 

    So animation gives us that space to believe in something like mermaids singing under the sea, at least while we're watching this film, but animation can also portray this in a way that feels uniquely musical. Let's look closer at "Part of Your World" as one example.

   The song invokes a very specific kind of sequence seen in earlier musicals—the “Over the Rainbow” style wish song. These numbers need to communicate the emotion not only through the content of the song itself but also how the song is visually presented on screen. And beholding Ariel sing about longing to touch the world above, flying weightlessly as though carried by nothing but the earnestness of her wish, we understand perfectly.

    Here, Ariel’s moving not just across her stage, but up and down as well, her yearning unbound by space or gravity. I’m certain Stanley Donen would have loved to let Jane Powell float across the screen singing “Wonderful Day” in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in the same way. But that kind of staging is impossible in live action. (At least it was in 1989. We’ll see how the remake pulls it off.) In animation, however, it’s as easy as drawing lines on paper. Is it just nostalgic for me to say that “Part of Your World” represents the actualization of the musical number? Or is it that the mechanics of the medium blend naturally with the aesthetic demands of the genre.

   In short, animated musicals are allowed to dream without apology because an animated film is basically one extended dream sequence. When you combine that freedom with a deep love for the musical form, you get something new entirely.

    The question in the air, I suppose, is whether these musicals are any less accountable for the promises they make. 

    

Intermission - Once Upon a Dream

    Before we go on, enjoy this gallery of animation and music creating some of the most spectacular dream scenes in all of musical history ...

ACT II History and Influence

The Circle of Life

 

Menken (left) and Ashman (right) accepting their Oscar
 at the 1990 ceremony for "Under the Sea"

   The life cycles of musicals and Disney have been intertwined since the days of “Snow White,” but their relationship has only strengthened through time. The resurgence in Disney animation in the 90s is a really good example. An artistic boom like this can be attributed to a lot of factors and people, but I want to focus on one individual in particular: legendary lyricist, Howard Ashman.

   With his writing partner, Alan Menken, Ashman penned most of the songs that dominate the Disney track list today. His Disney credits include all the songs for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast as well as most of the songs for Aladdin (Ashman passed away from AIDS complications during the film’s preproduction).

It was around this time in Disney history that the songwriters started to be more involved in the development of not just the songs but also the stories of the movies they were writing for. Howard Ashman was big into musicals like The Sound of Music and The King and I, and this naturally reflected in the Disney films made during Ashman’s tenure. Just look at the way Ariel is introduced in her film. Ariel, free-spirit that she is, misses her appointment, and Triton and Sebastian are basically like, “How do you solve a problem like Ariel?” Meanwhile, Belle invokes Maria even more overtly during her big solo in a number, one which bears great visual resemblance to the iconic title song in The Sound of Music. (Honestly, the internet gripes about Disney Princesses not having mothers—Julie Andrews is the mother of every Disney Princess.)

       If you grew up on these Disney musicals and then watch a lot of the classical musicals, things will start to feel familiar. This is true of both the visual presentation of the musical numbers and the stories themselves. And that’s not stealing—that’s homage. That’s filmmakers taking what they love and remixing it until it takes on an identity of its own. Really, that’s art.

These pastiche musicals would sometimes sneak in signposts of performative music—the princess with a magically gifted singing voice, the sidekick with a side career as a musician, etc.—but the stories had access to a much larger bank of story elements than classical musicals. Aladdin and Jasmine aren’t exactly stage-bound starlets chasing the thrill of applause, but they don’t need to be in order to share a musical moment. From this side of it all, it's easy to take that kind of thing for granted, but musicals weren't used to spreading their wings like this.

    It was really during the 90s that the Disney musical started cementing itself as its own genre born out of yet separate from the standard musical. This era also saw other big-name studios like Fox and Warner Bros trying to jump on the painted wagon too, as seen with films like Anastasia or Quest for Camelot. For the most part these films were modeled less after movies like Singin’ in the Rain and more after the films coming out of Disney. (The notable exception being Cats Don’t Dance, a deliberate homage to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.) These echoes all ranged in quality and eventually faded out as Disney itself started to move away from the musical format.

    When animated movies today decide to play the musical game, it's less out of obligation and more because song actually enhances the story, which is what it always should be. I could honestly spend an entire essay on what was happening with these films, but I bring it up here because this diverging sub-subgenre affirms that the animated musical was already starting to develop its own identity outside of the larger musical genre. Disney musicals take the skeleton of the classic movie musical, but the romance and vibrancy with which they dress it creates something entirely new.

       While the Disney knock-offs faded away after a time, we have observed a sort of generational echo that is bringing a lot of people back to the musical genre some thirty years after the days of Ashman musicals. Benj Pasek, one of the songwriters for The Greatest Showman, Dear Evan Hansen, and La La Land, said of the modern surge in musicals: “We feel like our generation has been so primed for musical content. We grew up with the resurgence of Disney animation and all that followed from that. In hindsight, it makes sense that people would be receptive; so many of us grew up with our first stories being told through song.”

    Ashman wrote songs that were inspired by musicals from days gone by, and his songs in turn inspired the rising generation of songwriters. This raises the question, where are musicals going to go from here?

How Far They’ll Go

    Animation toward the late 90s and early 2000s started veering more toward the adventure genre. When the medium course-corrected in the early 2010s, animated musicals borrowed from that genre as well. What we got as a result was a lot of musicals that ventured boldly beyond the confines of the stage, all the while carrying the musical vitality to far-off corners of the world. No one gives a second thought to our leading lady having a sing-off with a giant lava monster.

    This is also reflected in the rising interest in musical movies as a whole. This year alone saw the theatrical release of three different live-action musical films. But note that we’re not just seeing a rise in musicals, nor of just Disney animated musicals. The Disney remakes, love them or hate them, also bring something to the table, especially the musical remakes. When the musical came to the Disney drawing board, it left behind the curtains, the smoke and mirrors. And in this space of limitless storytelling, the musical found new life. We talked earlier about how animated musicals got away with a lot of fantastical nonsense because animation was itself a kind of curtain. Well, what happens when you drop the curtain?

    In Aladdin (2019), we’re not really questioning why Mena Massoud and Naomi Scott are singing their feelings any more than we question why they’re flying on a magic carpet. We take it as a given that of course Aladdin and Jasmine are going to sing, but historically musicals haven’t been allowed to skip these steps. Future songwriters and filmmakers are growing up with these musicals too. How are they going to define the genre? With movies like Aladdin (2019) and Beauty and the Beast (2017) setting the precedent for musicals without strings, can we one day expect musicals to arrive at this place naturally? Do we always need that cop-out that keeps us from believing in that place over the rainbow?

         The shift I hope to see in how we talk about “musicals” and “fantasies” is perhaps best demonstrated in Elsa’s “Into the Unknown” from Frozen II. Elsa starts the song with her heart in conflict: do I stay where I am safe, or do I follow that whispering voice that tells me to take a leap of faith? The song takes on a visual shift halfway through when the screen is filled with a gloriously choreographed sequence of light and color that could only ever happen in a dream, or a fairy-tale animated musical.

    The scene plays like a classic musical fantasy sequence of old. Character has a wish, sings about it, dreamlike spectacle ensues, and both the character and audience do some catharting. In a way, the song is nothing more than just another pretty illusion, but the movie puts a little more trust in Elsa's dreams. And this is where we start to diverge from the template.

 

    Remember that, according to film theory, the dreamer never actually resolves their problem within the dream itself. This is true of Elsa in this sequence. Dancing in the illusion hasn’t itself assuaged her of her sense of deep unrest, but this living reflecting pool has shown her truth nonetheless.

    The phantoms dancing around Elsa may not be real, but they do stand for real entities. The magic isn’t just taking the form of whatever looks the coolest, these fantastical images have a connection to Elsa’s past and who Elsa needs to become. Even if she can’t yet put a name to what she’s seeing, there is a world far beyond what Elsa can see. But to find it, she has to trust the yearning that brought this fantasy to life and follow where her dreams are taking her. If you’ve ever had the experience of confronting some deep truth while in the thralls of musical storytelling (or really this can happen watching any movie), then you know what it’s like.

But then, Disney has always done its own thing. I guess the real question is whether or not the chemical change Disney is catalyzing is also taking place within other branches of the genre.

      I had an observation the first time I watched In the Heights (spoilers to follow). The film is presented in a frame narrative with Usnavi reflecting on the story years after the fact. In the narrative proper Usnavi’s goal is to move back to his native country of the Dominican Republic. Because the story keeps jumping into the future with Usnavi chilling on the beach, the film seems to be foreshadowing that Usnavi is going to choose to leave Washington Heights in pursuit of his old home. Moreover, Usnavi is painted as being fairly pragmatic compared to many of the characters in the film. He’s not exactly the dreamer who believes music will save the day. It’s also worth noting that the singing has all been confined to the film’s internal narrative. The frame narrative doesn’t appear to have singing, and my first time watching I just assumed the music only “existed” in Usnavi’s memory, and this was just how the movie justified singing in this universe.

         These all turn out to be false leads. When we cut back to the frame narrative in the end, we see that the Usnavi has actually been telling this story from his bodega in Washington Heights: he decided to stay after all. The “beach” was just a metaphor made real, a symbol that the paradise he thought he would find in the DR has actually been here all along. And naturally, the film culminates in a finale song, one that takes place in the frame narrative–in the “real world.” This is the real awakening—that elevated worldview that we’ve only ever confined to the space of “pleasant illusions” and whatnot has actually been part of the fabric of this universe the whole time. In the Heights believes in what it’s selling a lot more than most musicals, and to be clear it is better for it. 

  We see the role Disney has played in rejuvenating the musicals through the rising popularity of musical movies, but one wonders if they’re shaping the genre in deeper ways. Slowly tearing down the curtain behind which dreamers have locked their hopes for decades.

When You Wish Upon a Star 

       Musicals in their artistic splendor and rosy worldview have long spawned irritation or disenfranchisement. This is why musicals are such a hard sell. So, musicals have historically come with curtains to hide behind, backdoors to escape out from when the cynical masses start grilling them a little too hard.

         This isn’t so far removed from the pushback we often see lobbed toward the Disney animated canon for espousing a worldview that has been labeled “saccharine,” “infantile,” or “naïve.” In this way, the marriage of the musical genre and Disney storytelling feels almost predestined. When you look at what gives Disney such staying power, sure, a lot of credit is owed to the highly effective marketing that the company has mastered, but more than that, I’d say, it’s the tradition of telling stories that sincerely believe that happiness, and happy endings, isn’t just a performance. The Disney musical tells you that Oz wasn’t Dorothy’s brain randomly assembling information while in a REM cycle, and there's power in believing that.

         Yes, life outside the stage hurts, sometimes agonizingly, but dreams are the one repository, the one sanctuary, that real life can't contaminate. Whether they're animated or filmed, musicals invite us to be braver than our disappointments, to carry music to places that need it.  Musicals let us know that we're not alone in our hope for a better life or a better world. What could be more authentic than that? 

     Besides, is the promise of the musical any less preposterous than the idea of some nobody from Illinois moving to LA to reinvent entertainment, laying the foundation for some of the greatest stories ever put to film?

    Maybe musicals are smarter than we give them credit for.

        

                    --The Professor