A Broadway Lyricist Helped Turn Around Disney Animation With a Third Song Pattern

By the late 1980s, Disney Animation was showing faint signs of life. The Great Mouse Detective arrived in 1986, and Oliver and Company followed in 1988, and people began saying the studio could still make good things that were commercially successful.

Then came the crazy idea that really worked. The studio would stop making cartoons with music and start making musicals that happened to be cartoons. That meant borrowing not just catchy tunes but the story structure of the Broadway stage.

Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg recruited Howard Ashman, a theater lyricist introduced to the studio by music executive David Geffen. Ashman said he wanted to work in animation. In his words, "I feel there is a connection between animation and musical theater." He brought with him composer Alan Menken, his partner on Little Shop of Horrors, and their first project together was The Little Mermaid.

Ashman argued that Broadway shows follow a pattern in the early going. The leading lady settles onto a rock or some other perch, and then, in his words, "she sings a song to the world telling the audience what she wants." Once the audience knows the one thing she wants most, Ashman believed, viewers root for her to get it through the rest of the show.

For Ariel, the young mermaid at the center of The Little Mermaid, that became Part of Your World. Sitting and longing aloud, she explains that she wants to go where the people are, to see them dancing and walking around on, as she puts it, feet. Ashman believed that plain statement of desire could carry the whole movie, because once viewers knew what she wanted, they would hope she got there.

He applied the same musical theater instinct elsewhere. It was Ashman who suggested making the little crab Jamaican, an idea that led to Under the Sea.