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04
3 / 2018

Howard Ashman’s Lecture at Disney

During the making of Disney’s The Little Mermaid, songwriter Howard
Ashman held a lunchtime lecture for the ilm’s production staff. The lecture is
frequently quoted and extended excerpts are occasionally included as bonus
features on various documentaries and movie re-releases, but Disney has yet
to release the entire thing completely uncut.
Here is – to the best of my abilities and resources – as much of the lecture as I
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could compile and transcribe. Hopefully someday we’ll get a video of the
whole lecture. Until then, there’s this. Enjoy!

I don’t really feel in a position to have much to lecture about. There’s

probably very few people in this room who know less about animation
than I do. I’m brand new here. John and Ron have been teaching me. In
working with this process, I am learning tons. That’s been really, really
great for me.

My background is in musical theater. And it’s interesting, because I do

think there’s a very strong connection and application between the two
mediums. When I was approached with the opportunity to work for
Disney, I leapt at it. I said, “What about animation? What about working in
that department?” That was what I really wanted to do here, much, much
more than anything in live-action. Although that is something I got to do.
Because I’m really a musical theater person, and I can see a very, very
strong connection between these two mediums. And I’d like to talk about
why that connection exists. There are all kinds of theoretical basis for
that. If you really think about the structure of an entertainment form, you
can really draw a line [between the two]. We’ll get into that in a little bit.

The irst thing about music for me, anyway, is information. It’s a way to
get character and plot information across. And there’s a big difference
there. That’s not everybody’s point of view on music in ilm. A lot of times,
you are just dealing with music purely as entertainment value or purely
as a marketing function. And there is validity in that. I don’t snub it. There
is validity in saying, “This movie needs a hit song. Because that will get
airplay, and that will get the title of the ilm out there, and that’ll drag
people into the theater.” But I don’t think that’s how Whistle While You
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Work or Someday My Prince Will Come or Who’s Afraid of The Big Bad Wolf
– I don’t think that’s how those songs were conceived. Those songs were
conceived as information and entertainment together. But that’s really
just the beginning of this subject in trying to integrate these two things –
what is the connection between the stage musical and the animated ilm?

I do think the Disney tradition does treat the songs as informational.

Perhaps not as substantially as we might want to do nowadays, and [it]
tends to change somewhat. But I do think they were beginning in that
direction. You have to remember that the same time the animated Disney
ilms are being made, the classics were being made, all through the late
30s all through the 40s and 50s, is also the Golden Age of the Broadway
musical. That is also when irst Rodgers and Hart and then Rodgers and
Hammerstein were working. There was a stage musical tradition that was
growing up at the same time. Tin Pan Alley was our pop music culture,
and it was borrowing from the stage and also, it turns out, from animated
ilms. There were dance band arrangements of these songs. They were
the pop songs of their eras. They were not just novelty songs. And I think
that’s important.

So you want music to be information. You want it to develop story or

character in some way so that the song will carry its own weight and
justify its existence in the ilm.

Someone in audience asks: Do you consider character revelation to be

information enough? It’s almost easy to lump almost any song into a
category of character and revealing something about the character?

It’s almost cheating isn’t it?

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Same audience member: It seems like an easy out to say that.

Yeah, it can be an easy out. When we talk about the structure of a song,
it’s more speci ic than that. It’s not character in some general sense. It’s
not character in the sense of, ‘She’s mean’. Or character in the sense of,
‘She’s sophisticated’, 'He’s handsome and virile’. That’s not character
information. I mean much more speci ic things by 'information’, And,
frankly, I probably mean more speci ic things by 'information’ than most
lyricists do. And you’ll hear that in some of the work that we’re doing on
this picture.

Developing character, then, in a particular way. That’s a really good

(unintelligible).

Integrating the popular-style song – that’s another important point.

Our particular tradition integrates music that has something to do with

the culture we’re living in; something to do with the popular song and not
another kind of song that is purely theatrical. Somehow telling story
through pop music is part of what this is about, too. And if you really do
think about the Disney ballads, they sound [very] much like the pop
ballads of their era. Really the music of the period – the music of Tin Pan
Alley – they used in a theatrical context. That is what the Broadway
musical was all about, and the Broadway musical is all about. It’s been
changing, by the way, and that’s one reason why I think the Broadway
musical has been having a lot of trouble, and may or may not be on its
way to becoming extinct. We can talk about that later.
There are two separate traditions of music and ilm, I think, that have
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nothing to do with this narrative, this 'information’ kind of song. This is
very different from the stage musical.

There are set-piece songs that are justi ied by realistic action. That’s the
Busby Berkeley ilm where all of the songs are justi ied by the fact that
they are putting on a show. So they’re rehearsing a song, so it’s okay for
Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell to sing. That’s one kind of song. That
tradition goes all the way back to the beginning of ilm musicals, and that
tradition goes all the way up through Flashdance and whatever happened
yesterday and will continue. That has nothing to do with most stage
musicals. That’s a very different kind of thing.

And then there’s the tradition of music as background, which has been
evolving with music video, in a sense, to a new place. Music or songs on
the soundtrack [acting] simply as if the narrator is saying something. As if
the narrator is saying, Ooh, ooh, Staying alive, Staying alive. I mean, who is
singing that, right? But if you take it seriously and look at the structure,
who is singing that is God out there. Who is singing that is the narrator’s
voice. Who is singing that is the ilmmaker making a comment. I sense that
they are probably songs along those lines in Oliver [& Company]. And
there are songs very, very often in contemporary ilms along those lines.
If you want to work a contemporary, potentially pop hit song into a movie,
that’s the kind of song – nine times out of ten – that it will end up having
to be. How else are you going to do it?

Then there’s the third kind of song, which is the song I’m interested in.
[This] is a song that’s more theatrically oriented, a more narratively
oriented song, the song that’s all informational content.
Why did it evolve that way, those other two kinds of songs? Basically,
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because ilm is a realistic medium. Basically because the convention, the
game that we play in live-action ilm, is we all get in there and pretend that
the camera just happens to be there. Right? We all just pretend. That is
just what the medium’s about. We sort of suspend the disbelief and say,
'Gee, the camera just happened to be there when Whoopi Goldberg was
robbing that department store!’ And that’s part of what we do collectively
as an audience.

Obviously, the animated ilm works in a totally different way. There is no

collective game being played that this may have really happened and the
camera just happened to be there. We know it was drawn. So we know
that the basic reality that we’re dealing with is totally, totally different. It’s
just subconsciously somewhere in the back of our heads. We watch in a
different way, therefore it makes it easier to sing. I have a theory. It may
be that music plays such an important role here – can play such an
important role here – that music may have more license in the animated
ilm in the same way it does in the theater, simply because level of reality
is different. There is no game being played by a theater audience. We
know that’s happening right in front of us and it’s painted scenery and it’s
not real. We go to the movies and it’s a real street – or it looks a lot more
like a real street – and we pretend it may be really happening.

So, yeah, I do think that animation might be one of the last places where
we’ll continue to buy the use of music substantially in a narrative format.
It’s interesting on Little Shop [of Horrors], the cards when they irst did
their sneak peeks, their market research, the cards from the 12 and 15
year old kids – who were basically who they wanted to hear from, actually
10 to 12 year old kids – basically a lot of the cards were going, “Well, it’s
good, but what’s all that singing? Why are they singing all the time?” It
was a big, big problem with music in ilm – music in live-action ilm. The
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only truth I know about it is it usually doesn’t work.

Original musicals for ilm – that is, musicals that try to use narrative songs
as opposed to the other two kinds – ilms that try to do that have a real
tough time unless they’re pre-sold Broadway properties that already have
some sort of interest that we’ve already collectively entered into. We want
to see South Paci ic. But I suspect if South Paci ic had been something just
brand new that people walked into and there are all these World War II
sailors singing There Is Nothing Like a Dame, even in 1960, people would
have sort of laughed.

It’s a very, very, very tricky medium. Little Shop maybe gets away with it,
or at least partially does, I think the irst half of the ilm does get away
with it because there’s a level of unreality to the whole thing. Singin’ in the
Rain, there’s a level of unreality to the entire thing. We’re talking about
something that’s more cartoon like, more animation. On the other hand,
even a ilm like Singin’ in the Rain, with The Band Wagon, some of these
things we view as classics, if you really examine them, they have precious
few situations where two people are sitting over dinner and somebody
just start singing to the other one.

So let’s talk now about how you can start songs, or how you can try to
start songs. For a ilm, some of the music is still justi ied. Even in Mermaid,
I ind, and this is maybe just instincts for myself, I still ind that though I’m
interested in narrative songs, you only want to push it so far. You only
want to push your luck so far. It may be taste or whatever it is, I’m not
really terribly interested in the animated characters starting to look at
each other and going, “Hey! Let’s go down and buy some soda!” It doesn’t
interest me.
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So there’s narrative information getting across, but in a different way, in a
kind of song that’s constructed different. Some of the music is still
justi ied. The ilm opens with a scene sea shanty – Little Mermaid I’m
talking about – opens at this point in its life with a sea shanty. So I’ve
justi ied music there by saying the sailors are singing. That certainly goes
back a long way. John and Ron asked for a song that sounded like Dumbo.
They said, “We love those roustabouts in Dumbo, hauling.” I had said,
actually, giving a little bit more history, Ron and John irst wanted a big
opening number, then we talked about it and decided there will be no
opening number at all, then I started to work on the songs and said, “I
want an opening number. I want music toward the top,” and decided that
he sea shanty might be a way to have our cake and eat it too, but an
opening number that would not provide tons and tons of expositional
information, that would provide locale. We’ll talk about it when we get to
that song.

It’s a very early demo, so they’re done on… You’ve probably already
heard these ‘til you’re sick. (Smiling mischievously) I know I have.

Howard plays the demo for ‘Fathoms Below’.

There’s a lot of information in that lyric, some of which people will get,
some of which people are not. The fact is, it’s all there. Hopefully there’s –
I try anyway – to put in a little more information than everybody’s going
to get the irst time around so maybe you’re going to want to see it more
than once. Maybe there’s still something to see the second and third time
around.
Shows storyboards of a cartoon ish descending from the surface, deeper and
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deeper down into the water.

There goes that ish, going down, down, down, down… It looks up in the
direction of the ship and its crew…

Shows storyboards of the ish breathing a bubbled sigh of relief.

We had a real hard time with this one, too. We had been through a couple
of drafts with this one. The irst draft we played, John said, what did he
say? “It sounds like an Old Spice commercial.” And he was right. It did
sound like an Old Spice commercial.

Howard plays a demo of ‘Daughters of Triton’.

The second song is also realistically justi ied. And I had a little problem
with this because of the idea of a performance underwater in this fairy
tale kingdom seeming funny to me. What we tried to do was work in a
classical pastiche vein, to work in a vein that sort of said, 'This sounds like
chamber music, this is comic.’ That takes the onus off it a little bit. So it’s
this comic chamber music event with a little Baroque-y and Gilbert and
Sullivan-y air.

The way the rhyme scheme is built, the last thing they’re going to do is
present Ariel. She’s not there, and the rhyme scheme is structured so that
you feel subconsciously the last thing should be 'Ariel’, the rhyme. “She’s
our sister, Ari–” and it stops.

We’re going to come now to Under The Sea. When I irst met John and
Ron on the project, I asked if [Sebastian] the crab could be Jamaican and
have a Jamaican accent for a very speci ic reason. And the reason was
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this: When dealing with a fairy tale, something that takes place long ago
and far away in Never Never Land, I wanted to be able to get,
convincingly, a more contemporary sound into a couple of the songs. I
wanted an opportunity to do something with a beat so that we could have
'up’ numbers. Think about it. You know what an 'up’ number is, right?
Something that doesn’t sound like Part of Your World. Something that isn’t
a sea shanty. An 'up’ number – something that makes you want to party a
little. You don’t want to throw party rock ‘n’ roll into the middle of this –
at least I didn’t. I didn’t want to suddenly write Let’s Hear it for the Boy in
the middle of this fairy tale. Actually, I didn’t want to write Let’s Hear it for
the Boy ever.

Howard plays the demo for ‘Under The Sea’.

[Sebastian] starts establishing the rhythm. Clams pick it up. And oysters.
He’s beating on lobsters, whatever.

Howard mimes claws opening and closing.

We really try for an old-time animated sequence and have as much fun as
we can. This is the only medium you can do that. I mean, what are you
going to do? On the Broadway stage you’re going to dress people up like
lobsters? Cats notwithstanding, this is the only medium where you can
have that particular kind of fun. And that’s really the point of being here.

Howard plays the demo for ‘Poor Unfortunate Souls’.

Ursula is the sea witch, and this is the closest we’ll get to a musical
theater song that this piece has. This is absolutely a plot song that is
justi ied by nothing. And it’s the riskiest song in the ilm in that it covers
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the key plot point in the whole story which is Ariel giving up her voice.

Let’s go on to Part of Your World. Ariel is a human-ophile. She has a

fascination, an obsession, with the human world. […] She’s been foraging
around in a shipwreck for human stuff. She takes these things to her
secret grotto where she has a collection of human artifacts. It’s her hobby
– it’s almost like any teenager’s room. There’s all this stuff from the
human world. She doesn’t know what these things are, but they fascinate
her because she’s looked from afar at humans on land.

This is a classic kind of song, the Disney version of saying – at the

beginning of every ilm, of the classic fairy tales – there is a version of this
song. It’s fascinating, we screened. Cinderella about a month ago. A Dream
Is a Wish is one. [In] Snow White, somehow they got away with two! I’m
Wishing and Someday My Prince Will Come are exactly the same type of
song about the same thing. […] Ballads are hard. Our attention span has
changed radically in the past ifteen or twenty years, and ballads are very
dif icult to sustain.

Anyway, this is our ballad. This kind of song exists in the Broadway
musical from Wouldn’t It Be Loverly – Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady tells
us what she wants. Rodgers and Hammerstein, in every show the leading
lady has a chance to plunk herself down on a tree trunk somewhere and
sing about what she dreams about. And she sings, this is what I want. It’s
called 'The Girl’s I Want Song’. It’s formulaic. In Little Shop of Horrors
there’s one called Somewhere That’s Green. We joke about this one and
call it Somewhere That’s Dry.
I believe in this kind of song a lot. She’s just been yelled at bySearch
her father,
so she’s melancholy and she’s in her grotto surrounded by her stuff.

Howard plays the demo for ‘Part of Your World’.

Most songs in that vein are less speci ic. I was interested in trying to give
more speci ic information and yet keep it feeling like a ballad. It’s her
dream – you’re not going to miss what the ilm’s about. That’s the central
issue of the entire ilm. By having her sing it, it makes that point indelible.
She wishes she were human. In the end, she will become human and live
happily ever after. That’s what she wants.

There is foreshadowing there when she says, What would I give if I could
live out of these Waters? What would I pay…? The fact is, she’s going to
make a deal with the devil, the sea witch. She’s going to give up her voice.
She’s going to give up a lot. She’s essentially going to give up practically
her life.

In the selection of images, one thing we’re working with is things that ish
can’t do and ish can’t have. If I were a ish, what would I not be able to
do? I would not be able to breathe up in the air. I would not be able to
spend a day in the sunshine. […] So even something that seems very
obvious like ‘spend all day in the sun,’ which is certainly a line that’s not
new, I think in this context is a little bit [new], or at least it’s more
interesting.

It’s neat when a song can turn around later on, when a song can turn on
itself. You can build a lyric idea that later on can just twist a little bit and
mean something else and develop at another point in the story. It’s a
musical comedy device. A good example is Somewhere That’s Green, which
has the lead line 'Somewhere that’s green,’ so that at the endSearch
of the story
it means in the plant. It’s a joke, but in the theater it really works. […] It
turns around very deliberately, and in order to do that you have to be
looking at the overall structure of the piece as you are writing it. You are
not writing it in isolation.

[…]

When Ariel meets Eric the prince, he’s almost drowned and she’s dragged
him up on the beach and has the lyrics:

What would I give

If I could live
where you are?
Just you and me
and I could be
part of your world.

‘What would I give if I could live out of these waters?’ – that theme comes
back, only it’s stronger now. ‘Part of that world’ has become speci ic,
become ‘part of your world.’ So this generic dream that she had is now
speci ically focused on this guy and we know where the plot is going.

And the music has done that. The song has done that. The strongest
songs are the ones that take the most important points in the story,
underline them, develop them, slam them home, move them forward and
are entertaining at the same time. You look for the key issues and not just,
‘Oh, we could put a song in here because they are at a party.’ That’s one
way to do it, but it’s nicer if there’s some structural reason. Audiences feel