Disney Movies-The Animated Musical

  • Walt Disney was a world-famous entrepreneur of animation
  • Walt Disney “embraced sound technology”
  • Disney launched his character Mickey Mouse in silent form in 1928, five years after founding his own studio.
  • “Synchronization was achieved with the assistance of Wilfred Jackson, who prepared a ‘bar sheet’ for the film in advance.”
  • “The musical arrangements were recorded in New York using the Powers Cinephone system: music director Carl Edouarde’s conducting followed the tempi of a bouncing ball that appeared on screen in the space to the side of the images where the final soundtrack would be located, an idea borrowed from animated illustrated songs such as Old Mabel (1924).
  • Snow White and the Seven Dwarves was the first ever animated feature film
  • Snow White and the Seven Dwarves had a script/story based around the songs. Much like how musicals are created today.
  • Disney brought in “original music from Carl Stalling, a cinema organist from Kansas City with considerable experience of improvising accompaniments to silent cartoons.”
  • Some other composers that worked for Disney were Bert Lewis, Frank Churchill, and Leigh Harline.
  • Leopold Stokowski conducted the famous movie Fantasia.
  • “Fantasia was released in 1940 in an ambitious and costly stereophonic format (Fantasound) that was soon abandoned because wartime strictures discouraged the rewiring of projection venues for multiple audio speakers (and using the live music mixer required to adjust the levels of constituent tracks according to the acoustical needs of individual venues).”
  • Pinocchio won Academy Awards for Leigh Harline “for both his orchestral score and the song ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ (later to become the Disney Studio’s signature tune)”.
  • Churchill committed suicide, which left a team of composers and arrangers to complete the music for Bambi.
  • Based on Cinderella’s music, “Oliver Wallace became Disney’s approved feature composer.”
  • Songwriting brothers Richard and Robert Sherman were hired by Disney in the 1960’s, and worked on a lot of feature films for the company.
  • Disney movies such as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King have been turned into stage musicals.
  • Elton John and Hans Zimmer also worked for Disney for movies such as The Lion King.
  • @@Alan Menken and Howard Ashman became the iconic composing and lyricist duo from the late 1980’s-1990’s.@@
  • @@Little Shop of Horrors was a 1960 film by Robert Corman that was turned into an Off-Broadway musical by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. It was later turned into a film, using the same songs by Ashman and Menken.@@
  • @@Ashman and Menken wrote scores for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin.@@
  • Animated movie musicals did better than live-action movie musicals in the mid-late nineties.
  • @@Ashman and Menken’s second animated feature was Beauty and the Beast.@@
  • Howard Ashman passed away before the release of Beauty and the Beast.
  • @@Alan Menken worked on Disney’s Newsies.@@
  • @@They used temporary tracks for a lot of the movie Aladdin in the first preview.@@
  • @@Alan Menken said that he would conform to what the director wanted to see for the film in his scores. Which meant scrapping a lot of his material.@@

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