Twenty-five years ago, Disney Animation’s The Lion King stampeded off the big screen and onto Broadway through director Julie Taymor’s wildly stylized stage adaptation. The musical filled with crowd-pleasing Disney songs later becoming one of the most successful musicals of all time. From Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin to The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Frozen, Disney animated classics have found new life on the musical stage in productions that not only celebrate the spirit of the original films, but also expand on them in ways only capable on the live theatre stage.
While ostensibly two starkly contrasting mediums, animation and live musical theatre share a common ground of performative and practical expressionism. This similarity allows Disney Animation's movies to translate seamlessly onto the Broadway stage.
Disney Animation Incorporated Broadway Influences in the 90s
From the early days of Snow White onward, Disney Animation's movies have almost always been musicals. The songs of their earlier eras are unmistakable classics. Yet, within the context of their early films, songs were less so musical numbers in the traditional sense of how songs are used in stage musicals to illustrate key character and narrative points. In Disney's films, they more so existed for the sake of spectacle and sentiment to demonstrate the craft of animation.
In the 90s, with the creative influence of Broadway composers like Alan Menken, Howard Ashman, and Stephen Schwartz, Disney Animation's renaissance sought to imbue the studio's films with more musical theatre DNA than they had, had in the past. Disney Animation began taking inspiration from contemporary musicals in developing the structure and style of their new sense of musicality. The songs began to play an even more prominent role in the storytelling and were used as windows into how the characters feel – underlining their motivations, an intention that remains even today in films like Frozen, Moana, and Encanto. While the song sequences in Peter Pan show all the different ways to have fun in Neverland, the songs in Beauty and the Beast express more direct character motivations and development along with unpacking key relationships – things songs like "You Can Fly" or "Never Smile at a Crocodile" didn't.
Disney Classics and Broadway Musicals Both Present Heightened Realities
As the musicality of these more modern Disney Animation films were inspired by Broadway, bringing them onto the stage seemed like a natural fit. Apart from the longer format of stage theatre allowing the stories to be told with greater depth and more live spectacle, animation and musical theatre also share a common mode of expression in telling stories and depicting characters. Animation is all about pushing extremes, expressions, and exaggerating emotions so that a collection of static drawings can come across as believable performances. Much in the same way, musical theatre employs widely expressive performative styles that allow the actors’ presence to be read from every seat in the audience and fill the stage. Unlike live-action film that has the benefit of capturing the most subtle and intimate performances of a live actor, both animation and stage necessitate more pronounced performances in order to be read clearly past their medium’s restrictions, turning them into strengths. The emotions and performances are encouraged to be larger than life in both animation and the stage because each medium serves as a heightened expression of reality.
The animated screen and the theatre stage also engage audiences to suspend their disbelief and accept whatever craftsmanship they're seeing – be that hand-drawn image or a constructed set. Both stylize and emulate a sense of reality through means that are transparently crafted and impart onto the audience an invitation to believe in the theatricality and artistry of the medium along with the story. Jon Favreau’s remake of The Lion King did not resonate with as many audiences as the original animated film or the stage version because of how unambiguously literal a translation it was to the screen, rendering the animals and landscapes in hyperrealism. The Lion King garnered its greatest successes by depicting the natural world not with realism, but with believability and heightened artistic expression through clever animation and meticulously designed puppets and costumes.
Over the past few decades, Disney has borrowed a lot of the methods of musical theatre for their animated features, which in turn, allows them to be fully realized as musicals on the stage. This symbiotic relationship has given these stories the chance to bridge mediums and strengthen the commonalities between animation and theatre.