Howard Review: Film offers a powerful look at Disney legendary music driven by AIDS

The new Disney Plus Howard documentary honors the impressive career of legendary lyricist Howard Ashman, who wrote some of the most beloved Disney Animation songs ever. It also tells the harrowing story of the discovery and spread of AIDS, which tragically took Ashman’s life in 1991 when he was just 40 years old.

However, the disease did not stop Ashman from writing iconic Disney sounds, even as his health declined. He even used his own personal experience with physical losses to describe the fate of a character.

“You may not know his name, but you certainly know the music of Howard Ashman,” the film’s producer, Don Hahn, said in a release. “He is one of the greatest storytellers of the 20th century who helped to revive the American musical and recreate Disney Animation. He showed us a songbook that still lives on in our lives today, but his personal story is so far to never fully told. “

Howard has evocative footage of Ashman working on so many instantly recognizable songs. The film includes the audition of Jodi Benson as the voice of Ariel in The Little Mermaid; Ashman gives directions to Paige O’Hara, who voices Belle in Beauty and the Beast; and the recording of Be Our Guest with Jerry Orbach and Angela Lansbury. His story also unfolds through interviews with Ashman’s husband Bill Lauch, family, friends, classmates, actors and Disney music partner Alan Menken.

Ashman began performing in his backyard with the children of the neighborhood, and grew up writing poems, songs, stories and plays before studying theater in high school, where he wrote a musical version of The Snow Queen for his dissertation. His first job for Disney was editing the scrapbook of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse while he was a struggling playwright in New York City.

But he soon started his own theater and eventually got to work with the famous Disney composer Alan Menken. Ashman and Menken put together in writing stage musicals God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in 1979, and then Little Shop of Horrors in 1982, the latter of which led to a film. The two moved together to Disney and began working on The Little Mermaid, with Menken writing the music and Ashman penning lyrics. “There’s just something about the Disney fairy tale movies that goes all the way back to Snow White and then to Pinocchio,” Ashman says in interview music.

He wrote Part of Your World – the song where Ariel enjoys becoming human – within minutes of hearing the plotline for The Little Mermaid. “With the help of The Little Mermaid, he literally taught us how to tell a story with songs,” Hahn said.

It is thanks to Ashman that the narrative song became a cornerstone of Disney Animation. He especially likes writing for the villains. “They’re just more fun, I do not know why … and Ursula is a very nice villain,” he said as he wrote Poor Unfortunate Souls.

“We’ve found ourselves in one area in movies where musicals might work, and that’s past animation at Disney,” he said at an event just days after he was diagnosed with HIV / AIDS. His diagnosis followed several of his friends and an ex-boyfriend who died of the disease years earlier.

The documentary follows his decline in health as he bravely plows ahead, working on the lyrics for Aladdin’s Friend Like Me and Prince Ali. His colleagues even picked up the storyboards for Beauty and the Beast and took on the job of upstating New York so that the sick Ashman could continue to work with them.

While writing the lyrics for Jafar’s short song Humiliate the Boy, Ashman channeled his experience with the loss of his sight, his voice and the sensation in his fingers as his AIDS progressed. Although the song was cut from the finished film, the lyrics described Jafar humiliating Aladdin by stripping him of everything. By the time he worked on Prince Ali, he was writing from his hospital bed.

Ashman won Oscars, Golden Globes and Grammys for the songs Under the Sea and Beauty and the Beast, as well as a Grammy for the Aladdin album. They were issued posthumously. Unfortunately, Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast were not released until after his death.

After Ashman’s untimely death, his Disney music partner Menken went on to score for Tangled, Hercules, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Enchanted.

Howard launches at Disney Plus on Friday, August 7th.