When it comes to princess songs, there’s no bigger name in the game than Alan Menken. That’s why Skydance Animation has tapped the legendary eight-time Academy Award-winning actor to write the music and score the new animated musical “Spellbound.”
In the film, now streaming on Netflix, Rachel Ziegler plays Princess Eliane, a teenager seeking to break the spell that turned her royal parents (Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem) into monsters. John Lithgow, Jennifer Lewis, Tituss Burgess, and Nathan Lane also lend their voices to the bizarre fairy tale saga.
“The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin” and “Beauty and the Beast” composer Menken is joined by frequent collaborator Glenn Slater (“Tangled”), who served as lyricist for the project. “Glenn Slater really captures the feeling of Alan’s music in a beautiful way,” Ziegler says in an exclusive new feature about the making of the film’s music. “Alan and Glenn together as a team are a match made in heaven.”
Ziegler says she first entered the project as a singer to sing on the demo recordings, but was eventually brought in to voice Elian for real — which she did over the course of nearly five years. “I worked on it steadily throughout Shazam and Snow White, going to different studios all over the world,” Ziegler told Variety earlier this year during her cover story interview, talking about the joy of recording a voiceover from anywhere in the world. “. . “Javier was in Jordan filming Dune, so he would literally walk off the set, throw sand everywhere, and get into the cabin!”
“This girl is unbelievable. “I mean she has an amazing voice,” Kidman says of Ziegler in the new film. “The music is beautiful, and it’s also classic.”
For Ziegler, singing Menken and Slater’s music is her real-life fairy tale. “I’m so grateful,” she says. “Alan wrote the soundtrack to my childhood, and now it’s the soundtrack to my first animated film.”
Below, Menken and Slater explain their process for crafting the music for “Spellbound” in an interview with Variety.
Elian clues the audience into her unconventional attitude with a peppy opening number, “My Parents Are Monsters.” How did you arrive at the fourth-wall-breaking tone for this character’s introduction?
Glenn Slater: One of the things we were very aware of is that this is based on real family dynamics that you would experience in the real world, we wanted to make sure that we really respected the way people would behave in the real world. We imagined Eliane as a 15-year-old girl, and a 15-year-old girl today would be talking on her phone, breaking the fourth wall. We really wanted to capture that kind of vernacular, the way you talk to your friends on social media, the way you show people through social media what your world is like. That was very present in our minds in creating the character and in that opening moment. This is a teenage girl, you know, not a fairytale princess.
Naturally, that bubbly exuberance fades into longing on her next big song, “The Way It Used to Be.” How did you go about crafting that song, knowing that it would be the emotional core of the film?
Alan Menken: You can see that in the actual animation, when you see this broken piano, and the water drops are hitting the notes. Something that was beautiful has been broken, and this kind of works its way to the forefront of the song. The song is a longing for something that was broken, and a desire to put it back together.
Slater: It’s the first song we wrote for this piece. It was written before we had finished the plot of the story, and we would sit around a table and discuss the character and what they wanted, and how this was different from regular fictional characters. Words like “longing and sad” and “hopeful and great” came together. Alan sat down at the piano and said, “Oh, like this?” It was one of those moments you’ll never forget.
Mencken: It usually takes more motivation!
Slater: Alan is like the most advanced musical AI in the world. She feeds him: she’s happy, but she’s brave, and she hasn’t seen her parents in a long time, and it’s like that feeling when you open a present, but it’s not what she wanted. And he says: “Oh, like this!”
Mencken: I’m actually an animated voice representation of Alan Menken.
Skydance Animation/Netflix
Why was Rachel Ziegler the right choice to voice Princess Elian?
Slater: I think she was pretty much (director) Vicky Jenson’s first choice from the beginning, and we were all so excited when she signed on, because she’s kind of amazing. She’s from the generation that grew up with Disney movies. She completely understood what a Disney heroine looked and sounded like, but she’s also a great actress, so she was able to take that template and give it her own twist, delve into the details of this character and make her feel like a real person. I just walked into the studio and nailed it.
Another standout number is John Lithgow’s rendition of “I Can Get Used to This.” It sounds like you both enjoyed working on it, with lyrics like “It’s beyond amazing / How did I live my whole life without a caterpillar?”
Mencken: Or “I can get used to this / Somehow I can’t help but shake my big fat belly with this!”
Slater: That was the last song we wrote. It was a moment where we had this somewhat serious second act, and a lot of twists and turns that were very emotionally heavy. And we kept saying, “It’s like we need a production number.” And we realized that John Lithgow was on board. Let’s find out something! He has such a great voice and great comedic timing that we just worked on his natural voice and came up with that.
Mencken: And we had to use Flinks as a conduit for a moment that would basically sum up this very cultured guy who’s now eating a caterpillar and going, “Oh!”
Skydance Animation/Netflix
In this regard, are there specific lyrics from these songs that you are particularly proud of?
Mencken: “Less than a grub.”
Slater: I think this happens on my tombstone. “Here lies Glenn Slater: without a caterpillar.”
Mencken: As you know, the most effective and influential ones are the ones you don’t notice. The moments that capture your heart are the most important.
Slater: We always say that if we do our job right, you’re not thinking about Alan’s music or my lyrics, you’re just thinking about singing that character. What is the way they talk and the way they feel? Songs where you remember the lines are when the characters are particularly cultured, intelligent, or witty, and so the words are witty of their own. But when you have characters like the mother and father in this film who can barely speak, the words are not necessarily clever, but hopefully they capture that feeling of struggling to express themselves and struggling to find the right words and to make an emotional connection. It won’t feel like Sondheim, but hopefully it will feel like the right thing from those characters in that moment.
Animation Skydance/Netflix
You’ve collaborated on many projects together, from “Tangled” to “Galavant.” What keeps you coming back and wanting to work with each other again and again?
Mencken: It’s a great process between us. We’re complete opposites in the room. I tend to use big emotional gestalts and motivation in the story of the song. Glenn looks at dramatic architecture, and how do you achieve that? We’ve been in the trenches together. I can’t remember a time when we weren’t working on something together. It really reminds me of my process with (late collaborator Howard Ashman) a lot. It gets smoother and smoother with every collaboration. But we both know that any time we approach a new project, we’re going to have to take everything apart and reinvent the wheel in order to find that unique sound for this project. With the amount of songs we put into this one, we could have a whole other musical with those songs!
Slater: This is an essential part of any project and any collaboration: having faith in your collaborator that you can pull things off, and knowing that you and your collaborator will come up with something better every time, is something you don’t really get with everyone. Knowing that I’m going to have a classic Alan Menken score, no matter what the idea is, no matter how many permutations it goes through, we’re going to end up with one of those tunes you can’t get out of your head.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Selome Hailu contributed to this story.