Soaring into Song: Youth and Yearning in Animated Musicals of the Disney Renaissance

Abstract

I saw The Little Mermaid (1989) when I was fourteen. With its spectacular animation and exhilarating musical numbers, it was like nothing I’d ever seen before. Watching Ariel sing about her longing for a better place to a soaring melody while floating in the water with her hair expressively swirling around her face reached deep into my own feelings of difference in the midst of an inexpressibly queer adolescence. The Little Mermaid ushered in the Disney Renaissance (ca. 1989–99), a period of revival in Disney animated features whose popularity was driven largely by musical theater and stories of youth. These films followed an effective formula: adolescent protagonists, feeling trapped and misunderstood, sing of their desire to escape in stirring musical numbers of the type described as soaring, usually with music by Alan Menken. Musicals of the Disney Renaissance affirm and validate young people’s agency, desires, and rights to a dream using musical theater conventions that give them voice and animation that lets them take flight. Disney adolescents feel their emotions so strongly that, when they sing about them, they begin to float, fly, and defy gravity. From Ariel’s underwater choreography to Quasimodo’s acrobatics among the spires of Notre Dame, animated musical numbers vivify the singers’ growing personal power, imagining extraordinary aspirational corporealities (figure 1).