“Spellbound,” now on Netflix, is an animated fairytale about a princess from a far away land (voiced by Rachel Zegler) whose parents (Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman) are mysterious turned into monsters. That premise starts young princess Ellian on a journey – to not only break the spell, but to also figure out what turned her parents into monsters in the first place.
And putting some spring in her step along the way are a collection of killer tunes from Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, the songwriting team behind Disney gems like “Tangled” and “Home on the Range” (Menken himself is a Disney Legend who worked on “Beauty and the Beast,” “Aladdin,” “Newsies” and “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” among others. He has won eight Academy Awards).
TheWrap spoke to Menken and Slater about the process of writing music for the movie, rolling with the punches (as the movie went through some dramatic changes) and the specific challenges that went along with “Spellbound.”
Where does this process start for you?
Alan Menken: Our first relationship to this project was getting a call from John Lasseter after he had left Disney, to work with him on a new animated musical at Skydance. And the call came from Chris Montan, who had been the head of music when I was doing all those animated films for Disney. It’s an amazing reunion of people I love working with, and Glenn and I had worked with them all on “Tangled.” That was door-openers, like, OK, let’s see what they got. And then sitting down and seeing the pitch.
Glenn Slater: We came in very early in the process, when it was basically, We’d like to do a movie on this theme, and we have kind of an outline for a plot that was very vague. That’s usually when we come in, because the songs for an animated musical, it’s not like they do a whole movie, and then you drop the songs in after, the songs really are part of the fabric of the whole movie. We did a process called song-spotting, where we look at the outline and we say, “Alright, here’s where we think the song should go. Here’s eight places where we think the big emotional moments are, or the big comic moments, or whatever it is that would prop up this particular film.”
We call them cinder blocks because they’re the foundations for the piece. And then as the script began to develop, we kept going to those meetings and saying, “All right, this cinder block is the same, but this one has moved, this needs to be a little bit different.” And once we were ready to start writing, we were intimately familiar with what the script was doing, and we were able to go off and execute what we had said – “Here’s what the emotion should be.”
AM: We also look at those cinder blocks and the dramatic arc. And say, “I don’t know about unless… That’s not okay. This one seems clear. Let’s start with that one.” And in doing so, first of all, you break the ice of writing a song. Second of all, you posit the voice of the character, the tone, the how the score will land in terms of the world of the story. It’s valuable. That’s the first song, or first couple songs really set up the DNA of the project. If everybody’s on board with that, now you have something solid you can at least start with.
And this movie went through some big changes.
AM: Oh, whole blocks of characters just went “bye.”
GS: But the nice thing about working with people like John Lasseter and Vicky Jenson, who are just consummate pros, is that they understand that this is like an exploratory process, where in executing the ideas, you’re going to discover new things that are going to change what you thought you had. They’re both very fluid and very, very adaptable. And we were able to discover what this piece was together in tandem, which was really nice.
Do you like exploring like that or do you prefer having a more solid blueprint going in?
AM: No. It’s harder work not to have more of a formulaic dramatic arc to lean on, but it’s also richer in many respects — if you can solve it right. There’s no preference there. The preference for me is who I’m going to be collaborating with and working with, and who I’m in the trenches with and do we understand writing a musical. But even within that context, you still will have people who are very narratively literal and you’ll have someone like me who’s going, “Just do me a favor – wrap the narrative however you need to wrap it so that this moment lands.” And they’ll go, “Oh no, could you write that song so that now this works?” And you can never be precious with your own work. I’ll write the song for that. We’ll try it. I’ll write the song for this. And it becomes a creative survival in the fittest.
What were some of the challenges on “Spellbound?”
AM: There’s no romance, there’s no villain. You have plot elements that we don’t know about, that you are going to find out about later, and you can’t front-load them. And yet, we need to hold people’s attention and hold their emotional thread. You have to construct proxies for those. That’s still a part of the story. It’s a very complicated endeavor but it just leads to something that’s so unique. And believe me, there are times in the process where I went, “What is this?” and then there’s process where times later we said, “Oh my god, this is really coming together.” We all know a lot about musicals, but there’s always somebody else’s opinion that you didn’t think of. You go, “Oh my god, I think that.” It’s the most collaborative form. And God bless the collaboration.
GS: You know, unlike most movies, which are based on a story format with a beginning, middle and an end and a familiar hero’s journey, this is about something else. This is about a psychological process. And a psychological process, not just for one person, but for children and parents together, sometimes in different ways. The plot doesn’t follow the normal pathway that a plot would follow, the emotional highs and lows are different highs and lows. And we kept saying to ourselves, “Well, this looks and feels like a fairytale, but it’s not a fairytale.” It does not have a happy ending necessarily and it doesn’t have a lot of those things that people expect.
We really had to rethink how the storytelling worked and how the songs worked within that context. A song in the middle of the film called “Remembering,” in which Ellian and her parents are trying to rediscover language a little bit — you know, it’s unlike any song that’s ever been in an animated film, because it’s not an “I want” song or a big production number or a big, soaring anthem. It’s a very small moment between three people just trying to find the right words. And because this movie is about what it’s about, we had the luxury of exploring a small moment like that in music, rather than trying to find like a hero moment. And throughout the process, we constantly found ourselves taking ordinary song tropes and inverting them, turning them inside out, trying different things, putting them in different places. Everything about this felt like we were trying something new.
“Spellbound” is now streaming on Netflix.
