so before anyone tells me i’m exaggerating the importance of howard ashman:
in 1988 disney was in dire straights, hadn’t had a notable box office success since 101 dalmatians in 1961. they’d bled out a significant number of their animators and staff, and by the time they’d begun production on oliver & co. they were fairly directionless and not sure how they’d survive the bankruptcy they were teetering on. they’d been trying for years and years to find a formula for success and hadn’t found it yet, with only a few exceptions here and there.
they also hadn’t done fairytale based musical since sleeping beauty in 1959.
howard ashman and alan menken were right off of the success of little shop of horrors, and when ashman was called in to do a song for oliver & co. he chanced upon the development of the little mermaid and suggested, among other things, that disney return to the musical formatting of their classic princess movies. this time, he suggested they adopt a broadway storytelling style, rather than the operettas their previous musicals emulated. (the primary difference here being that operettas have characters singing passive commentary about circumstances they’re in, whereas broadway calls for every song to be a scene in itself that pushes the story or character development forward.)
broadway turned out to be perfectly suited to animated films because 1) they provided vibrant, memorable numbers that propelled the plot quickly and 2) the best songs were marketable. disney’s financial and critical success in the 1990s– and the ubiquity of their movie’s soundtracks– would attest to this.
so menken and ashman entered the disney creative team and ashman produced and co-wrote the little mermaid, beauty and the beast, and began production on aladdin. ashman died of AIDs, halfway through the production of aladdin. but because he had insisted on bringing in and collaborating with broadway talents, soon stephen schwartz and tim rice entered the picture.
between the four of them, they wrote the music and lyrics for the little mermaid, beauty and the beast, aladdin, the lion king, pocahontas, hunchback, and hercules. it was these core movies and the broadway talents attached to them that defined the disney renaissance, and propelled disney back to the financial and creative glory it hadn’t held since the early 1960s.
disney musicals as we know them were 100% the product of howard ashman’s creative influence and his collaboration with menken. before the little mermaid, there was no single “disney style,” because before ashman they were scrambling for footing and direction. he (and menken) not only provided the skeleton on which all modern disney musicals have been built (princess and the frog, tangled, frozen, moana) but the financial success of the early disney renaissance cemented disney’s position as the media deity it is now.
so what does all this have to do with le fou being gay? howard ashman was a gay jewish man in the early 1990s, fighting AIDs while working in children’s movies with rigid censorship. whatever LGBT content he could incorporate into those films was not much more than metanarrative coding.
back then, disney movies could have been sunk by boycotts and outraged conservatives. nowadays? disney can do whatever the hell they want. disney still produces and promotes pirates of the caribbean as part of their brand’s lineup, which has ALL RANGE of violent and suggestive content, but because it’s heterosexual they know no parents will protest. and yet? in the remake of a movie which was the brainchild and final passion project of a gay man dying of AIDs, they choose a villainous buffoon as their “gay representation.”
MY POINT? howard ashman was the creative force responsible for disney’s return to glory in the 90s AND the one whose vision ensured its tremendous success and growth into the 2000s. the least they owe his legacy is to use the security their company has now–media superpower that it is– and provide the respectful representation he wasn’t allowed to when he was busy saving their asses.
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