Spellboundis a new animated film from Skydance Animation currently streaming on Netflix. Directed byShrekdirector Vicky Jenson, the movie tells the story of a young princes, Ellian, who must go to great lengths to try and reverse a mysterious curse that has turned her parents into monsters. The movie’s cast includes Rachel Zegler, Nathan Lane, Javier Bardem, Nicole Kidman, Jenifer Lewis, and John Lithgow.
Spellboundis a movie musical, and it enlisted two A-listers for help in creating itssoundtrack. Disney legends Alan Menken and Glenn Slater teamed up to provide score and lyrics, respectively, and worked closely with Jenson to ensure the movie hit all the required beats of a musical. Menken and Slater have collaborated on a number of projects together in the past, most notably the Disney animated filmTangledand the TV seriesGalavant.
Spellbound Parents Guide: Is The Netflix Movie Suitable For Kids?
Spellbound is Netflix’s latest animated movie from Skydance, and its universal story about childhood and resilience is perfect for the entire family.
Screen Rantspoke withSpellboundcomposer Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater about their work on the Skydance Animation project. The musicians discussed putting together songs like “What About Me?” (whichScreen Rant’sSpellboundreviewcalled the best song in the movie) and the process of discovering when and where to place musical moments. The duo also discussed the possibility of a live-action adaptation of Disney’sTangled.
Alan Menken & Glenn Slater On Telling The Story Of Spellbound Through Music
The Story Was Rewritten To “Earn” A Key Song Moment Late In The Movie
Screen Rant: When you start a project, how do you work with the writers and directors on finding what moments in the script are best suited for a song, and how much does that change throughout production?
Alan Menken: The second part is, it changes a lot. Everyone is coming from a different place, in this project, especially. You have writers who are not musical theater writers, so we have to kind of push our point of view in terms of structure. But they also want to have an agenda in terms of the narrative, and you just jump into the sandbox, react to what’s there, and say, “Okay, well, this works and this works,” so you have at least some starting points that you may play with.
Glenn Slater: Musicals are all about structure and building an edifice that will allow the audience to go with you when you go from dialogue into song, and that is like a wave that carries you up and up and up. to make that edifice feel solid, we put down what we call cinderblocks—big chunks of, “This is where an ‘I Want’ moment goes.’ ‘This is where we need a production number.’ ‘This is where we have an action sequence that we’re going to need to musicalize.’ ‘This is where we need to hear from a different character because enough of that voice—we need to hear a different voice.’” We’ll put down those markers right at the very beginning of the filmmaking process.
Alan Menken: The thing about a cinderblock is, “Don’t tell me what color it is. Don’t tell me what shape it is.” It’s just that we know we want that basic thing.
Glenn Slater: We talk that through with the writers and the director, and they take that on board as they’re shaping the narrative. But very often, you will find yourself coming up with a plot point or a new insight into a character that changes what that cinderblock is, and then you have to go back and look at your other cinderblocks and say, “to support that cinderblock, we need to move things.”
For example, fairly late in the process we were talking about Ellian as a character—“As a 15-year-old girl, how would she be reacting to what’s going on?” Alan and I kept saying that a 15-year-old girl would not still be the good girl this late in the story. The 15-year-old girl is going to be getting annoyed. She’s going to be getting moody, she’s going to be getting emotional, and she’s going to get angry, and we need to have that moment in the film.
We went off and wrote the song “What About Me?” to capture what a 15-year-old girl would sound like at that moment. When we brought it in, everybody said, “Oh my God, yes. Psychologically, that is the honest place that we need to go,” and we said, “Great. So, if we’re going to go there two-thirds of the way through the film, we need to re-look at all the cinderblocks, because the cinderblocks we have in place are not getting us there.”
Luckily, we’re working with Vicky Jenson, who is so experienced and has done so many of these, and John Lasseter, who, again, has done so many of these. [They] have the confidence to say, “We will,” not throw away, but “reorganize everything, rethink everything, [and] go back to the beginning. Let’s move those cinderblocks again and make the score support the film that we all want to see.”
Alan Menken: Maybe the most important attribute you have to have to be a songwriter for musicals is the ability to take your baby and go throw it away. Or [you can] use part of it, but [it’s] never being precious about the material, and always being ready to rewrite.
Glenn Slater: You’re never thinking, “Is this a hit single?” or “Is this going to win an award?” or “Am I writing it for this artist?” You’re always thinking in terms of the character and the story: “What’s the right song for this character to sing?” and “What’s the right song to tell this story the best way?’
Menken & Slater Discuss Two Of The Movie’s Key Songs
Inside “What About Me?” And “My Parents Are Monsters”
I was meaning to ask about “What About Me?” later on because as I was listening, I was like, “This is expressed both musically and lyrically, in my mind, as perfectly as it could be.” It’s so articulate and powerful. How hard was that to get right?
Glenn Slater: It was actually one of the hardest things for us as a collective. We started this film just before the pandemic hit, and, for the first year of writing, we were basically writing on Zoom. For any musical, the difference between one that works and what doesn’t work is that on the ones that work, everybody’s writing the same musical. On the ones that don’t work, everybody has their own idea of what they’re doing, and it never quite gels. For that year that we were in separate rooms, I think we all had a slightly different vision of who Ellian was and how she would act. It wasn’t until we were finally able to all get back together in person and express with the bursts of thought, interruptions, and jumping on top of each other that you can do in real life but are very hard to do over Zoom, that we all came up with a, “This is who Ellian is,” that we could all agree with.
[It was] that idea of a 15-year-old girl who is brave and strong and resourceful—that’s every animated heroine—but also one who is hiding how she really feels from her parents. One who is just barely holding on to that persona of being okay with everything, and who is allowed to be upset and petty sometimes, and exasperated, and who is allowed to go to those emotional places that a real girl would go to, but that you don’t often see animated characters go to. It took a long time for us to all settle on that.
Alan Menken: And generally, we like to work music first. I want him in the room to give me the feedback, but we know that she’s basically going to explode into that dark spiral, that darkness, so I created a piece of music that was almost operatic in its intensity. It is an emotional rant. When that felt right—which is how we work—Glenn will go and work with that and come back, he’ll have adjustments, and then we’ll shape it. And that was one of those songs that nobody was convinced about until we said, “Here. Listen to this song,” and they went, “Ah. Boom.”
Glenn Slater: It comes out of lots of conversations. “Well, what would she say? She would say, ‘What about me? What about my feelings?’” Alan heard that phrase, “What about me?” and that music perfectly captures that.
Alan Menken: And that became the North Star. Once we had that song, we went, “That’s our guiding light. We need to earn that.”
Talking about cinderblocks, something that I really loved was the song “My Parents Are Monsters” and the way that is reversed at the end, I thought that was such a good payoff. Was that always the plan or was that something that you realized was possible later on?
Alan Menken: I was the nudge who said—I don’t want to take credit—“I think we have to bookend the movie with a reprise of that song.” But that was late in the game because initially, we had an opening number before “My Parents Are Monsters” called “Once Upon Another Lifetime”. It was a gentle telling of the backstory, which is pretty much…
Glenn Slater: The standard way to open an animated film–
Alan Menken: Torture. I don’t like sitting through what I know is backstory. But then [Glenn] had the incredibly hard task of essentially inserting the information of the backstory into her saying, “Everything’s fine.” So, once that was the opening number, I said, “We really have to end up with that.”
Glenn Slater: And there’s so much to set up the story. When Vicky said, “Why don’t we just start in media res, [where] it’s already happened and we’re just catching up with our heroine a year into this crisis that she’s dealing with?” the title of the song changed, the length of the song changed… so many things had to change to catch up with that idea. What we had to convey very quickly was the central premise, because it was right there—her parents are monsters—but what it also let us do is set up that physically, her parents are monsters, but also allegorically, her parents have turned into these monsters who are constantly fighting, bickering, self-absorbed, narcissistic, and ignoring her very presence. We didn’t plan [it like], “It would be that title and then we’d reverse it at the end.” That title came about because of the storytelling exigencies, and once we had that title, it was, “Look, we can flip it and capture the dynamic at the end just by flipping the words around.”
“There’s A Chance” For A Live-Action Tangled Remake
“It’s One Of The Wannabes”, Says Menken
Iam a huge fan ofTangled.I know Disney’s doing a bunch of live-action remakes coming up. Do you think there is a chance for a live-action version of that and do you think there’s anywhere in the story that could benefit from a new song?
Alan Menken: There’s a chance, but I don’t know how far along that is or is not. That’s probably in the corporate realm as much as anything else. But yes, there is. It’s one of the wannabes. [And] yes, there are many chances for new songs. We never got the song for being in the town. It just had underscore. In fact, at the moment, we’re in the midst of working on a stage adaptation as well.
Glenn Slater: And that’s plenty of new songs.
Alan Menken: And remember, we did that whole TV series as well, so God knows, there’s plenty of room for new songs.
About Spellbound
Spellbound tells the story of Ellian, the young daughter of the rulers of Lumbria, who embarks on a quest to save her family after a spell transforms her parents into monsters. The movie is directed by Shrek director Vicky Jenson and features a score by Alan Menken and lyrics by Glenn Slater. The movie’s cast includes Rachel Zegler, John Lithgow, Jenifer Lewis, Nathan Lane, Tituss Burgess, Javier Bardem, and Nicole Kidman.
Spellbound
Cast
Spellbound, directed by Vicky Jenson, follows Princess Ellian on her adventurous quest to rescue her family and kingdom. As a mysterious spell transforms her parents into monsters, Ellian must navigate this perilous journey to restore the King and Queen of Lumbria.
