Mufasa's 'Bye Bye' shows how Disney villain songs went wrong

I had huge hopes for Mufasa and it was extremely mediocre. Below Wish and Moana 2 IMO. The bones of the plot were good, but the directing was bad. Too much crammed into too little runtime.

The music in recent Disney movies hasn’t been great, with the exception of Encanto. I just watched Mulan again and holy crap what a good movie. (Although it’s not Disney, I also watched Prince of Egypt again and that’s better than any movie Disney has made in a decade.)

A not insignificant part of human history is retelling the same stories. Stories like the Odyssey and the Iliad were oral traditions refined, refined, and refined, until taken down by a master. Every time Dracula and derivatives get made, something new gets added, changed, improved.

The problem with Disney's remakes is that they are trying to be the original story, reshot, but LESS Disney. The Little Mermaid is a prime example of something that should have been brighter, more colorful, more energetic, more beautiful, and IMPROVED, but instead they chose a least common denominator impersonation.

The concept of going back and retelling a prequel can work. It worked for Rogue One (despite production challenges), it worked for Wicked. What isn't working for the Disney Live Action movies is letting the machine output reduced facsimiles, instead of giving the projects to experimental storytellers, or master storytellers to do their thing.

Id love to see a remake of Bambi that amplified the music/animation connection, using modern technology to sync the movement of elements in the frame to parts of the musical composition, much like a visualizer. Breathing, fluttering, raindrops falling on the beats, quivering with the strings. Imagine a modern Little April Showers by Atticus Ross that looks like Spiderm-Man into the Spiderverse or Puss in Boots 3 or Wild Robot or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. Bambi should be a music video like Fantasia. Instead Disney will try and tell a story about a Deer, and forget the rest of what made Bambi so revolutionary.

And yet, Disney still does make things like Soul, which really was innovative in its animation style by how restrained it was. It's simple complexity of its dream world was its strength. Animation can be done well without the hyper speed over indulgences I cited above as good examples.

Its entertainment, needing it is not the point at all, for the company it is mostly about trying to keep the money machine going. The Lion King net income was 580 MILLION. Maybe you don't need it, but Disney sure as heck enjoyed that, and so did many others that saw it.

only live action remake disney i liked. i havent seen one since part of Mulan so maybe theres another gem in there somewhere

Do you mean this song?

> Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen

That's the crux of 'Hellfire', the villain song from Hunchback of Notre Dame. A core part of that is the villain, Frollo, is responsible for persecuting Roma/'gypsies' in Paris, and the fact that he finds one of them, Esmerelda, attractive messes him up even further, given the combination of his bigotry and his strict Puritan beliefs (at the end he decides that he'll propose to her, and if she rejects him, he'll have her executed).

To be fair as a comparison, the Hunchback of Notre Dame is probably one of the heaviest Disney films, especially in terms of how relatively grounded it is. Most Disney villains are a little bit more fantastical, even if as evil in the abstract.

>“Hellfire,” perhaps the single greatest Disney villain song, is the darkest of them all, as Judge Frollo reveals the unquenchable lust for Esmeralda that’s driven him to unimaginable evil, and contrasts it with his strict, austere religious beliefs.

I assume this is what was being referenced

This is probably referring to a somewhat controversial song from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, "Hellfire," which is sung by a villain and is basically all about this.

Encanto's villain is the concept of generational trauma and manifested by grandma. I believe she isn't evil, just traumatized and passing it on to the next generation unwittingly. Others believe her to be evil because real life people don't stop being who they are after a song number.

I think it's a really innovative villain because generational trauma is real and lots of people have to deal with it. It some times takes more than one generation to leave a vicious cycle.

Kiros is a villain. He just wants to kill everyone. There’s throwaway two sentences about how the white lions are mad because they’re born different or whatever but it’s quickly swept aside.

Also, I wonder if the reference doesn't land because Mikkelson doesn't have the musical skill for it? He sounds to me like he's struggling to hit a few of the notes and some of the more complicated timing marks. Which isn't a slight to Mikkelson so much as I think Miranda has a bad habit of writing songs far too complex for the actors that eventually get asked to sing them and we're in the Disney era where they aren't casting separate singers from voice actors or casting singers first over Name actors. (That was one of the tricks to the "Disney Renaissance" era that Disney seems to have forgotten.)

The most obvious/egregious case being in Moana where in the movie The Rock has fun with but kind of struggles against "You're Welcome" and Miranda himself unfairly sings it over the End Credits just so you know how it sounds like as it was intended to be sung without the compromise of passing it off to a fun Name actor. (Less egregiously/obviously, it is also why "Shiny" is kind of unfair as the villain song in the same movie, because Jemaine Clement as we know from Flight of the Conchords has the raw talent to pull it off and does pull it off, even with Miranda trying to throw him curve balls.)

At least Miranda wrote "Shiny" which is the best of the recent Disney Villain songs..

Some of the reviewers made the great point that Moana 2 falls flat compared to the first one partly because Lin-Manuel Miranda wasn't on the songwriting team. (Your Welcome was excellent too)

I haven't seen this Lion King movie but that's a rare failure for him if "Bye Bye" isn't very good.

Or, there is just a lack of evil in it.