Songwriters Alan Menken and Glenn Slater explain why ‘Spellbound’ is ‘a much bigger story than your typical fairytale’

When composer Alan Menken first joined the animated film “Spellbound,” the prospect of writing the score and songs felt “exciting and terrifying at the same time” because the story “defied a formulaic approach.” It is a sentiment that his collaborator and lyricist Glenn Slater echoes, because “while this has the form of a fairytale story, it’s actually a much bigger story than your typical fairytale.” The new Netflix movie centers on Princess Ellian, whose parents have been inexplicably transformed into gigantic monsters. The lyricist continues, “It’s an allegory for a family dynamic that many, many families go through.” Watch our complete video interview above.

Menken and Slater are frequent collaborators, having preciously worked on films “Tangled” and “Home on the Range,” TV series “Galavant,” and Broadway musicals “The Little Mermaid” and “Sister Act” together. The lyricist says that their process “always starts with conversation,” adding, “We sit at Alan’s piano and we just talk and talk about the characters.” For Menken, kicking off the process begins by contemplating “what is the musical world of this story” and “where’s the unique musical world of this story.”

For “Spellbound,” those questions were not necessarily easy to answer. As Slater explains, “This is set in a fantasy world that doesn’t really have a correlation to a real-life place,” and therefore the songwriters borrowed from “lots of different cultures,” with influences from Spain, Brazil, and Bollywood. “That all goes into the cauldron when we sit down,” he adds. From there, Menken “will nail the melody immediately” because “he’s the master at taking an emotion and making it concrete in music,” boasts the wordsmith.

WATCH Netflix is trying to capture that Disney magic in ‘Spellbound’ trailer

The song “The Way It Was Before” demonstrates how Menken and Slater translate big emotions into sweeping songs. Golden Globe winner Rachel Zegler, who stars at Ellian, performs this number, which is the emotional heart of the film, in which the princess reminisces about and longs for the life she had when her parents were human and they were truly a family. Slater explains that this number is an example of how he and Menken take “fairytale tropes” and turn them “inside out,” sharing, “It feels like and sounds like your typical ‘I Want’ song, but what she wants is something she will never be able to get.” The composer notes that the song comes from a “broken place,” which is visualized in the film as a “drip of water hitting a broken piano.”

“Spellbound” has plenty of humor, too, as captured in the show-stopping number “I Can Get Used to This,” performed by John Lithgow, and the early duet “Step By Step,” which features Lithgow and Jenifer Lewis. Slater says that the latter number “looks like and feels like a villain song, except these aren’t villains.” He continues, “Alan wrote this great, snake-y flamingo melody to it that gave me so many opportunities for interesting rhythms and clever rhymes.”

Although “Spellbound” is an animated film, the songwriters do not think of this method of storytelling solely as “a children’s genre.” Rather, they approach them first and foremost as musicals, which Menken notes have become “enormously powerful.” Reflecting on how this medium has evolved over the past few decades, the EGOT champion looks back on his and Howard Ashman‘s “Little Shop of Horrors,” an Off-Broadway show with adult themes that became “the Rosetta Stone for ‘Little Mermaid’ and what followed.” He adds, “We baked in the sophistication of these Off-Broadway musicals of the early 80s into what became Disney,” and which extends to the present with “Spellbound.”