Howard Ashman Documentary

Nice that they're doing it, but lately I've found the YouTube fan documentaries to be far more interesting and getting better and better at covering parts they'd rather not.

He was a lovely talented man I was happy to calla friend.

Anybody seen it yet? Streaming from yesterday....

I'm not really interested in Disney documentaries. Documentaries are supposed to be honest and revealing, and something tells me Disney won't be great at being honest or revealing when it comes to the life of a gay man who died of AIDS.

The trailer showed a bunch of protesters with AIDS signs

Hell yes I’m gonna watch this later. Love Howard Ashman. His songs will be part of pop culture forever.

Watched it yesterday. Extremely sad but very informative.

What do you want them to do, R4, show in excruciating detail exactly how he got it?

R8 No, but I don't want them to pussyfoot around the gay or the AIDS angle. Disney doesn't exactly do gay representation well.

Thankfully they don't pussyfoot around anything

[quote] Disney doesn't exactly do gay representation well.

And the few times they even try, it feels like get-off-my-back-ism and even is that too much for the str8 trash that constitutes their fan base.

I watched it and thought they did a great job not only handling his HIV but also his first relationship. It was a very well made documentary.

Just watched it. It’s interesting but seems so incomplete because his career was incomplete, cut short by HIV.

Most of this was covered in WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY.

This is Disney repeating itself for more money. Surprise, surprise.

Disney did not make the documentary. They simply purchased it to broadcast. It ise a lovely film. And endlessly gay gay gay.

I might get Disney + just for this. I love Howard Ashman.

[quote]Disney did not make the documentary. They simply purchased it to broadcast. It ise a lovely film. And endlessly gay gay gay.

His work at Disney really only took up about a third of the movie.

This is a great documentary. Strangely enough, the people who haven’t seen it just *hated* it. Don’t take cues from the bitter and uninformed.

I saw it at a film fest last year and my only real memory is SOBBING UNCONTROLLABLY - can't wait to re-watch!

Just watched it and bawled. It was lovely. 90% of it has been covered before, even touched on in DVD extras for the various movies he worked on, but it was nice for him to have something of his own to put all the pieces together. A really magnificent talent and a tragic loss

was he a pig bottom?

No, had two boyfriends, the first gave him HIV.

R22, that's how it's presented but that doesn't mean he only ever had two sex partners

I thought it was strange that you never saw the faces of the people being interviewed. Also, no Ellen Greene interview, just a short clip of her singing. I needed more Greene. But it is okay, nothing new and I also cried a lot at the end.

That's Don Hahn's style R24

It was the same for his other Disney documentary 'Waking Sleeping Beauty'.

R24 Agree, found it very hard to figure out who was narrating with no establishing shot.

I watched it. Was he ever happy?

Ashman was the one who said that the crab in The Little Mermaid should be Jamaican, to the doubts of many in production.

Ashman did a demo of "Under the Sea" before it was cast with a voice actor. Here he is as Sebastian, the Jamaican crab.

What’s Waking Sleeping Beauty about?

R29 It's a documentary that explored how Walt Disney Animation Studios broke out of their mid-1980s box-office slump.

Don Hahn explains why he wanted to do the Ashman documentary:

[quote] “(Ashman's) was an untold story. People had talked about writing a book about Howard, but there is no book. There is no biography. His sister runs a blog and a fan site, and that’s it. I want to do something that was more expressive. I didn’t think you could talk about Howard in a book. He is a musician, so you have to hear his songs. We have 25 songs in this movie, and I feel like that was the right approach.”

Why he didn't film people commenting on Ashman's life, but instead only used their audio:

[quote] “One of the reasons I do the movie with audio interviews is because when you show up with a camera and lighting and everything, people shut down a little bit and get more mannered with the responses, but, if you set up a microphone, within five minutes people forget they are being recorded. And I really tried to get Howard to tell his own story, so that meant a lot of research and trying to find as many radio interviews with him telling his own story of explaining how he approaches his work. I know [the acclaimed US documentary maker] Ken Burns a little bit, and he talks about the joy of bringing his subjects to life. I wanted it to be in a room watching Howard work for 90 minutes.”

Is Beauty and the Beast an allegory for his AIDS?

[quote] (Howard Ashman's sister) Sarah expresses skepticism about the much-parroted idea that Beauty and the Beast is an allegory for Aids. Hahn is a little more open to the theory.

[quote] “I think there is some validity to it,” he says. “When we were making the movie we never talked about his disease. He was clearly sick. He lost his voice and his eyesight by the time we were done working with him. And he never saw the completed movie. Howard never did want to do political theatre. I don’t believe he consciously put himself into those songs. But we are all the product of our times.

[quote] “I’m sure there was some subtext in Howard’s writing. Beauty and the Beast is about a character who is horribly cursed and he was trying to break that spell.”

Ashman never saw the completed movie:

[quote] After the first screening for Beauty and the Beast, in March 1991, the animators visited Ashman in hospital. He weighed 80 pounds, and had lost his sight and the ability to speak. He died on March 10th, 1992, aged 40.

Howard Ashman saved Disney. Why aren't they saying that?

This was a DVD extra from "Waking Sleeping Beauty" in which they talk about the importance of Ashman to Disney.

Watching waking Sleeping Beauty. Do not like him.

^ OK Finished Waking Sleeping Beauty. Really liked it lots. Well made, well constructed and very human.

I wish I was able to remove my comment above now. Is worth seeking out, and it should have gotten more traction. Really covers an amazing part of Cinema history well.

No Ellen Greene is curious, she did the encores show Josh Gyllenhaal as a tribute to Howard who she was close to.

Ashman is the reason Disney became known for animation again. Those days were over for a long time until the Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast changed things.

The films from that time,like Oliver and Co, Basil and the Great Mouse Mystery,whilst not remembered fondly did make money.

Howard actually co-wrote one of the Oliver & Co songs.

R38, they were by no means huge hits though. That all changed with The Little Mermaid. It was completely unexpected.

Ashman wrote the screenplay for the 1986 film "Little Shop of Horrors," which is based on his musical. He also wrote the song lyrics.

Found this in wiki:

Remake

[quote] In January 2020, Full Circle Cinema reported that a remake of the film is in the works, with Taron Egerton in talks to play Seymour, Scarlett Johansson as Audrey and Billy Porter voicing Audrey II. The Hollywood Reporter affirmed in February 2020 that the film was being developed by Warner Bros. Pictures with Greg Berlanti directing, Porter confirmed, and Egerton and Johansson in negotiations. Additionally, Chris Evans was also in talks to play Dr. Scrivello.

Jonathan Groff should be Seymour. Nobody wants to see Taron Egerton.

He did it before R42

But yeah, he'd be great for the movie

It’s actually surprising to hear how much influence he yielded on the direction and tone of the films he worked on. I had no idea Aladdin was his initial pitch. One of the reasons those 90s Disney movies came together as well as they did is that they seemed to follow the creative voices where it led them — sometimes the ideas were dictated by the songwriters, sometimes the scriptwriters, the directors, an animator, etc.

It was really a “takes a village” type of thing, it seems

[quote] The films from that time,like Oliver and Co, Basil and the Great Mouse Mystery,whilst not remembered fondly did make money.

That's more than you can say for me. I had no songs at all.

This is a clip from "Waking Sleeping Beauty" that deals with the death of Howard Ashman, which happened before the release of "Beauty and the Beast."

R38 Oliver and Company and The Great Mouse Detective are still fondly remembered and did do well in VHS sales. Ashman wrote some awesome songs for them and the directing team Musker and Clements did their thing. The Great Mouse Detective was more for adults, particularly genre fans who loved Sherlock Holmes and Vincent Price. Oliver and Company used a contemporary setting and being a product of the 1980s at that; it so it felt weird compared to the other films of Disney canon.

Oliver & Company wasn't released on home video for almost 10 years,

I remember being bored by The Great Mouse Detective as a small kid. People who saw it when they were a bit older (~10-12) seem to have fond memories of it, though.

The Black Cauldron was released a few years before I was born, and it's the only Disney animated film I never heard of at all as a child. Never saw a trailer for it on any VHS tapes, never saw any merchandise for it, never saw it on TV.

Disney delayed the home release of Oliver & Company because they re-released it in theaters in 1996 and then did the VHS release the same year. It's some weird strategy they were trying out to gain more profits with the whole Disney Vault thing, maybe to recover profit lost, anything pre-Little Mermaid got this treatment. They did the same with The Great Mouse Detective, re-released in theaters in 1992 and then released on VHS the same year. The Black Cauldron didn't get released on VHS until 1998. I guess for a period of time they weren't widely remembered but people who grew up in the 90s and 2000s do remember them from having the VHS tapes and watching broadcasts on Wonderful World of Disney or on Disney Channel.

[quote] The Black Cauldron was released a few years before I was born, and it's the only Disney animated film I never heard of at all as a child. Never saw a trailer for it on any VHS tapes, never saw any merchandise for it, never saw it on TV.

Everything wrong with that movie was made worse when Jeffrey Katzenberg became head of the film division and made cuts to get it from PG-13 to PG. their hopes that it would turn these studios depleted fortunes around were dashed when [italic]The Care Bears Movie[/italic], a 90-minute toy commercial animated for pennies on the dollar in Canada, made more money. They were actually thinking of closing animation down after that. There were also still purists who objected to the fact that the studio was now making cartoons for television. It was Roy E. Disney, Walt’s nephew, who convinced the new company heads to forgive this one expensive miss and give them another chance. They moved the animators to Glendale from the main studio in Burbank. That may have seen disrespectful at the time, but the results speak for themselves.

The movies that came from that recovery period were great and deserved their accolades, but it was too good to last and Disney learned every wrong lesson from it. When Pixar hit it big, they thought it was because the films were made on computers and so they use that as an excuse to start phasing out the old style of animation. That’s why I think the term “Disney renaissance“ is 50% marketing hype. If it were a real Renaissance, it would have more than four hits with a bunch of also-rans after it, and they would not have given up on it altogether the way they did. Compared to some of the crap they turned out in the later years of Michael Eisner, [italic]The Black Cauldron[/italic]’s flaws seem minor in comparison.

R52 Didn't Katzenberg become CEO of the newly founded DreamWorks Animation? I remember when Antz came out and people called it A Bug's Life ripoff and then also Shrek which was a supposedly a giant F you to Disney Animation and their formulaic storytelling. Prince of Egypt, Road to El Dorado and Spirit were all great hand-drawn films. DreamWorks got stale really fast and everything they have done is just a rip off of Shrek except How To Train Your Dragon.

Honestly, I think Disney's early 2000s films were underrated. Treasure Planet, Atlantis, Lilo & Stitch and Emporer's New Groove were quite good, not perfect but entertaining and magical nevertheless. But when they got to stuff like Brother Bear, Home on the Range and Chicken Little, yeah, it was all over. Meet The Robinsons and Bolt weren't that bad (imo) but the art style were generic Pixar lite and the style of humor was ripped off of DreamWorks and neither made a big impression. The Princess and Frog and Winnie the Pooh were the last attempts at hand-drawn and both didn't do well despite being good films. But honestly Disney didn't promote those well and they premiered them against big films like Harry Potter (WTF?). Tangled, Frozen and Big Hero 6 were big hits and from then on, they just stuck with CGI and never looked back.

[quote] I remember being bored by The Great Mouse Detective as a small kid. People who saw it when they were a bit older (~10-12) seem to have fond memories of it, though.

When I was a small child I preferred [italic]An American Tail[/italic], the collaboration of Steven Spielberg and Disney expat Don Bluth. There had been very few Jewish cartoon characters before then. I didn't see [italic]Mouse Detective[/italic] until I was an adult, but it was not half-bad and I don't know why I never watched it sooner.

[italic]Oliver and Company[/italic] had its moments — and the casting of Bette Midler as a female dog was certainly inspired — but it started a troubling trend of product placement in animated movies. After he left Disney, Jeffrey Katzenberg took this to the extreme with the godawful [italic]Shark Tale[/italic].

Don Bluth in general is great, I loved The Secret of NIMH even though it wasn't faithful to the original book. As a kid I never realized Fievel's family in An American Tail was supposed to be Jewish, then I rewatched it as an adult and it's so obvious. Land Before Time is great, just avoid all the sequels. Now the designs would be outdated because we know that dinosaurs have feathers. All Dogs Go to Heaven would have been more successful if it wasn't pitted against The Little Mermaid on it's opening weekend. After All Dogs Go to Heaven, the quality of Bluth's films declined hard, only Anastasia was his success afterwards. Rock-A-Doodle and Troll in Central Park are weird as hell.

I have a real love-hate relationship with Bluth. There's something about the way he animates humans that I find kind of off. Parts of Anastasia are great (minus the parts with Rasputin, that the Broadway adaptation wisely eliminates), but the facial models are not.

Now, you really want to see another studio eating Disney's lunch, The Prince of Egypt is vastly underrated.

[quote]Now, you really want to see another studio eating Disney's lunch, The Prince of Egypt is vastly underrated.

Dreamworks seems ashamed of the few non-CGI animated movies it made around that time, so you rarely hear about them anymore. Then again, it's hard to make religious figures like Moses "toyetic."

Road to El Dorado was pretty racy too for an animated film. I think it was supposed to be PG-13 originally and Miguel and Tulio were intended to be a gay couple. Even in the finished product, they have more chemistry together than Tulio and Chel, the female love interest.

They quickly squandered a lot of the goodwill they built up. [italic]Pocahontas[/italic] was preachy and is tainted by Mel Gibson's presence, [italic]The Hunchback of Notre Dame[/italic] should have been a PG-rated movie but they chickened out in that regard. [italic]Hercules[/italic] at least didn't try to take itself too seriously.

[italic]Mulan[/italic] and [italic]Lilo and Stitch[/italic] were the standouts of the immediate post-Renaissance era. But overall I prefer pre-Pixar Disney.

Don Bluth uses rotoscope for human animation. Rotoscoping always looks weird, creepy and awkward to me. I agree Anastasia had a lot of awkwardness to the human movements. So did Anne-Marie's animation in All Dogs Go To Heaven.

[quote]As a kid I never realized Fievel's family in An American Tail was supposed to be Jewish, then I rewatched it as an adult and it's so obvious.

The film opens with them celebrating Hanukkah and getting chased out of Tsarist Russia by a pogrom led by cats. It doesn't get more obvious than that. Bluth is a Mormon (except I think his late brother was also gay), so the Jewish element is largely Spielberg's influence. Fievel was his grandfather's name.

[quote]Don Bluth uses rotoscope for human animation. Rotoscoping always looks weird, creepy and awkward to me.

There's a fair amount of rotoscoping in the early Disney films as well. That may be why I dislike a lot of them.

With Basil the mouse, they should have stuck with the original title of [italic]Basil of Baker Street[/italic] as the original books were titled. Years ago, some disgruntled ex-animator had a blog where he posted a memo from the era with a list of retitled Disney films that were just as literal as [italic]The Great Mouse Detective[/italic].

R63 - in the UK, they compromised and released it as Basil the Great Mouse Detective.

I hope that remake of Little Shop Of Horrors reallyvgets made- its my most favorite musical ever.

R65 Will be CGI poop.

My partner and I bawled watching this film this afternoon. He’s younger (shut up) and was unaware of Ashman’s amazing talent and contributions to the Disney Renaissance.

I’ve said it in other threads; the post-Renaissance hand-drawn relaunch with “The Princess and the Frog” never stood a chance as soon as they hired Randy Newman.

His style is totally unsuited for a princess film and really makes one appreciate the lighting in a bottle that was Ashman-Menken.

R67: Both of the Sherman Brothers were still alive; why were they not asked?

I don't think Howard Ashman had anything to do with Oliver & Company

Yes he did, R69. He co-wrote the song “Once Upon a Time in New York City” that Huey Lewis sings at the beginning. They hired multiple songwriters to write the songs. Walt did the same for most pre-Sherman features.

This was also Ashman and Menken's doing.

Oh, my.

The irony of Ashman being a part of a piece of narc propaganda such as [italic]Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue[/italic] is that recent science has found that cannabis can help control the progression of HIV.

R73, another irony is that that sequence felt like an acid trip

R23, I haven’t seen the documentary yet, but I remember reading somewhere that he and his first boyfriend did engage in “extracurriculars” together. Something like Ashman felt pressured to agree to group sex in order to stay with the boyfriend, who had grown restless in the relationship.

(If I have that wrong, someone please correct me.)

That’s correct.

[quote][R73], another irony is that that sequence felt like an acid trip

That whole special reeked of get-off-my-backism. It's like they took your least favorite episode of your favorite sitcom and animated it. Think about it: a 30-minute anti-drug PSA sponsored by McDonald's? How many of those billions and billions served were served to stoners?

And this was the second time Winnie the Pooh got on his high horse about some Important Social Issue … remember [italic]Too Smart for Strangers[/italic]? That was right before Ashman and Menken came to the studio but the same mentality created that. What's creepier than being lectured on child abuse by an obese English bear who wears a shirt but not pants?

R57 I remember when the Prince of Egypt was announced a friend predicted there would be Burning Bush nightlights. LOL! It didn't materialize, of course, but it made you think what some companies would do for a buck. At the time (late '90s), the Disney Renaissance had made Disney a fortune in merchandising alone; the lucrative Disney Princess line arose during this time. Thus, there were many studios that were desperate to copy Disney's model. At any cost.

R59 Pocahontas was a huge hit, the 4th highest-grossing movie of 1995. As you can see, the #1 movie (Die Hard with a Vengeance) only grossed around $19 million more. Toy Story (#2) only grossed about $18 million more and that film is considered a massive hit and game changer. Pocahontas actually did better internationally ($33 million more) than did TS.

In fact, the decline of the Disney Renaissance truly began the following year with Hunchback.

Pocahontas also beat Toy Story at the Oscars twice -- for Best Song and Best Score.

In fact, Pocahontas was the last Disney film to win both categories. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King had previously accomplished this feat.

I loved him. I don’t have Disney + but I will find a way to watch this.

[quote]Pocahontas also beat Toy Story at the Oscars twice -- for Best Song and Best Score.

Perhaps because Randy Newman just writes the same song over and over again.

That said, he kind of was robbed for "When She Loved Me" from Toy Story 2. Almost every nominated song that year was better than the Phil Collins song from Tarzan, which won.

The doc is worth watching just for the clip of Ellen Greene doing "Somewhere That's Green." That song gets me every single time.