Fascinated is a new animated film from Skydance Animation currently streaming on Netflix. Directed by Shrek From director Vicky Jenson, the film tells the story of a young princess, Ellian, who must make a great effort to try to reverse a mysterious curse that turned her parents into monsters. The film’s cast includes Rachel Zegler, Nathan Lane, Javier Bardem, Nicole Kidman, Jenifer Lewis and John Lithgow.
Fascinated is a musical film and recruited two celebrities to help create its soundtrack. Disney legends Alan Menken and Glenn Slater teamed up to provide the score and lyrics, respectively, and worked closely with Jenson to ensure the film hit all the beats required of a musical. Menken and Slater have collaborated on several projects in the past, most notably the Disney animated film. Tangled and the TV series Galavant.
Screen speech I spoke to Fascinated composer Alan Menken and lyricist Glenn Slater about their work on the Skydance Animation project. The musicians discussed creating songs like “What About Me?” (which Screen speechof Fascinated critically considered the film’s best song) and the process of figuring out when and where to place musical moments. The pair also discussed the possibility of a live-action adaptation of the Disney film. Tangled.
Alan Menken and Glenn Slater tell the story of being fascinated by music
The story was rewritten to “gain” an important musical moment at the end of the film
Screen Rant: When you start a project, how do you work with the writers and directors to figure out which moments in the script are best suited for a song and how much does that change over the course of production?
Alan Menken: The second part is what changes a lot. Everyone comes from a different place, especially on this project. You have writers who are not musical theater writers, so we have to force our point of view in terms of structure. But they also want to have an agenda in terms of narrative, and you just go 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 can play with.
Glenn Slater: Musicals are all about structure and building a building that will allow the audience to follow you as you move from dialogue to music, and that’s like a wave that takes you up, up, up. To make that building feel solid, we put what we called concrete blocks on the ground – big chunks of ‘This is where the ‘I Want’ moment goes.’ “This is where we need a production number.” ‘This is where we have an action sequence that we will need to musicalize.’ ‘This is where we need to hear a different character, because enough of this voice – we need to hear a different voice.’” We’ll place these markers early in the filming process.
Alan Menken: The problem with a cinder block 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’ve talked about this with the writers and the director, and they take it into consideration as they shape the narrative. But often, you’ll find yourself creating a plot point or a new take on a character that changes what that concrete block is, and then you’ll have to go back and look at your other concrete blocks and say, “To support this concrete block, we need to move things.
For example, at the very end of the process, we were talking about Ellian as a character – “As a 15-year-old girl, how would she react to what’s happening?” Alan and I kept saying that a 15-year-old girl wouldn’t be the good girl this late in the story. The 15 year old girl will be irritated. She’s going to be moody, she’s going to be emotional and she’s going to be angry, and we need to have that moment in the film.
We went out and wrote the song “What About Me?” to capture what a 15-year-old girl’s voice would sound like at that moment. When we brought it in, everyone said, “Oh my God, yes. Psychologically, this is the honest place we need to go,” and we said, “Great. So if we’re going to get to two-thirds of the way through the movie, we need to look again at all the cinder blocks, because the cinder blocks we have in place aren’t going to get us there.”
Fortunately, we’re working with Vicky Jenson, who is very experienced and has done a lot of these things, and John Lasseter, who, again, has done a lot of these things. [They] have the confidence to say: “Let’s go”, not throw it away, but “reorganize everything, rethink everything, [and] go back to the beginning. Let’s move those concrete blocks again and make the soundtrack support the movie we all want to see.”
Alan Menken: Perhaps the most important attribute you need to be a musical composer is the ability to pick up your baby and throw it away. Or [you can] use part of it, but [it’s] never being precious with the material and always being ready to rewrite.
Glenn Slater: Do you ever think, “Is this a hit single?” or “Will this win a prize?” or “Am I writing 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 is the right song to best tell this story?”
Menken and Slater discuss two of the film’s main songs
Inside “What About Me?” And “My parents are monsters”
I wanted to ask about “What About Me?” later, because as I listened, I thought, “This is expressed both musically and lyrically, in my mind, as perfectly as it could be.” It’s so articulate and powerful. How difficult was it to get it right?
Glenn Slater: It was actually one of the hardest things for us as a collective. We started this film right before the pandemic hit, and for the first year of writing, we were basically writing on Zoom. For any musical, the difference between what works and what doesn’t is that in the ones that work, everyone writes the same musical. In those that don’t work, everyone has their own idea of what they’re doing, and that never works. That year when 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 get together in person and express ourselves with the thought outbursts, interruptions, and jumping on top of each other that you can do in real life but are very difficult to do on Zoom, that we all created a “This is who Ellian is”, which we all agree with.
[It was] that idea of a 15-year-old girl who is brave, strong and resourceful – that’s every animated heroine – but also one who hides what she really feels from her parents. Someone who can barely hold on to this persona of being okay with everything, and who can sometimes get upset and petty, and exasperated, and who can go to these emotional places that a real girl would go to, but that you don’t often see characters in. excited going. It took a long time for all of us to sort this out.
Alan Menken: And we generally like to work on music first. I want him to be in the room to give me feedback, but we know it’s basically going to explode into that dark spiral, into that darkness, so I created a piece of music that was almost operatic in its intensity. It’s an emotional speech. When it feels right – which is how we work – Glenn will work with it and come back, he’ll make adjustments and then we’ll shape it. And that was one of those songs that no one was convinced until we said, “Here. Listen to this song,” and they said, “Oh. Boom.”
Glenn Slater: This comes out of a lot of conversations. “Well, what would she say? She would say, ‘What about me? What about my feelings?’” Alan heard the line, “What about me?” and this song captures that perfectly.
Alan Menken: And that became the North Star. Once we had that song, we thought, “This is our guiding light. We need to win this.”
Speaking of concrete blocks, something I really loved was the song “My Parents Are Monsters” and the way it reverses itself at the end, I thought it was a great payoff. Was that always the plan or was it something you realized would be possible later?
Alan Menken: I was the one who said – I don’t want to take credit – “I think we have to end 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 listening to what I know to be a backstory. But then [Glenn] had the incredibly difficult task of essentially inserting backstory information into his saying, “It’s okay.” So since that was the opening number, I said, “We really have to finish this.”
Glenn Slater: And there’s a lot to set up the story. When Vicky said, “Why don’t we start with media res, [where] has this already happened and we’re just catching up with our heroine a year into this crisis she’s dealing with?” the title of the song changed, the length of the song changed… so many things had to change to keep up with this 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 allowed us to do was establish that physically, her parents are monsters, but also allegorically, her parents turned into in these monsters who are constantly fighting, fighting, self-centered, narcissistic and ignoring your presence. We don’t plan [it like]“It would be that title and then we would flip it at the end.” That title came about because of the demands of storytelling, and as soon as we had it, it was, “Look, we can flip it and capture the dynamic at the end just by flipping the words.”
“There’s a Chance” for a Tangled Live-Action Remake
“He’s one of the aspirants,” says Menken
I I’m a big fan of Tangled. I know Disney is making several live action remakes. Do you think there’s a chance for a live-action version of this and do you think there’s anywhere in the story that could benefit from new music?
Alan Menken: There’s a chance, but I don’t know how far along it is or isn’t. This is probably as true at the corporate level as anything else. But yes, it exists. He’s one of the aspirants. [And] Yes, there are many chances for new music. We never received the music because we were in the city. I just underlined it. In fact, we’re currently working on a stage adaptation as well.
Glenn Slater: And it’s a lot of new songs.
Alan Menken: And remember, we did that whole TV series too, so God knows there’s plenty of room for new music.
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 turns her parents into monsters. The film is directed by Shrek director Vicky Jenson, and features a soundtrack by Alan Menken and lyrics by Glenn Slater. The film’s cast includes Rachel Zegler, John Lithgow, Jenifer Lewis, Nathan Lane, Tituss Burgess, Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman.
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