by Kevin Fallon
Howard, the documentary on the life of legendary lyricist Howard Ashman, opens with sounds of an orchestra warming up before launching into the first notes of “Belle,” the opening number for Beauty and the Beast, at a 1990 recording session for the Disney animated musical.
If you have any connection at all to the film and its music, you’ll get instant goosebumps as Ashman, with all the animated physicality of one of the film’s magical characters, coaches Paige O’Hara, the voice of Belle, through his desired phrasings, tones, and pronunciations. Angela Lansbury and Jerry Orbach are milling about, chatting with Ashman and preparing to launch into recording the “Be Your Guest” showstopper. It’s as thrilling, and nostalgic, as archival footage comes.
But at the crux of Howard is a love story between two men.
It’s about how that love informed the perspective from which he wrote the music for these animated classics. It’s about how that love held strong as Ashman worked through his last days, first making the decision to finally tell Disney about his HIV diagnosis, then recording Beauty and the Beast as his health deteriorated, and finally writing the music for Aladdin from his deathbed.
It changes how you think about and internalize this music you probably hold so dear.
Disney obsessives might be familiar with the fact that Ashman died of AIDS at age 40, eight months before Beauty and the Beast hit theaters, and the attempts over the years to extrapolate different meanings from the songs’ lyrics because of what he was going through at the time.
But it makes an entirely different, more profound impact to see the story of Ashman’s great love with Lauch woven through the narrative of his indelible output, and to bear witness to the Herculean effort the pair went through at the end of his life to ensure that these final projects would be lasting ones.
More, this is a film that censors no aspect about Ashman’s life as a gay man and gives space to the brutality of the AIDS epidemic and how, through Ashman, it shaped what would become one of the most defining eras in Disney history. Read more via Daily Beast