How Alan Menken and Glenn Slater Crafted the Music of ‘Spellbound’ (EXCLUSIVE)

When it comes to princess songs, there’s no bigger name in the game than Alan Menken. That’s why Skydance Animation turned to the legendary eight-time Oscar winner to write music for and score its sweeping new animated musical “Spellbound.”

In the film, streaming now on Netflix, Rachel Zegler stars as Princess Ellian, a teenager who seeks to break a spell that’s turned her royal parents (Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem) into monsters. John Lithgow, Jennifer Lewis, Tituss Burgess and Nathan Lane also lend their voices to the whimsical fairytale epic.

“The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin” and “Beauty and the Beast” composer Menken was joined by frequent collaborator Glenn Slater (“Tangled”), who served as the project’s lyricist. “Glenn Slater really captures the feeling that goes along with Alan’s music in such a beautiful way,” Zegler says in an exclusive new featurette about the making of the film’s music. “Alan and Glenn together as a team is a match made in heaven.”

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Zegler says she first came onto the project as a scratch vocalist to sing for demo recordings, but was eventually brought on to voice Ellian for real – something she did over the course of nearly five years. “I worked on it steadily throughout ‘Shazam’ and ‘Snow White,’ going into different studios all around the world,” Zegler told Variety earlier this year during her cover story interview, raving about the joys of recording voiceover from anywhere in the world. “Javier was in Jordan doing ‘Dune,’ so he would literally get off set, sand everywhere, and get in the booth!”

“This girl is incredible. I mean, she has the most superb voice,” Kidman says of Zegler in the new featurette. “The music is beautiful, and it’s also classic.”

For Zegler, singing Menken and Slater’s music is her own real-life fairytale. “I’m very thankful,” she says. “Alan did the soundtrack of my childhood, and now the soundtrack of my first animated movie.”

Below, Menken and Slater break down their process for crafting the music of “Spellbound” in an interview with Variety.

Ellian clues the audience into her unconventional situation with a lively opening number, “My Parents are Monsters.” How did you land on that fourth-wall-breaking tone for the introduction to this character?

Glenn Slater: One of the things that we were very conscious of was, because this is based on real family dynamics that you would experience in the real world, we wanted to make sure that we were really honoring exactly how people would act in the real world. We were conceiving Ellian as a 15-year-old girl, and a 15-year-old girl today would be talking into her phone, breaking the fourth wall. We very much wanted to capture that kind of the slanginess, the way that that you talk to your friends over social media, the way that you would show people through social media what your world looks like. That was very present in our minds in creating the character and in that opening moment. This is a teenage girl you know, not a fairy tale princess from a storybook.

Of course, that bubbly exuberance fades away and turns to longing in her next big song, “The Way It Was Before.” How did you begin to craft that ballad, knowing it would be the emotional core of the film?

Alan Menken: You can see it in the actual animation, when you see the this broken piano, and the drip of water just hitting the notes. Something that was beautiful is broken, and that kind of works its way into the intro of the song. The song is a longing for something that has been broken, and the want to put back together.

Slater: It’s the first song that we wrote for the piece. It was written before we really even had the plot nailed down, and we were sitting around a table and discussing the character and what she wants, and how this was different than ordinary fairy tale characters. Words like “longing and sad,” but “hopeful and great,” came together. Alan just kind of sat down at the piano and said, “Oh, like this?” It was one of those moments that you never forget.

Menken: Usually it takes a little more prompting!

Slater: Alan is like the world’s most sophisticated music AI. You feed him prompts: she’s happy, but she’s brave, and she hasn’t seen her parents in a long time, and it’s kind of like that feeling when you open up a present, but it’s not what you wanted. And he’s like, “Oh, like this!”

Menken: I’m actually an audio animatronic representation of Alan Menken.

Why was Rachel Zegler the right choice for Princess Ellian’s voice?

Slater: I think she was pretty much [director] Vicky Jenson’s first choice from the get go, and we were all very excited when she signed on, because she’s kind of amazing. She’s of the generation that grew up with Disney movies. So she has completely internalized what a Disney heroine looks like and sounds like, but she’s also a brilliant actress, so she was able to take that template and give it her own particular spin, and dig into the specifics of this character and make her feel like a real person. She just got into the studio and nailed it.

Another standout number is John Lithgow’s showstopping “I Could Get Used to This.” It just sounds like you two had a blast working on it, with lyrics like “It’s more than marvelous / How have I lived my whole live larva-less?”

Menken: Or “I could get used to this / Somehow I can’t help but shake my big fat caboose to this!”

Slater: That was the last song that we wrote. It was a moment where we had this fairly serious second act going on, a lot of, a lot of twists and turns that were pretty weighty emotionally. And we kept saying, “It feels like we need a production number.” And we realized that we had John Lithgow aboard. Let’s figure something out! He has such a great voice, and such great comic timing that we just worked off his natural sound and came up with that.

Menken: And we had to use the Flinks as a as a connector to a moment that would basically encapsulate this very cultured man now eating larva and going, “Oh!”

On that note, is there a specific lyric from these songs that you’re particularly proud of?

Menken: “Larva-less.”

Slater: I think that’s going on my tombstone. “Here lies Glenn Slater: Larva-less.”

Menken: You know, the most effective ones and affecting ones are the ones that you don’t notice. It’s the moments that really grab your heart that that are the most important ones.

Slater: We always say that, if we do our jobs correctly, you don’t think of Alan’s music or my lyrics, you just think of that character singing. What’s the way that they talk and the way that they feel? The songs where you remember the lines are when the characters are particularly cultured or clever or witty, so the lyrics by their own witty. But when you have characters like the mother and father in this movie who can barely speak, the lyrics aren’t necessarily clever, but hopefully they capture that sense of struggling to express themselves and struggling to find the right words and to make an emotional connection. It’s not going to it’s not going to feel like Sondheim, but it’s going to hopefully feel like the right thing from those characters at that moment.

You two have collaborated together on so many projects, from “Tangled” to “Galavant.” What keeps you coming back and wanting to work with each other again and again?

Menken: It’s a great process between us. We’re quite opposites in the room. I tend to go for the big emotional gestalt and the drive in the story of the song. Glenn is looking at the dramaturgical architecture, and how do you make that work? We’ve been in the trenches together. I can’t remember a time when we weren’t working on something together. It really reminds me of my process with [late collaborator Howard Ashman] a lot. It gets smoother and smoother with each collaboration. But we both know that anytime we approach a new project, we are going to have to break everything down and reinvent the wheel in order to find the voice of this project that’s unique to this one. The number of songs we threw out on this one, we could have a whole other musical just with those!

Slater: That’s a key part of any project and any collaboration: having the faith in your collaborator that you can throw things out, knowing that you and your collaborator are going to come up with something even better every time, is something that you don’t really get with everyone. Knowing that I’m going to get an Alan Menken classic, no matter what the idea is, no matter how many permutations it goes through, we’re going to end up with one of those melodies that you can’t get out of your head.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Selome Hailu contributed reporting to this story.