![]() ![]() It’s ironic that a movie about the core concept of every “I Want” song - wishing for something - has the worst “I Want” song of them all. Here, we rank every “I Want” song featured in a Disney animated musical since The Little Mermaid set the standard back in 1989. That lesson from Ashman was well taken, with the “I Want” song becoming an instant staple of the Disney formula and remaining a part of it to this day. “Howard sat down when he first got there, and using The Little Mermaid, he literally taught us how to tell story with songs.” In the Disney+ documentary Howard, which is about Ashman’s life, producer Don Hahn explains just how important Ashman was to Disney as we know it. While there are some songs in earlier movies that could be considered “I Want” songs, like Snow White’s “I’m Wishing,” it was Ashman and The Little Mermaid’s “Part of Your World,” in which Ariel sings about her desire to become human, that truly codified what a Disney “I Want” song sounded like. An “I Want” song, as he explains in the Disney+ documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty, is a number early in a musical where “the leading lady sits down on something and sings about what she wants in life, and the audience falls in love with her and then roots for her to get it for the rest of the night.” By expressing this desire in a song, Ashman says, it makes the point impossible to miss. One of Ashman’s many great contributions to the House of Mouse was introducing the studio to the concept of an “I Want” song. Three decades after his death, Ashman’s impact on Disney animation and the genre as a whole has stood the test of time. That musical-theater sensibility, with Ashman as lyricist and Menken composing, helped revitalize the studio’s flailing animation department, and the success of Mermaid ushered in what is now referred to as the “Disney Renaissance.” The pair continued to work together, making music for Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, until Ashman’s untimely death from AIDS in 1991. The original 1989 film marked the pair’s first collaboration with Disney, following their theater success with Little Shop of Horrors. No matter how you might feel about Flounder’s lip filler, Disney’s live-action remake of The Little Mermaid has at least one thing going for it, and that’s the iconic music from the songwriting team of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. This list was originally published in 2023 and has been updated to include the “I Want” song from the new Disney movie Wish. ![]()
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