- Disney’s live-action Snow White remake is using a musical approach that helped create one of its most iconic films – Alice in Wonderland – University of Sheffield research says
- Snow White remake adopts Walt Disney’s formula of using multiple songwriters on a film’s score to overcome problems with its story
- This ‘patchwork quilt’ approach was first used in Alice in Wonderland in 1951 when Disney used 12 songwriters to write over 40 songs to help transform Lewis Carroll’s Victorian novel into a 20th century musical classic
- The latest Snow White film commissioned new songs to address contemporary sensibilities around gender stereotypes, whereas in 1951 Disney brought in new songwriters to depict the character, Alice
Disney’s new live action remake of the classic film Snow White has revived a musical approach that helped transform Alice in Wonderland into one of its greatest-ever animated films, according to research from the University of Sheffield.
The study, by Professor Dominic Broomfield-McHugh from the University’s Department of Music, has found that the Snow White remake has chosen to use a formula favoured by Walt Disney in the 1940s and 50s to use the film’s soundtrack to overcome problems with its story.
The technique, which the University of Sheffield academic is calling ‘the patchwork quilt approach’, refers to how Disney hired a series of songwriters to create new songs around individual characters in Alice in Wonderland when the studio was having difficulties turning Lewis Carroll’s Victorian novel into a musical animation.
Disney took this approach from Victorian music halls where several artists would often take turns to perform individually, each singing their own personalised songs that had been written by a team of different artists, to give each character a specific sound or style.
Disney commissioned 12 songwriters to create over 40 songs for Alice in Wonderland – some of them newly discovered in the Library of Congress’s copyright deposit – including songs to help depict Alice as a passionate young woman who falls asleep and dreams of finding herself in Wonderland.
The formula proved to be hugely successful, helping Alice in Wonderland become one of the studio’s greatest and most recognised animated films, rewatched and remade for generations. He used it again in films including Peter Pan (1953), Sleeping Beauty (1959), The Jungle Book (1967) and The Aristocats (1970) before the studio ushered in a more contemporary sound with The Little Mermaid (1989), the first of the many Disney scores by Alan Menken.
Now in remaking its first animated film in Snow White, Disney has returned to the patchwork quilt formula for its score in an attempt to overcome challenges with the storyline that was originally written for the 1930s.
Like Alice in Wonderland, the remake has benefited from keeping the charming tunes of the original songwriters to depict the Seven Dwarfs, while using the pop-infused approach of songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul to bring the tale into the 21st century for new audiences.
Professor Dominic Broomfield-McHugh, Professor of Musicology at the University of Sheffield, said: “When Walt Disney first started to create Alice in Wonderland in the 1930s, he was struggling to convey the story from the original novel, which is complex, episodic and ambiguous, as typically seen in Lewis Carroll stories. His solution was to change tactics and draw on this Victorian music hall technique where artists would take turns to perform individually, all singing songs written by different artists, in order to fully engage and capture the audience’s attention.
“In place of Carroll’s moralising tone in each chapter of his Alice books, Disney decided to focus instead on the famous characters like the Cheshire Cat, White Rabbit and so on, each of whom would have their own song to bring them to life for the audience as the focal point of each scene.”
Professor Broomfield-McHugh added: “There is a parallel between the way the remake of Snow White provides the title character with new songs and the way Disney commissioned songs for Alice herself late in the process of making Alice in Wonderland.
“After working with 10 other songwriters to provide songs for the characters Alice encounters in Wonderland, Disney turned to composer Sammy Fain and lyricist Bob Hilliard, both of whom had recently worked on Broadway. This team were more used to telling stories through song, so they were able to give Alice more of a personal identity just as Pasek and Paul have done by replacing the old ‘Someday My Prince Will Come’, which depicts Snow White waiting for a prince to come and save her, with the new ‘Waiting on a Wish’, in which Snow White dreams of escaping her destiny.
“It’s appropriate that in revisiting their first animated film, the Disney studio should also revisit a multi-author technique that Walt himself approved, but which has been less commonly used since the more contemporary style of musical ushered in by The Little Mermaid in 1989.”
Professor Broomfield-McHugh’s research on Alice in Wonderland is published in The Oxford Handbook of the Disney Musical, of which Broomfield-McHugh is co-editor, due out 30 March 2025.
