The Evolution of the Disney Song: From Snow White's Lullabies to Encanto's No. 1 'Bruno'

The evolution of Disney music is really a story about who the studio borrowed its songwriters from, three times, each one importing a sound Disney didn't have yet. Any list of the best Disney songs clusters around three specific moments: 1937, 1989 and January 2022. Knowing why explains why the next one probably won't sound like a power ballad at all.

Before the Mouse Could Sing

In the 1920s and '30s, Tin Pan Alley ran American songwriting like a factory: Broadway revues and sheet-music publishers churning out verse-and-chorus songs built for the parlor piano, not the dance floor. When Walt Disney built his first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), he borrowed that machine rather than the hot jazz filling nightclubs at the time. Walt told his composer to write something "quaint" that would "appeal more than the hot stuff": operetta warmth over syncopation, because a fairy-tale princess singing at a wishing well needed to sound timeless, not of the moment.

1937: Frank Churchill Writes the First Disney Ballad

That instruction produced "Someday My Prince Will Come," composed by Frank Churchill with lyrics by Larry Morey, sung by 18-year-old Adriana Caselotti in a performance the Financial Times later said "spelt out the tantalising promise of love and nurture." Paired with the work song "Whistle While You Work," the two numbers set a template Disney musicals still lean on nearly ninety years later: the longing ballad that states the heroine's wish, and the ensemble work song that turns labor into spectacle.

"Someday My Prince Will Come" outgrew the film almost immediately. Dave Brubeck recorded it on 1957's Dave Digs Disney, and Miles Davis reworked it and named his 1961 album after it, an unlikely second life in jazz clubs for a fairy-tale lullaby.

The Golden Age Plateau

For three decades after Snow White, Disney's songwriting stayed inside that same Tin Pan Alley lane: Pinocchio's "When You Wish Upon a Star," Cinderella's "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes," gentle, waltz-time, written for a single voice and a soundstage orchestra. It worked because nothing else in American pop sounded like competition yet. By the time rock and soul had rebuilt the charts in the 1960s and '70s, that same formula started to read as a museum piece: sweet and orchestral, increasingly disconnected from whatever teenagers were actually listening to. Disney kept making movies; it mostly stopped making songs anyone outside the films was humming.

1989: Ashman and Menken Import Broadway

The reset came from off-Broadway, not from inside the studio. Alan Menken and Howard Ashman had just scored a hit with Little Shop of Horrors when Disney hired them for The Little Mermaid (1989). Menken has said the film landed because "there was a hunger for a true legitimate film musical," paired with the freshness of two theater writers doing their first film score.

Ashman brought a structural idea straight from the stage: every song needed a job. He coined the "I Want" song, the number where the protagonist states exactly what she's chasing, which in Mermaid meant waiting the entire first act for "Part of Your World." Add a villain number and an Act One closer, and Ashman and Menken had rebuilt the Disney song around the architecture of an integrated Broadway musical rather than a standalone single.

The Renaissance Peak and Its Price

That architecture produced the Disney Renaissance's two biggest wins: Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992), both powered by Ashman and Menken scores that ran the table at the Oscars. Ashman had already won once, for "Under the Sea," then won again, posthumously, for the Beauty and the Beast title song. Ashman died in 1991, at the height of the AIDS crisis, eight months before Beauty and the Beast opened in theaters, and never saw either film finished; his partner, Bill Lauch, accepted his second Oscar on his behalf. Menken kept writing for Disney for decades afterward, but the specific partnership that invented the modern Disney song ended there.

The Post-Renaissance Lull

Menken carried on without Ashman, writing Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, and later Tangled and Enchanted with new collaborators including David Zippel and Stephen Schwartz. Commercially, the momentum held for a while: the Pocahontas soundtrack still reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in 1995 on the strength of "Colors of the Wind."

Two years later, Megara's showstopper "I Won't Say (I'm In Love)" from Hercules kept the same Broadway-ballad architecture Ashman had defined.

Neither song crossed back onto pop radio the way "A Whole New World" had. Disney songs were increasingly played in theaters and nowhere else, while the charts had moved on to boy bands and R&B. That drift accelerated once Pixar took over Disney's creative center of gravity in the 2000s. Films like Ratatouille didn't need an "I Want" song at all: its 2007 soundtrack leans on Camille's "Le Festin," a wistful chanson used as mood-setting rather than plot machinery.

Original Disney songs spent most of the 2000s as score, not single.

2016–21: Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Streaming Reset

The next turning point came from a Broadway writer again, but a different kind of one. Lin-Manuel Miranda, fresh off Hamilton, wrote Moana's songs in 2016, including "How Far I'll Go," which picked up Grammy, Oscar and Golden Globe nominations. By Encanto (2021), Miranda had gone further: he composed the score and wrote the story, building rhythmically dense, overlapping verses meant to reward repeat plays rather than land as a single Broadway-style power ballad. "We Don't Talk About Bruno" is credited to seven performers at once: Carolina Gaitán, Mauro Castillo, Adassa, Rhenzy Feliz, Diane Guerrero, Stephanie Beatriz and the rest of the Encanto cast, blending salsa, Latin pop, hip hop and Broadway phrasing into one gossip-chain ensemble number.

January 2022: TikTok Puts Bruno at Number One

"We Don't Talk About Bruno" didn't open at No. 1. It climbed. The Encanto soundtrack had already jumped from No. 110 to No. 7 on the Billboard 200 the week the film premiered on Disney+, then climbed from No. 7 to No. 1 the following week, driven mostly by streaming. The single itself moved from No. 2 to No. 1 on the Hot 100 the next week, dethroning Adele's "Easy on Me" on the strength of sales, streaming and airplay combined, a climb that coincided with the song exploding on TikTok rather than radio. That made it only the second song from a Disney animated film ever to top the Hot 100, 29 years after "A Whole New World" did it in 1993, and the first Hot 100 No. 1 of Miranda's career. By then, seven songs from Encanto were sitting in the Hot 100's top 100 at once, and the soundtrack had over 16 million monthly Spotify listeners.

Line up the eras against the chart numbers and the shift is hard to miss.

None of that happened on a platform Disney owns or built. If the Renaissance's lesson was "hire Broadway," the streaming-era lesson looks more like "write something people want to lip-sync in fifteen-second clips." Whatever beats that probably won't sound like a power ballad either, and it might not come from a single breakout song built for radio at all. That's the real history of Disney songs in three moves, not thirty. For more on how pop production itself keeps resetting, see our history of pop music; for the Disney-to-pop-star pipeline from a performer's side, see how Olivia Rodrigo went from Disney star to pop's sharpest songwriter.

Hear the difference yourself: Snow White's operetta phrasing, Ashman and Menken's Broadway ballads, and Mirabel's family rattling off gossip in cha-cha-chá time sound almost nothing alike, even though they're all soundtrack mainstays.