During the award ceremony as Disney Legend, Chris Montan allowed himself to joke: “Does anyone remember any Paramount songs?”, he told those present at the theater and the hundreds of spectators who followed the event through his official page. The joke remained as a sample of her humor. Perhaps in short distances he is someone sarcastic. But, also, it was the summary of a tradition within The Walt Disney Company: Making Memorable Songs.
For much of the last thirty years, one of the company’s key names in that department has been Chris Montan. recognition of him as disney legend explained from there leading different music production teams that resulted in iconic themes and unforgettable soundtracks. However, the award suggests something else: it is the celebration of a school, of a way of composing songs and of the treatment of the chords and melodies that accompany the stories on the big screen.
When you think of favorite movies, it is normal for titles to come out in any direction. In the case of The Walt Disney Company, in the section of animated films, this search may be even more specific: by evoking the name of a production –this is where the particularity arises– that memory may be accompanied by a series of melodies . More than one has wondered “And if we make a snowman?”.
That’s why Chris Montan’s joke in relation to Paramount is very funny, yes, but also true. Part of the collective memory remembers Disney for its music. In that area, the former president of Walt Disney Music has been one of the most visible faces and with the greatest responsibility in supervising projects.
The Chris Montan Story
His relationship with Disney began in 1984, composing different songs and working together with other people in the musical section. Since then, he has risen through the ranks to hold the position of senior vice president of music and, beginning in 1995, establish an exclusive agreement with the company. It was a context in which the music industry was moving in different directions, with genres that seemed to be dying while others stepped on with force and distortion. Chris Montan, who had been composing music for about ten years and working on some record labels on his own account, found no space in that environment.
So, he thought about the possibility of approaching The Walt Disney Company, in which character albums and movies were being worked on. What Chris Montan did not imagine when he became interested in this type of project is that the person in charge of that area at the time, in the mid-1980s, would leave his position and would give way to a kind of refoundation of the sector, with Montan as one of those involved in that process.
That coincidence, as he recalled in The Soundtrack Show, it was the beginning of a new era in which he assumed immediate responsibility as a songwriter while the department rearranged itself. Those tasks were not as complex as understanding the dynamics of the business and what the executives wanted. Despite any possible conflict with the head of the company, natural in creative environments, Chris Montan is one of his code names.
Chris Montan’s Musical Productions
- The little Mermaid (1989)
- The Lion King (1994)
- Pocahontas (nineteen ninety five)
- toy story (nineteen ninety six)
- Jim and the giant peach (nineteen ninety six)
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1997)
- Hercules (1998)
- mulan (1998)
- Bugs (1999)
- Tarzan (1999)
- toy story 2 (2000)
- dinosaurs (as executive producer) (2000)
- The emperor and his follies (2006)
- The family of the future (2007)
- Ratatouille (2007)
- Nice to meet you (2008)
- WALL E (2008)
- Up (2009)
These, along with an extensive list of productions, including contemporary classics such as Frozen, Inside Out Y Moana. Part of Chris Montan’s working method was to understand the concept of the production in order to advance on it. What for the viewer may be just a song, for him it was a fragment of a work of greater proportions.
Disney and the reading of the context
During the ’90s, from Chris Montan’s point of view, the industry wasn’t taking musicals into account. Other types of stories were developed through various genres. Relying on music as a medium through which to tell a story became relevant to Walt Disney.. In the words of the producer, “nobody in Hollywood was thinking about them. They had been forgotten since the sixties. They seemed old-fashioned and artificial.”
What changed? According to Montan in the aforementioned podcast, the influence of groupings like the Beatleswhich little by little changed the collective imagination. The melodies and themes were progressively refreshed. So, there was a series of creatives who had, in Montan’s words, “the knowledge of the past with the language of the present.” It was possible to make a sort of update of the genre along with adaptations of stories taken from various mythological or literary tales.
The pop influence of music at the time, the 70s, 80s and 90s, was impregnating imaginaries. Those that would later be reflected in different productions. Something that The Walt Disney Company exploited like no other company, hand in hand with Chris Montan over time. The summary of awards achieved by the company from his work is as follows, according to World Soundtrack Awards:
“(Chris Montan) has been nominated for multiple Grammy® Awards and won Best Original Cast Recording for Aida and Best Compiled Soundtrack for Visual Media for Frozen. Under his direction, Walt Disney Studios earned 42 Musical Academy Award nominations an unprecedented 16 Academy Awards for ‘Best Song,’ ‘Best Score,’ and ‘Best Musical.
The emotional value of Disney
Through its musicals, Disney has not only achieved blockbusters or adaptations through which old myths and stories are represented to new generations. In this enormous series of animated productions, and their songs, there is a kind of personal refuge in which each one will find a layer of their life, through which they connect through the melodies of one theme or another.
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That makes these stories last beyond the time in which the viewing took place. The emotion that each one has may be maintained over time, resting somewhere in memory until it is activated by a song or the aesthetics of those movies. “Who invented gladiators? Hercules!” either “Overcome! We must be like a swift torrent, win!” can be phrases that evoke more than just the title of a movie. It is the magic of cinema, that field in which for many years Chris Montan was one of the most relevant figures and in which he is still advising on some projects.