Disney has been making adaptations, or remakes, of its most successful animated films since 2014. And in them we often come across changes to the song lyrics. Why? It has a great deal to do with questions of translation and with updating the messages.
Disney has been releasing at least one remake a year since 2014, which has left us with a new catalogue of films for children (and not-so-children) that the more nostalgic among us cannot help comparing with the originals. And those comparisons also bring us to the songs, the hallmark of those films, with which more than one generation grew up. Why are those songs changing? Why do some of them sound so different, and why have the lyrics even changed? The explanation often lies in the way they are translated. Although the songs of the original films are deeply ingrained in us, Disney remakes go through new translation teams. Even when the original-language version keeps the same lyrics as the first films, in Spain they are translated from scratch. And it is left to those teams, and to the distributors’ own instructions, to decide whether to be completely faithful to the original… or not. On top of that, the lyrics have been brought up to date. Society’s sensibilities have changed and Disney adapts its messages to today’s concerns. Some lyrics in the classics contain lines that would now be seen as inappropriate, on grounds of sexism, racism or homophobia, for example. Or, sometimes, simply because they deal with topics or references that are no longer current and would not be understood. Let’s look at some examples.
Aladdin (1992 vs 2019)
A magic lamp, an almost impossible love and the wrath of the vizier. Aladdin’s entrance into the city of Agrabah is quite a spectacle in both versions. The song performed by the Genie is fairly similar from one version to the other, but it has two very important changes: the original actor (Robin Williams vs Will Smith) and the absence of some verses which in 1992 referred to American pop culture. “He’s got seventy-five golden camels Don’t they look lovely, June? Purple peacocks, he’s got fifty-three Fabulous Harry, I love the feathers!” Those references to June and Harry are Robin Williams’s own impressions of figures (the first of them a role played by Williams himself) who were very well known in the United States at the time. In Spain those lines were adapted, performed by Josema Yuste and full of period in-jokes from his Martes y 13 days. “Tiene de oro un montón de camellos Aquí Radio Pincho Moruno Pavos reales con su pedigrí Tú siempre tan oportuno, Bruno” And what about the 2019 version, with Will Smith as the Genie and Daniel García dubbing him into Spanish? Those lines simply disappear.
More Disney remakes: The Little Mermaid (1989-2023)
The changes in the Disney remakes will reach us this year too, in 2023, with the adaptation of The Little Mermaid. Although at the time of writing this post it has not yet been released, the film’s director, Rob Marshall, has announced that it contains the original songs composed by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken, that three new ones have been added… and that the lyrics of at least two numbers have been changed because they contain messages that today could be read as sexist or as expressing domination. The songs affected by the changes are Bésala (Kiss the Girl) and Pobres almas en desgracia (Poor Unfortunate Souls) “No hacen falta palabras Calla, déjalo, no digas nada, no Tan sólo bésala” Are these lines insensitive enough to need changing? We will find out after the premiere.
Now that we know the reasons behind the changes in the Disney remakes, in the next post we will look at further remakes and the changes to their lyrics.
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