Chapter 12: Flirting with Death’s Daughter
Post from the Riding with the Mouse Net-log by animator Terrell Little
We were well into production on
Mort when Frank and Jim flew us out to Howard’s place in Fishkill, a small town in New York near Poughkeepsie[1]. We’d been seeing less and less of Howard of late and he’d been working shorter and shorter hours, which was frustrating us, and now we were expected to rip up our lives, leave our families behind, and live in a Residence Inn in Bumfolk, NY, and get driven out to Bill and Howard’s mountain top fortress of solitude every morning. When you work in Hollywood you get used to dealing with needy famous people with fragile egos, but this was ridiculous.
Jim, Tim, Andreas, Ron Clements, John Musker, Steve Hulett, and I flew up in the Disney jet (my first flight in a private jet). We met David Lazer there. Jim stayed a couple days to set things up and look over the concept art and then left with David to go to New York City, where they were restoring a theater and setting up a new Muppets play. The rest of us stayed and worked with Howard, Alan, and Danny Elfman, who’d been flown up separately. The writers were soon writing and us artists soon drawing concept art to help inspire Howard, Danny, and Alan. We freely shared our thoughts and opinions and the project evolved. Howard, despite being clearly exhausted, wrote like he was running out of time, which, unbeknownst to us, he was.
“Death hangs over this house,” Tim said to us out of the blue one day. We figured it was Tim being Tim, but somehow, he knew.
The irony that we were making an ultimately hopeful Disney cartoon about Death was not lost on any of us, though only Howard, Bill, and Jim knew just how ironic this was at the time. And yet even not knowing about Howard’s illness at the time, the whole production took on a strange resonance from our experiences working with the dying Howard, which can be felt in the finished product. Suddenly death, and indeed Death, seemed closer and more intimate than ever before. And Mr. Pratchett’s views on Death were, strangely, somewhat comforting, actually. Death wasn’t some malign force, but a fact of nature, a dispassionate professional doing an important and largely thankless job. But, busier than ever, he takes on an apprentice, the eponymous Mort. Mort, of course, has all of the passions and emotions of a human, unlike the arch-professional Death, and in a fit of passion Mort disrupts the natural order by intervening and saving the life of the beautiful Princess Keli from an assassin, with lasting supernatural consequences. Meanwhile, Mort is developing a complicated and often acrimonious relationship with Death’s adopted daughter Ysabel, giving a new meaning to “flirting with Death” (or at least his daughter). And Daddy Death isn’t too happy about either development.
You’d think that working in such a quiet, natural, bucolic setting would be a calm and joyous experience. You’d be wrong. Howard’s hidden illness was causing him extreme pain and discomfort which manifested in a short temper. Howard had always been a bit opinionated and didn’t like it when his ideas were questioned (something that he shared with pretty much the entire Disney Animation department, yours truly included), but up in Fishkill he was increasingly short tempered. In the morning he’d bring everyone doughnuts and show such sweetness, but then turn on a dime and rip your head off. In hindsight, it’s easy to understand why, but at the time it was straining our relationship.
We had a brief visit from
Mort author Terry Pratchett, who’d tagged along with Jim one week. He (in his words) helped “muck about” with the evolving script and storyboards. He was a fun and jolly guy, but you could tell there was a powerful and complex mind working there with some deep and wry reflections on life and humanity. He and Howard occasionally argued and at one point there was a “snap” and Terry was threatening to walk out. Jim and Bill, Howard’s partner, dragged them both into a back room. We expected yelling, but it was dead quiet. When they emerged, Terry and Howard were actually holding hands. A melancholy seemed to hang over the room from that point forward. In hindsight they must have pulled Terry into the secret. Afterwards, Terry and Howard and Jim worked closely together for the rest of the visit, Terry gave Howard a hug on the way out the door the last time.
And then, suddenly, it was time to record. We all flew back to Burbank and met the stars, always one of the most exciting parts of any production. We had River Phoenix doing the voice and singing for Mort, Helena Bonham Carter as Ysabel, Winona Ryder as Princess Keli, Michael Palin as Death’s manservant Albert, and Christopher Lee as Death. I only vaguely knew Lee at the time as a Bond villain (Tim knew him through some old low-budget British horror films), but he was totally fascinating. Tim had originally wanted Vincent Price for the voice and Jim had imagined Thurl Ravenscroft, but Terry convinced us to consider Lee, and even Tim quickly admitted that Lee was exactly the right choice.
Even with such completely gorgeous people in the room as Helena, Winona, and River, Lee commanded all the attention. He’d been a commando in World War II. He had been in hundreds of plays and movies, making me embarrassed that I only knew him as a villain in one of the less amazing Bond flicks. He even freaked us all out by explaining to the voice actor playing the assassinated king the correct sound that a man stabbed in the back should make[2]. It wasn’t that he knew the sound that freaked us out, it was how casually and nonchalantly he explained it, like he was teaching us the proper sound a kitten should make when it mews. Even when he did the voicework and singing (he’d almost gone into opera!) you had to suppress a shiver at times. Certain lines stuck with you, like “THAT’S MORTALS FOR YOU. THEY’VE ONLY GOT A FEW YEARS IN THIS WORLD AND THEY SPEND THEM ALL IN MAKING THINGS COMPLICATED FOR THEMSELVES.” (I of course need to write that in all-caps, as anyone who’s read the book knows).
And Howard seemed to come alive throughout the recording, back to his old energetic self, though I’d occasionally catch him leaning, exhausted, against a wall when he though no one was watching. He and Christopher Lee in particular had a bond. Lee seemed to “get” what Howard wanted, and Howard said wonderful things about him afterwards. He said to Lee at one point “I hope it’s you I see waiting for me afterwards.” I didn’t know at the time what he meant.
It was while all of this was going on that
A Small World debuted. We watched the numbers and reviews with baited breath. There was a fear that the film would be dead-on-arrival. “Common wisdom” at the time was that a “girl film” couldn’t compete, and we had lots of direct competition. Don Bluth was back for revenge with
All Dogs Go to Heaven and Hollywood Pictures was putting out
Return of the Littles just a week earlier to try and make us look like the copycats. We all celebrated when
A Small World was a hit. People around the world were humming “A World of my Own” on the street, which made Howard and Alan very happy and all of us happy for them. They’d eventually get an Oscar for it.
There was a small break from
Mort while Howard and Alan composed “The Song of Susan” with Freddy Mercury for a new MGM film (another Oscar for him in ‘90) and then another break later still when Jim brought us all back to LA with no notice. It turned out that Howard had caught an infection and was in the hospital. Secretly, Jim, Molly Ringwald, and Richard had, with Howard’s permission, made a special deal with St. Vincent’s to record a cameo with Howard for
The Song of Susan. When we ultimately saw it for the first time when
The Song of Susan debuted, suddenly we animators all knew and it hit us like a knife to the gut. Afterwards, Howard refused to speak to any of us about it, so we respected his privacy. But it hung there like a scythe, even if that scythe was softened when we knew that the kindly being who held it held no ill will.
And the second that the music was done for
Mort, we all went back to Fishkill and started working on the music for
Aladdin. Back during the making of
A Small World Howard had put together a treatment and some songs, but it was largely felt by management that such a project would be seen as a copy of
The Thief and the Cobbler. But after
The Song of Susan cameo the animation department overwhelmingly chose it to be our next film, and we chose it for him, and by the time
Aladdin screened in 1991 it was felt that the underperforming
Thief and Cobbler would be largely forgotten outside of animation circles. The songs for
Aladdin were delightful and a lot of fun to work with as an artist, and they were Howard and Alan at their best.
“The Song of Susan” or “Humiliate the Boy” will bring a tear to my eye every time. But for me, it’s the soundtrack for
Mort that always resonates with me and reminds me of what was so great about Howard, the man I’d once laughed at who’d become something so inspirational, so amazing, so dignified, and such a tragic personal and collective loss. Death’s song “To Be Alive” (or Death’s Lament), sung as he explores the living world, trying to understand humanity, is so layered with the nuance and subtext of a man facing is own mortality with both curiosity and acceptance that I can’t even begin to fully fathom it all, and I may not until I’m staring down that road myself. Perhaps not even then.
Howard never finished the recording for
Aladdin. He worked right up to the very end, but eventually his illness got to the point where he had to be hospitalized with the score about two-thirds recorded. Alan and Danny completed the recordings based on Howard’s annotations, but we’ll never know what his final versions of many of the songs would sound like.
Death came for Howard not long after
Mort debuted in late 1990. They screened it for him in his hospital room and later told him the news about his third Oscar for “To Be Alive” while he was on his death bed. Alan would be the one to accept the Oscar for him as he lay dying.
While Terry Pratchett was visiting back in better days, Howard confessed to him that he hoped that Terry’s take on Death was the right one. “He seems like a fellow I’d like to meet.”
(Image source pinterest.com)
[1] Eisner and Wells did the same thing when Ashman was working on
Beauty and the Beast.
[2] He explained the same thing to Peter Jackson during
Lord of the Rings.
