When Robert Komaniecki started ranking Disney songs, he thought he knew how it would pan out. “I was born in 1990 and so in my mind, those are the best Disney musicals,” he says of the renaissance period that produced Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. “I think a lot of my fellow millennials reading this list reacted in a similar way. They were like, ‘You have songs from The Little Mermaid below a song from Frozen? That’s unthinkable!’”
But Komaniecki is a music theorist, and his list removed nostalgia from the equation, instead assigning songs rankings out of 500, scored on lyrics, music, vocals, plot integration and subjective enjoyment (“vibes, basically”). By the time he posted his findings to X, counting down in daily batches of five to fierce debate from followers, he had meticulously analysed and ranked 115 songs.
“A great Disney song needs to be inextricable from the plot of the film,” he says. “It needs to have lyrics that are clear and concise, thoughtful and artful and have plenty of rhyme. And it needs to bring us closer to the character or characters that are performing it. It needs to say something that the dialogue and the animation cannot.”
It was after his critical ear tuned in while listening to I’ve Got a Dream from Tangled for the umpteenth time with his young daughters that Komaniecki, a lecturer in music theory and music history at the University of British Columbia, fell down a (white) rabbit hole. Over the course of a month, he worked his way chronologically through 31 films, Snow White (1937) to Wish (2023). There were some caveats: he included only songs over two minutes long and only those sung in the style of traditional musical theatre, ie by the characters rather than by an absent, omniscient voice (knocking out the likes of Elton John’s Circle of Life).
His scoring system prioritised craft: “What gets me excited is seeing evidence that the musicians did their jobs to total perfection,” he says. The result is a pleasingly geeky thread that dives deep into chord progressions, orchestration, sound mixing and enunciation, weaving in titbits of moviemaking history along the way (and unsurprisingly, leaving songs that time has not been kind to – the Siamese Cat Song from Lady and the Tramp and Peter Pan’s What Made the Red Man Red – languishing at the bottom). While the “unimpeachable pitch” of Hercules’ gospel singers is lauded, the technical “faceplants” of Wish send most of its canon plummeting down the rankings. Pedantry is welcome, such as Komaniecki’s irritation that in Painting the Roses Red from Alice in Wonderland, a four-part harmony is sung by only three playing cards on screen (“it’s a barbershop quartet, there are four suits, get real!”).
By the time Komaniecki reached the end, some big hitters had fallen: Poor Unfortunate Souls (The Little Mermaid) was sunk by tempo issues, A Whole New World (Aladdin) by leaning too heavily on the piano and Be Prepared (The Lion King) by inconsistent vocal timbres. But margins were fine, it was must be said. The top 10 were separated by only eight points, with a top three of Zero to Hero (Hercules), Beauty and the Beast and a controversial winner: Mother Knows Best from 2010’s Tangled, with a perfect 500/500.
“It’s a pretty under-known song,” says Komaniecki. “With Beauty and the Beast only one point behind, it would have been easy to switch those and go with maybe a more satisfying choice for a lot of people. Like, ‘Yes! This is the song I associate with Disney magic!’. But I really wanted to stay true to the process and I just thought that Mother Knows Best was more perfectly executed.” Consequently, he was thrilled when the song’s lyricist, Glenn Slater, got in touch to express his enjoyment of the poll.
Of course, fans had strong opinions. Komaniecki was surprised by both the resounding hatred of Frozen’s Fixer Upper (No 41 – “I think it’s an OK song!”) and the emphatic adoration for Hunchback of Notre Dame’s Catholic-mass-inflected Hellfire (No 4 – “wonderfully composed”). “People love Hellfire! It’s not in the tradition of a lot of other Disney songs – there’s not a single moment of humour in it. Like, this is just about religious hypocrisy.”
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Even with the tools of music theory, “the whole exercise was subjective”, says Komaniecki. Many disagreed with his choice not to prioritise big emotional moments over sillier ones (hence Frozen’s In Summer beating out The Little Mermaid’s Part of Your World). As a self-confessed lyric-head, he is especially partial to multisyllabic rhymes and double entendres: “Like in Zero to Hero: ‘Bless my soul, Herc was on a roll / Person of the week in ev’ry Greek opinion poll’. There’s three different rhymes in there. It’s this perfectly densely packed little couplet. It’s so satisfying.”
But while his critical brain may have been satisfied by the strict methodology, Komaniecki acknowledges that ultimately, a favourite Disney song is not about technical perfection but about the way it makes you feel. For him, that is Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. It may have only just scraped into the Top 40 thanks to some dodgy balance issues with the background singers, but it’s this wry, rousing villain number that has his heart. “It’s so funny and I love Howard Ashman’s lyrics … There’s a reprise with ‘No one plots like Gaston / Takes cheap shots like Gaston / Likes to persecute harmless crackpots like Gaston’. It’s fourth-wall-breaking. It’s so cute. I love it.”