Can You Feel The Love Tonight (from The Lion King)

"Can You Feel The Love Tonight" film clip

Thank God Disney figured out how to make their love songs not suck.

Sorry to be so crass, bur SERIOUSLY. One of my favorite films of all time is Disney’s animated versions of Robin Hood. That film is hilarious, and has fantastic music, EXCEPT for the love song “Love,” which features Robin Hood and Maid Marian running around the forest and gazing into each others eyes in an ever so nauseating fashion. I mean, this thing is painful. I clearly remember every single time we got to this part of the film, my brother and I would frantically leap for the remote control to fast-forward through this section.

Now with the new Disney animated film renaissance that started with the The Little Mermaid (which I discussed in this earlier post) Disney made a lot of improvements in their craft and what they did to their love songs was make them interesting, unique, and emotionally meaningful as opposed to the trite statements of romantic love.

Howard Ashman and Alan Menken created the music for The Little Mermaid. These two composers had such a great success that they continued their partnership with Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. These three films had some of the best film music ever composed, songs that were both witty and touching and were critical parts of the story telling adding insight, depth and character. Then Howard Ashman died of AIDs in 1991 at the age of 40.

Riding this wave of animated film success and facing the death of one of their important artist, Disney took some big changes. They decided for the next animated film to create an original story as opposed to basing the film on a pre-existing fairy tale and trusted the music, one of the most important aspects of their success to Tim Rice and Elton John.

Tim Rice made his mark working with Andrew Llyod Webber on such musicals as Evita and Cats. His first work doing film musicals was finishing up the lyrics for Aladdin after Ashman had died, but taking on a whole film full of songs was a much larger undertaking.

Disney had previously featured pop singers like Billy Joel in the Oliver & Company song “Why Should I Worry.” However, Disney had never trusted a pop artists to compose the songs for one of their films.

Elton John in 1994 far from the peak of his career. In 1990, he checked into hospital for health issues due to his drug abuse, alcoholism, and bulimia (not exactly the image Disney likes to associate with). Of the four albums that were from 1990-1993, two were made up of previously recorded material, and the other two albums The One and Duets, though moderate successes, were a shadow of the pop masterpieces Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy.

It didn’t help either that Elton John had never composed music for a musical before The Lion King.

Despite all of this, The Lion King came together as one of Disney's greatest accomplishments. When it was released in 1994, it became the highest grossing film of the year and the most successful animated feature film until the release of Finding Nemo in 2003. Elton John and Tim Rice were nominated for four Oscars for the film and won for “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.” If you are one of the two people on this planet who haven’t seen The Lion King, go watch it, I promise you’ll love it.

“Can You Feel The Love” takes the best of Disney traditions while innovating the Disney love song. The composers approached the background music like Disney composers always had utilizing the music to support the meaning of the words. When Timon reaches the line, “our trios down to two” in the introduction, the music falls flat onto a staccato chord. After "twilight," there’s a ascending sparkle and after “there’s magic everywhere” there is a harp flourish. At the end of this section, under the line “romantic atmosphere,” the music rushes up like with a ocean wave. Composers have utilized this technique of putting meaning in the background music throughout classical music displaying a high level of creative artistry.

“Can You Feel The Love Tonight” could have been a straightforward love song describing how these two lions are falling in love, instead the composers took a different path developed the characters by expressing their viewpoints.

Timon and Pumbaa bookend the song with feelings of loss which is not the usually response from Disney supporting characters. Most of the time, supporting characters are elated at the prospect of their friend falling in love like in "Beauty & The Beast." This is a great comedic moment that does ring true as most people have to learn how to share their friends when buddies find significant others.

The chorus asks if questions the listener the question “can you feel the love tonight?” While this questions is in our mind, we hear Simba’s insecure thoughts about Nala’s acceptance and Nala’s questioning of Simba’s life choices. Do we really feel the love when they are thinking about these things? If we take the lyrics outside of the context of the song we see that don't express love love but are seeds of conflict which foreshadow later scenes in the film.

What is special about this song is that despite the inner dialogue we feel the love between the Nala and Simba. There is a glorious moment when they share their love and the background choir comes forward and the instrument drop out (1:45). What this moment describes to us is that despite unresolved conflict they can feel love and so can we.

There is this idea that falling in love with someone is finding someone you completely agree with and always get along with. That’s simply not the case and if you are looking for this kind of love, then you might as well give up, because you will never find that. “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” gives a more realistic viewpoint of the complexities of love without diminishing the magic that can exist between two people who love each other. It’s a beautiful statement about relationships and most definitely does not suck.