Their first film together, 1966’s “Roman Candles,” an homage to Andy Warhol’s “The Chelsea Girls,” featured a dialed-back version of Divine. The pair’s lifelong friendship and storied collaboration began when the Baltimore natives met as teenagers in the mid-1960s.
Minkoff’s idea to model Ursula - a take on the sea witch in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” - on a drag queen that embraced the bizarre and grotesque certainly pushed boundaries.ĭuring his illustrious career, Divine, born Harris Glenn Milstead, was the muse of avant-garde director John Waters, who lovingly referred to the drag queen as “the most beautiful woman in the world, almost.” As Waters’ favorite leading lady, Divine helped the director pioneer the “trash cinema” genre: low-budget productions that exaggerated and satirized exploitation films. “I think all of the people in animation during that period in the ‘80s were big fans of the earlier Disney classics and wanted to make the modern films reach those same heights - and the only way to do it, we all knew, was to push the boundaries of what seemed acceptable.” “There’s a lot of really edgy stuff in the early animated films that people had forgotten about, not the least of which was killing Bambi’s mother, but Disney had gotten very safe with the kinds of stories and films that it was making at that time,” Minkoff said of the company before Ashman’s arrival. Looking back at that era of the studio, Minkoff said people had forgotten that Walt Disney, the man, was an “innovator who had broken all the rules throughout his career.” Howard Ashman, left, and Alan Menken. And that’s just what he did with “The Little Mermaid,” which became the first in a string of animated hits for Disney. Once Ashman arrived in Los Angeles - as detailed in Don Hanh’s documentary “Howard” - he gravitated toward the animation arm of the studio, seeing an opportunity to marry his musical theater background with the more offbeat, experimental approach of the illustrators. “So John came back to me and said, ‘Howard liked your drawing, and that’s the way we want to go with it.’”Īshman, along with his creative partner, the composer Alan Menken, had been recruited by Disney after the success of their off-Broadway play “Little Shop of Horrors,” in the hopes that they could deliver the studio a much-needed hit. “Howard looked through all the designs and focused on that one,” Minkoff recalled Musker telling him at the time. But all of the accounts include the flash-in-the-pan moment when a young illustrator, Rob Minkoff, came up with a vampy, mascaraed matron. In some accounts, the animators working on the film were having a particularly tough time finding the right look for their antagonist, who was originally modeled after a certain sharp-tongued “Dynasty” matron.
There’s plenty of mythology surrounding how the animated villain of 1989’s “The Little Mermaid,” written and directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, came to be. More than three decades after Ursula, the buxom sea witch of Atlantica, first slithered her way onto the big screen, the underwater mistress of mayhem is back to tempt the seas in the new live-action version of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid.” In celebration of her return, everyone from comedian Melissa McCarthy, who’s playing the conniving nemesis of King Triton, to film historians, are taking the opportunity to pay tribute to the legendary drag queen who inspired Ursula’s unwholesome ways: Divine.
