It’s exhausting to overstate what a cultural phenomenon The Lion King soundtrack was in 1994. Of the 5 songs written by Elton John and lyricist Tim Rice, three had been nominated for Finest Authentic Music on the Oscars (with ballad “Can You Really feel the Love Tonight” triumphing over the epic “Circle of Life” and the exuberant “Hakuna Matata”). Two had been nominated for Music of the 12 months on the Grammys. The soundtrack album was the biggest-selling file of the 12 months within the US, holding off competitors from the likes of Nirvana, Inexperienced Day and TLC. The songs type the premise of the highest-grossing musical within the historical past of Broadway. Thirty years on they continue to be embedded in our collective consciousness, so Lin-Manuel Miranda may very well be forgiven for feeling cautious about being referred to as on to offer the tunes for follow-up Mufasa: The Lion King. “Nicely, once you listing it like that, it’s terrifying!” he says, a sly grin breaking by means of his black goatee. “I didn’t take into consideration any of these stats!”

Miranda, in fact, is aware of a factor or two about creating cultural phenomenons himself. The 44-year-old New Yorker made his Broadway debut in 2008 along with his Tony Award-winning musical Within the Heights. A couple of years later got here Hamilton, the hip-hop-inspired historic musical about one of many founding fathers of the US that grew to become a bona fide popular culture juggernaut. It’s been a fixture on Broadway because it debuted in 2015, and in London’s West Finish since 2017.

Given his observe file, Miranda didn’t really feel the necessity to search counsel from his predecessors John or Rice. “I’ve spoken to them about different stuff. This hasn’t come up,” he demurs. “He’s been very busy,” he provides of Elton. “He’s acquired Satan Wears Prada and Tammy Faye.” The previous, a musical based mostly on the 2006 trend comedy, started its run within the West Finish in October. The latter, in regards to the lifetime of evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, opened on Broadway in November, though it has since introduced its closure. “We’ve nearly switched,” says Miranda. “He’s just like the Broadway child proper now and I’m penning this film music.”

Rising up in Manhattan in a middle-class Puerto Rican household, Miranda had his sights on the brilliant lights of Broadway from an early age. He began writing Within the Heights whereas attending Wesleyan College, setting the story within the Washington Heights neighbourhood the place he nonetheless lives along with his spouse Vanessa Nadal, whom he’s identified since highschool. They’ve two sons, 10 and 6, with the eldest named after Sebastian the crab from The Little Mermaid. Clearly, Miranda’s love of Disney runs deep. Immediately, we’re sitting within the shade at San Diego Safari Park, with giraffe, rhino and Somali wild ass grazing on an ersatz savannah behind us. In a separate enclosure close by, an impressively maned African lion named Bo lazes within the sunshine. The situation has been chosen by Disney for its lengthy affiliation with The Lion King franchise: legend has it that animators visited the park forward of the 1994 authentic for inspiration and promptly added Timon to the script as comedian aid after falling in love with the meerkats.

That first Lion King marked a turning level each for Disney and for animated movie. Whereas it was largely hand-drawn by animators within the conventional Disney fashion, it was additionally the studio’s first manufacturing to include CGI know-how to flesh out crowd scenes, most famously within the dramatic wildebeest stampede sequence. The movie was an unprecedented field workplace success, banking $978m to turn out to be the highest-grossing 2D animated movie of all time, nevertheless it additionally marked a altering of the guard. The next 12 months noticed the arrival of Toy Story, from Disney subsidiary Pixar, the primary solely computer-animated function movie.

Today, Disney is all-in on computer-generated graphics. Regardless of the fondness a lot of its viewers nonetheless has for conventional animation, the studio hasn’t launched a 2D movie since 2011’s Winnie the Pooh. But at the same time as Disney’s aesthetic has modified, The Lion King has remained the jewel in its crown. When Jon Favreau remade the movie in 2019 with photorealistic CGI it divided critics however audiences flocked to see it. It made a staggering $1.6bn on the field workplace, changing into the highest-grossing animated movie in historical past till that file was damaged earlier this 12 months by Pixar’s Inside Out 2.

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Mufasa, then, has a troublesome act to comply with. The brand new movie, which acts as each a prequel and a sequel to Favreau’s 2019 model, must show there’s an urge for food for photorealistic animation that goes past remakes of Disney’s already beloved classics. Whether or not Barry Jenkins, swapping his movie digicam for computer-generated landscapes and virtual-reality goggles, has risen to the problem will depend on who you ask. The Occasions gave the movie 5 stars, calling it a “dazzling prequel with excellent songs”, however The Unbiased’s critic was much less impressed, handing out simply two stars and calling it a “catastrophic waste” of the Oscar-winning Moonlight director’s skills. For me, Jenkins succeeded in bringing real emotional depth to what may in any other case have been a superfluous origin story for the regal Mufasa and his treacherous adoptive brother Scar.

Miranda says it was the prospect to collaborate with Jenkins, together with the unique movie’s musical legacy, that satisfied him to make Mufasa his subsequent challenge. “I felt like I’d study rather a lot working with Barry,” he says. “However I additionally felt, given Beyoncé’s unbelievable [remake-inspired] album [The Gift] that she launched in 2019, that The Lion King is sort of its personal musical style. It’s rooted in African rhythm and harmonies, however I felt like there was quite a lot of area to play and break new floor.”

New floor, but additionally a possibility for a return to Disney requirements. Because the composer of Encanto’s chart-topping “We Don’t Speak About Bruno” factors out, trendy Disney heroines don’t are inclined to sing love ballads. “It’s nearly an endangered species at this level,” says Miranda. “However I grew up within the period of the romantic Disney ballad, ‘Kiss the Woman’, ‘A Complete New World’, ‘Magnificence and the Beast’, ‘Can You Really feel the Love Tonight’… just about each Tarzan tune! Phil Collins didn’t must go that onerous however he did, for us!”

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He was decided to put in writing a ballad for the younger Mufasa (voiced and sung by Aaron Pierre) and his love curiosity Sarabi (Tiffany Boone). “After I learn the script and Sarabi says: ‘Inform me it’s you. I do know it’s you.’ I used to be like: ‘That’s the tune, thanks very a lot!’ I knew we had been off to the races, and it was a pleasure to put in writing.”

Elsewhere, his rating features a fleeting nod to the primary act of Phantom of the Opera, and in addition a correct Disney villain anthem, for Mads Mikkelsen’s white lion antagonist Kiros – which got here after Miranda learn on-line that he’s too earnest a songwriter to put in writing something memorable for a baddie. “I totally went Michael Jordan once I learn that,” he jokes, referencing a meme from basketball doc The Final Dance. “‘And I took that personally…’ In order that tune was not initially within the script, however I used to be like: ‘Barry, put me in coach, let me do it.’”

Mufasa arrives at a vital time in Disney’s historical past. Final 12 months, as its expensively acquired golden goose Marvel continued to misfire, the studio was soundly crushed on the international field workplace by Common off the again of each Oppenheimer and The Tremendous Mario Bros. Film. This 12 months, Disney is again on high. Forward of the discharge of Mufasa, it already has three of the 4 highest-grossing movies of the 12 months: Inside Out 2, Marvel offshoot Deadpool & Wolverine and Moana 2. The success of the latter has been a serious victory for CEO Bob Iger, who made the choice to remodel a deliberate Disney+ collection right into a theatrical launch. In doing so he proved Disney nonetheless able to doing what it did finest in its renaissance years: crafting animated musicals that pack out cinemas.

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The massive audiences turning out for Moana 2 can no less than partially be attributed to Miranda’s work on the unique 2016 movie. His infectious soundtrack produced the Oscar-nominated earworm “How Far I’ll Go” and helped Moana turn out to be the most-watched streaming movie of the previous 5 years, seen on Disney+ for greater than a billion hours. Miranda’s absence from the sequel has been a lot commented on by critics, however he says he had “a lot of conferences” to supply recommendation to incoming songwriters Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, who took over when the sequel was nonetheless being deliberate as a Disney+ collection. Within the meantime he launched Warriors, an idea album based mostly on the 1979 motion movie The Warriors. The songs are considerably edgier than his Disney music, because the story follows a road gang battling their manner by means of New York boroughs given voice by rap icons similar to Nas (Queens), Busta Rhymes (Brooklyn) and RZA and Ghostface Killah (Staten Island). There can be many who hope Miranda may but adapt it as his subsequent stage musical.

However earlier than that, there’s the reception of Mufasa to cope with. Disney is effectively conscious there isn’t a such factor as a secure wager in relation to a $200m blockbuster, even with Miranda’s soundtrack, a critically revered director and a much-loved character on the coronary heart of the story. It could actually, nevertheless, normally depend on Miranda’s songs to convey it an awards season stamp of legitimacy. He’s beforehand earned Academy Award nominations for each Moana’s “How Far I’ll Go” and “Dos Oruguitas” from Encanto. With two Emmys, 5 Grammys and three Tonys already to his title, the prize-laden composer is barely an Oscar wanting EGOT standing. Nonetheless, Miranda insists he’s not troubled by any perceived hole on his mantelpiece. “I reject the notion I’m on this race,” he smiles, his fingers forming a gracious shrug. “I’ve a Pulitzer and a MacArthur Genius Grant. I’m already one thing nobody else is!”

‘Mufasa: The Lion King’ is in cinemas within the UK and US from 20 December