Film Review - Howard (2020)

Howard is the new Disney Plus documentary written and directed by Don Hahn who also did the 2010 documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty and this one goes into the life and times of lyrist Howard Ashman who worked on Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin who sadly passed away from AIDS in 1991 and that struggle as well as the great success he enjoyed are covered here. 

I’ve been waiting to see this doco since 2018 when it first played at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, I adored Waking Sleeping Beauty and I’m also a kid of the 90s which means that Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin are instrumental in developing that love of film and/or musical theatre and this documentary does not disappoint. 

Firstly like Waking Sleeping Beauty the doco is done through the use of archival photos and videos with the interviews being audio only and you hear from Howards partner Bill, his sister Sarah, Alan Menken among others and they go into great depth about Howards desires/hopes/fears and it feels very intimate while also doing some great staging at the same time, at one point Howard and Alan are giving a lecture in a theatre and the crowd is really into it while intercut with that is Bill telling us about his HIV diagnosis and it makes you feel sad while watching that segment. 

Also I loved hearing all those songs again, tracks like the Mob Song (a hugely underrated song from Beauty and the Beast) and Prince Ali from Aladdin and Ellen Greene singing Somewhere That’s Green in Little Shop of Horrors and Howard and Alan their genius was that you would hear just a portion of one of their tracks and within a few moments you could sing either the whole thing from memory or enough of it where you can find your way through and I wanted to listen to them all again after this doco ended. 

And so that was Howard and it was well and truly worth the wait and is a great portrait of a man whose genius shown brightly in the all too brief time he was here and it made me very emotional at times while I was watching it, 4 out of 5.