Howard Ashman didn’t send giant slithery monsters into the clouds to save the earth, nor did he conquer hordes of intergalactic invaders. His triumphs are the stuff of dreams, the kind of accomplishments proven powerful by the test of time.

Two-time Oscar nominee Don Hahn was determined to make sure no one forgot that. A colleague of the late Ashman and a veteran producer of blockbuster Disney animated and live-action features, Hahn gathered his best documentary team to tell the story of a major creative force who, through his work on The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Aladdin (1992), influenced film for years to come.

An extraordinary thing happened. The resulting documentary feature, Howard, which had opened fairly quietly at the Tribeca Film Festival two years ago, experienced an enthusiastic embrace beyond anyone’s expectations (especially throughout social media). The millions currently streaming it on the Disney+ service have been yearning for what it has to offer.

I spoke with Hahn and his longtime producer and Emmy winner, Lori Korngiebel (whose credits include Hahn’s Waking Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent and Lilo & Stitch) about the film and this recent reception. Lori compared the response to her childhood feelings about Disneyland.

LORI KORNGIEBEL: We’ve wanted people to see this movie for so long! I remember when I was a kid, my mom would wake us up in the morning and say, “Wake up, we’re going to Disneyland! She never prepped us. So throughout the day, I couldn’t believe I was actually there. I will honestly say that’s how it felt this weekend. I can’t believe it’s finally out there and people are finally getting to see it and they really seem to like it.

DON HAHN: That’s really interesting because I felt the same way when we would go to Disneyland when I was a kid. I just couldn’t believe it. It feels that way now, too. And not every movie is that way! Beauty and the Beast was that way. In a sense, all of Howard’s movies felt that way. Now, this movie is not Beauty and the Beast, I’m not trying to say that, but there’s a reaction that is really emotional. It feels a little like the Mr. Rogers movie a couple of years ago. People are longing for a sense of nostalgia, a sense of authenticity, a sense of honesty, and there’s that kind of reaction to the movie.

GREG: This film, in a way, mirrors documentary that you and Lori worked on, Waking Sleeping Beauty, which told the story of the renaissance of Disney animation but this focuses on a person with a pivotal role. Do you find yourself reliving that era quite a bit?

DON: I’ve questioned that a lot of times. At a certain point you think, is it time to move on with life and start looking forward instead of always back? But having said that, I think there’s always an obligation in my mind to tell these stories if you have them in your head. I was afraid that Howard’s story would be lost. I thought that, after thirty years, somebody should have written a biography, or something might have been done on American Masters, or just anything. And there’s almost nothing except the efforts of some really wonderful people in theater and his sister Sarah, who keeps his story alive on her blog. That started to really haunt me.

GREG: His time was very short, yet what he accomplished in that time was more than some might do in an entire career. The film shows that his contributions exceeded writing lyrics.

DON: Yes, he was far more than that. He was a dramatist, a director and a book writer—all of which I don’t think we realized at first. He was a producer on The Little Mermaid and Executive Producer on Beauty and the Beast. And rightly so. He contributed that much. There were many other collaborators. Howard, if he were in this interview, would be the first to call out [Little Mermaid and Aladdin] directors John Musker and Ron Clements, [Beauty and the Beast directors] Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, [composer] Alan Menken and all the people that also contributed to those movies. But we surfed a lot off of Howard’s wake. We really learned a lot from him.

GREG: The film shows the effect he had at Disney shortly after his arrival. There is are scenes in the film from the landmark April 1997 “Little Mermaid Crew Meeting,” when Howard explained how he thought the principles of musical theater storytelling could blend with the classic Walt Disney feature animation tradition. Were you there?

DON: I wasn’t in that room — I was in London working on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, I think–but the echoes of that meeting went throughout the studio. I think what Howard did was say, here’s how music is used in a movie. You can have a song that is supposed to be on an FM radio and that’s fine. You can have source music. You can have needle-drop [production library] music. Or you can have this other thing that I like, which is plot-driven music and put all the heavy lifting of plot and emotion into the songs. That was the big breakthrough for us [in Disney Feature Animation]. It takes a huge commitment to do that. When two characters fall in love, instead of them sitting on the sofa and having a scene about that, which would be very easy, you sing about it. When a character expresses what she wants in life, she sings about it. It was a re-education for some, but a primary education for many of us, just to say “Oh really!” Howard was such a master of it, he had studied it and was an encyclopedia of it and he was able to bring it to us.

GREG: When you go back to Walt Disney’s Snow White and Pinocchio, each song was part of the story. You could not take them out because that story points were woven within them and in the action around them.

DON: In one of his interviews, when he talked about Snow White, Howard mentioned the “Heigh-Ho” song from Snow White. He said, “That’s just straight from an operetta.” We’d sit around the table and he’d talk about it in that way: “Well, this is like Gigi,” or “The dance of Belle and the Beast is like The King and I because a dance in a fairy tale is the consummation of a relationship.” I look back and think how lucky were we to be in those rooms. He made us do our best work. You’d have to come in prepared and be as smart and on the same level as Howard. You could absolutely debate with him, but you’d have to be pretty clever to go head-to-head with him. That made us step up a lot. That was a really happy thing.

GREG: Howard only worked on a handful of Disney projects, yet that work was the springboard to the films that followed. It’s a far-ranging influence—the theme parks, stage versions, school productions—even the more recent live-action versions are referenced in your film.

DON: Howard was a traditionalist in a way because he referenced traditional American musicals, unlike maybe someone like Sondheim who was pushing out into new territories. But then Howard would mash it up with something. He would put ‘fifties girl group rock and roll with a Roger Corman monster movie or he would take a Danish Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale and put it with a Rastafarian crab and Reggae music. He would really switch it up to be able to create something fresh. He was just fascinated with musical adaptation. Alan [Menken] talks about this too, just taking a pastiche and not being afraid of it. Just leaning into it. Saying, “Aladdin’s going to be done Cab Calloway style, here we go!” It was a brave kind of approach but it was really successful.

GREG: In a way, a lot of the younger viewers seeing the film now are going to be introduced to the same concepts and knowledge. When they watch any of the classic Disney animated musical films, this offers a deeper understanding.

DON: The younger people absolutely know the music, they just didn’t know who the guy was, what he went through, and all that stuff. I think that’s been a very bold reaction to the movie.

GREG: Maybe this will encourage further behind-the-scenes explorations of what makes this kind of work so impactful and enduring.

LORI: I sure hope so, because like Don, I grew up loving Disney and I still get the geeky little fan in me every time I see anything from the Archives or from Disneyland. There are a lot of us out there. I would love to see more and more projects like Howard, and like The Imagineering Story.

GREG: Let’s go behind the scenes now with the Howard documentary. When you produce a feature with so many elements, do you look at it in pieces in a film, do you put in “placeholder” images or is it storyboarded?

LORI: All of the above. You start a project having an idea, but there’s no script in a documentary. Don and I started the research in Washington D.C. at the Library of Congress because that is where Howard’s archives are located. From there we went to New York to do interviews with Bill [Lauch, Howard’s partner] and Sarah [Ashman Gillespie, Howard’s sister] and Kyle [Renick, the late director of New York’s WPA Theater, where Ashman and Menken’s Little Shop of Horrors made its debut] and gathered photos from them, so by the time we got back to our editor in Los Angeles, we had the building blocks. But like anything in life, things will take a turn because something will show up and all of a sudden you find yourself going down a path you weren’t expecting and you’re down the road less traveled. So it’s a wonderful journey.

GREG: You’re assembling it while it’s assembling itself.

LORI: One hundred percent. Basically what we do is gather all the pieces together and just start working. Don and Steven Yao, our editor, would work in “chunks.” We would see how the story unfolded and came up with little sections of the movie. Then we saw how those sections would work with the audio that we had, whether it was stills or moving pictures, in terms of a clip from a feature or home video or something like that. Then we slowly built it out that way.

GREG: People must talk about the scenes they’ve enjoyed the most.

DON: One scene people seem to really love is the one with Angela Lansbury talking about her teapots. You love that because, first and foremost, it’s Angela Lansbury talking about her teapots. But secondly, you’re a fly on the wall and I think that’s tremendously satisfying as an audience—to be in a place where you’re not supposed to be and seeing something in that way.

GREG: There is another sequence in which Roy E. Disney says, “I don’t want to compare Howard to Walt, but on the other hand, he had that kind of influence on everybody.” That’s a pretty huge thing for Roy to say. I seem to recall this clip in Waking Sleeping Beauty, as well.

DON: Yes, and it is in both of those films because of that. If that were anyone else I might not have put it in, but coming from Roy, who knew Walt Disney… Roy knew and he was there. To have him say that, we had to put it in because it’s a testimonial that you’re not going to hear very often. So much of our success depended on Roy. He was such an interesting guy—quiet in one way, ferocious in another and able to express himself mostly in writing. He was a great writer. Roy used to talk about how long ago when he was sick, Walt came up the stairs just to see how he was doing and told him the story of Pinocchio. Roy said, “When I saw the movie it was so disappointing because it just wasn’t as good as what Walt told me that night!”

GREG: Disney+ is a perfect place for it because so many subscribers are primed to see this. They are not critics or necessarily people “in the business.” Couldn’t be a better or more welcome stage for Howard.

LORI: I was in high school and college during the “Howard times” and I started at Disney Feature Animation in the late ‘90s. I had heard about Howard Ashman, but I didn’t really know who he was. I just knew that Beauty and the Beast was my favorite movie. There are going to be a lot of people like me who feel the same way. It’s the movies that last forever and this is a way to introduce the people who made those movies. It’s a pleasure and a joy to work on them, and even more so to watch them.