Howard Ashman, Stephen Sondheim and the queering of magical realist space

In 1982, legendary composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim wrote a letter to Howard Ashman, effusively praising his Little Shop of Horrors. Taking this connection as starting point, I consider how Disney’s adaption of Sondheim’s Into the Woods, alongside Ashman’s work on Aladdin, The Little Mermaid, and Beauty and the Beast, represents a more visible embrace of the queer aesthetic for twenty-first-century Disney. Their magical realist spaces, I argue, represent countercultural and utopian techniques, with a specific resonance with queer spatiality as outlined by theorists such as José Esteban Muñoz.