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.