Earlier this year, Mickey and Minnie Mouse were finally given their first themed attraction, located at Walt Disney World in Florida and scheduled to open at Disneyland in California.Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railwayis an authentic Mickey and Minnie cartoon experience that’s full of iconic Disney characters and features the latest upbeat and catchy Disney song, “Nothing Can Stop Us Now,” written by husband and wife songwriting duoChristopherandElyse Willis.
While you can’t currently experience the ride, as the domestic Disney Parks are closed due to COVID-19, they will be reopening again and Collider got on the phone to chat with Christopher and Elyse Willis about how cool it is to get to create a song for Mickey Mouse’s first ride-through attraction, how theMickey Mouse Shortsthat they also work on inspired them, also developing the song into a single that fans can listen to, what they learn from working with the character voice actors, how this version evolved from a different original version, the freedom that Disney gave them, the experience of going through the attraction for the first time, and their collaboration with each other.
Collider: How cool is it to have an original song that you’ve written, not only play an important role in a ride, but inside of a ride at a Disney theme park, for Disney’s most famous character, Mickey Mouse, in his first ride, ever?
CHRISTOPHER WILLIS: Well, you put it very well. We really benefited from the coming together of several things. The Mickey shorts tend to have a new story every time, and they tend to have lots of songs and new material. Each episode is fresh, so that meant that the ride had a slightly different development from what you might expect when something’s associated with a movie, and then the ride tends to revisit your memories of the movie, likeAriel’s Undersea Adventure, or something. And how extraordinary that Mickey’s never had a ride-through attraction before. That’s just another layer that’s incredible for us, as big fans of the parks, and incredible for the whole Mickey team, to find ourselves in this position. We’re all feeling incredibly lucky.
ELYSE WILLIS: We’re also feeling very lucky that they were able to release a version of the song that people can enjoy while the parks are closed. That’s great that they were able to get that out, so people have a little something to remind them of it, if they were lucky enough to go on it, or to look forward, to for when the parks open up again.
Was that something that was always in the plan to do, at some point, or did that only come up later?
ELYSE: I think it was always vaguely in the plan. I don’t know exactly when the moment was that it was like, “Okay, this is definitely gonna be released,” but we certainly always hoped that would be the case. As the opening got closer, and then when the ride actually opened, Kevin Rafferty, who’s the creative director for the ride, has always been so nice about sharing with people the importance of the song on the ride, so that helped it have a life of its own and gave it the importance that it needed to get out into the world. We’re very lucky.
Since you hear the song in portions during the ride itself, did you have to also adapt the song a bit, to release it as a single?
CHRISTOPHER: We had an instinct, when we were working on the song for the ride, that it would be worth putting a version together that was a little standalone thing. We didn’t actually know for sure that it would be needed, but it was strange having this song that only existed, intertwined with the story. When you get to the end of the ride, you hear the end of the song, but so much has happened since the cartoon started that everything is different and the words have a specific meaning, and the feel and the tempo have changed. So, we had a session coming up with the singers and just thought, “Why don’t we finish the song, and then we’ll have it.” And of course, what’s poignant now is that it’s absolutely wonderful that Russi Taylor is the voice of Minnie. It’s throughout the ride and on the single because she recorded it all at a relatively early stage, long before she passed away. If we hadn’t had that stroke of luck, then we wouldn’t have been able to have that in the single, if we’d come back to it later.
When you work with someone like Russi Taylor, who’s done the character of Minnie Mouse for so long, do you learn a lot from the experience?
CHRISTOPHER: That’s right, yeah. With all of the character actors, you can discover things in the song that you didn’t realize, or occasionally even change a note or a word, because what they’re doing is so good and larger than life and truthful to the character. Chris Diamantopoulos, the voice of Mickey, is so wonderful. He’s so steeped in the history of Hollywood and the history of Broadway, and all of those flavors of great performance of the past, come through in the way that he performs. We always feel very fortunate when we actually get into the room with him.
This is an incredibly catchy song. Was there a point when you realized just how catchy the song was and that people would be able to remember the song, pretty much from the first time they hear it?
ELYSE: Hopefully, it’s catchy, not in the way that it drives you crazy. There was actually another song that was a first draft version of this, and it was making us a bit nervous that it was a little too simplistic and maybe would be catchy in the way that you don’t want it to be catchy. And also, it was potentially going to cause difficulties, later in the ride, when that music from the song, the melody and the tune and the harmonies has to do a lot of work, in the course of the ride, as the underscore for the ride, scoring different emotions and different parts of the storyline, and different places that you go to and the music of that place. So, there was another song that existed, and then Chris just had a brainwave in the shower one day, of the beginning of the song.
CHRISTOPHER: With the earlier idea for the song, it was a song about a picnic, and it was too focused on Mickey and Minnie heading out and wanting their picnic. By the end of the ride, it felt like the song was going to need to be about something more. They do get their picnic, but so much has happened that it needed to have a slightly bigger message.
ELYSE: It had to be about the whole journey.
CHRISTOPHER: Funnily enough, I was more preoccupied with catchiness, in writing that first song, listening to all of the other Disney ride songs that I revere so much, but it was a little bit too repetitive, actually. So, it was a process of relaxing a bit on the final song and saying, “We want it to be a Mickey shorts type of song and a Great American Songbook kind of song. We love all of that stuff. Let’s not worry about whether it’s catchy or not. We’ll just write a good song.” Honestly, we didn’t really know until the song got released and the ride was in the process of opening that we started to get a sense that people really liked it and that it was setting out to be really memorable. Kevin Rafferty was working on the construction of the ride and saw a big, no-nonsense construction worker guy, walking past and singing the song, as he was working, and he knew the song and the ride were going to be a hit.
Did you have a real freedom in creating what the song would be? Did Disney give you any guidelines for what they wanted or any notes about how they’d like the song to sound, or were you able to create this, and then present it to them?
ELYSE: We were pretty lucky in the freedom that we were given, both on this and on the Mickey shorts. The team for the Mickey shorts, with Paul Rudish and some of the directors and art directors, were also involved on this ride-through attraction, so it very much felt like an extension of that. Working with those same people, we’ve definitely developed a very close relationship with them, over the years. Along with just knowing each other better, personally, we also know what everybody likes and what everybody finds funny, or what they think works in a certain context. We’ve all gotten really comfortable with each other’s creative processes, which allows it to not be overly notated or specified, with doing certain things.
CHRISTOPHER: It’s almost alarming, when you’ve had an image of what must go on behind closed doors, somewhere as revered as Disney is. In a case like this, there is a sense of where the song’s going to go and what the song is going to achieve. Then, there’s a moment of coming home, back to your music pad and the piano, and thinking, “Wow, I guess it’s up to me now. There’s a hole here that needs a very specific song, and that’s my job.”
ELYSE: In a lot of ways, it’s not terribly different from what happens on the Mickey shorts, themselves. Those shorts need incredibly specific thoughts. The task, itself, felt really familiar and similar to what we knew, but then it ends up being this other thing entirely. We very much benefited from the fact that this all had to happen so early in the process that it almost doesn’t really seem real, in a way. When you get to a week or a few weeks or a month out, before the ride opens, and the anticipation is building, and people are talking about how this is the first with a song in ages and that the song better be good, you’re like, “Oh, god, what have we done? Did we do okay?”
CHRISTOPHER: The anticipation was just extraordinary. But if you roll the clock back, two and a half years to when the song needed to be written, it was just a couple of people in Glendale, talking about this crazy idea. The pressure was much more reduced. There’s much more of a sense of play and just doing something that will please our friends and colleagues.
What was the experience like, the first time you went through the ride and heard the song? Did either or both of you guys get emotional about that experience?
ELYSE: It’s a loss to take in, when you actually get to ride it in person. You could ride it 20 times and find things that you didn’t see on the previous 19 times because there’s just so much going on. I don’t know if I would say that I got emotional, but it was an overwhelming experience, for sure. I actually sang on a lot of parts of the ride, too, so I was equally proud and distracted by my own vocal. It was pretty magical, to use a Disney word. It definitely felt magical. Especially after years of working on something that was more or less just a concept on a piece of paper or on a screen, to suddenly see it comes to life, in that way, is pretty spectacular.
CHRISTOPHER: It’s very eerie, if you’ve gotten to know the ride in the abstract, over several years, because you know it down to the last detail. There have been virtual versions of it and lots of diagrams, and there are scenes that have been mocked up in hangers in Burbank, so you know it, but you don’t know it. It’s like a place that you feel like you’ve been to in a dream. It’s most peculiar thing to finally be there for real.
What is your working relationship like, with each other? How do each of you feel that your skills compliment the other?
ELYSE: We’re very lucky that we like each other and we like spending lots of time together, anyway. Even when we’re not “working” with each other, we’re both musicians, so we’re always bouncing ideas off each other, and asking the other one for advice or their input on things. It feels like our whole relationship is a working relationship, in a very healthy way. Both Chris and I have similar musical backgrounds, and the aesthetic that we like and grew up with, with classical music, the Great American Songbook, musical theater, and definitely, for me, tons of Disney. It’s good that we come from similar places, but then we both specialize in different things. Chris is a pianist and a composer, and he thinks lots and lots about harmony and what makes a good melody. I’m a singer, so I’m thinking about the sing-ability of a song and the way the words work. The two of us together fit nicely, when we’re trying to create something like this.
CHRISTOPHER: I think there’s something like that going on stylistically, too. Apart from being really obsessed with music and classical music, I’m English and I grew up very into comedy andMonty Python. When I have lyrical ideas, they might be a bit tortured and a bit clever, and Elyse’s interests lean a bit more Broadway and a bit more Disney heritage. I might have views on lyrical things, but Elyse is a great musician, so she’ll have views on musical things. There’s an overlap, but a little bit of a difference, as well.
you’re able to listen to the track, “Nothing Can Stop Us Now,” via iTunes and Spotify.
