Best Disney Song

Ninety years of songs written on the working assumption that a child will sing them back at full volume, in a car, for several months.

That brief produces a very particular kind of writing. The melody has to be simple enough to remember after one hearing and interesting enough to survive the two hundredth. The lyric has to carry plot while sounding like nothing but feeling. Howard Ashman and Alan Menken worked out the modern version of this in the late eighties by treating the films as Broadway musicals with better budgets, and almost everything since has been in conversation with that decision. Lin-Manuel Miranda later wrote the ocean itself as a question and somehow made it work. Forty-nine songs are here, running from the jazz era through the Broadway revival to the ice queen who walked off and took the box office with her.

The bracket splits along an interesting line: showstoppers against quiet ones. Belters win early rounds because they are simply louder in memory, but the songs that reach the final tend to be the ones people go back and play on purpose.