Yearlong Song Challenge, Day 51: Maeve

Prompt: "Your favorite Disney song"

Selected by Maeve

"Belle (Reprise)"

Belle (voiced by Paigo O'Hara)

Beauty and the Beast: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, 1991

This one's tricky. I do think that there are better Disney songs, especially in the past few years (shoutout "How Far I'll Go" and "For the First Time in Forever"). But I also think that your favorite Disney song will always be tied to your childhood favorite Disney movie. For me, this is Beauty and the Beast. A brunette who loves reading, adventures, didn't dumb herself down or lower her ambitions... unfortunately, this movie has probably impacted my life too much. I mean, I definitely have convinced myself that I can bring out the best in extremely icy and rude men, who seem to like enjoy my company, yet the success rate is marginal at best and has not once ended with a happy ending (ew, get a grip, we're talking about Disney movies you pervs). Unfortunately, try as I may, we can't all have Belle's je ne sais quoi spirit. NOT TO SOUND LIKE A DISNEY ADULT, but I love this movie, musical, any live production, etc.

That being said, I think the best Disney (and for what it's worth, Broadway) songs are the "I want" songs, where the singer expresses their discontent for their current situation and dreams of something bigger and better. For an example, please see the two I shouted out above. While the song "Belle" definitely conveys this, let's be real, "Belle's Reprise" is superior. It doesn't do the heavy work of setting up the whole plot, but is short, to the point, and delivers with the powerful belting of, "I want adventure in the great wide, somewhere / I want it more than I can tell / and for once it might be grand / to have someone understand / I want so much more than they've got planned..." Folks, unfortunately, I did just type that from memory... which is tough. But an inspiring lyric? Or am I justifying the fact that I'm identifying with a teenager in a Disney movie, roughly thirty years from when I heard the song for the first time. Ugh, time is a flat circle and maybe also this is an SOS?