Lin-Manuel Miranda: ‘I have a Pulitzer and a MacArthur Genius Grant. I’m already something no one else is’
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The ‘Hamilton’ creator and ‘Moana’ and ‘Encanto’ songwriter had the daunting task of crafting a successor to Elton John’s beloved ‘Lion King’ soundtrack. He talks to Kevin E G Perry about the lure of working with Barry Jenkins, endangered Disney ballads and why he doesn’t care about winning an EGOT.
![[A scene from Barry Jenkins’s ‘Mufasa: The Lion King’]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/17/20/newFile-2.jpg)
Growing up in Manhattan in a middle-class Puerto Rican family, Miranda had his sights on the bright lights of Broadway from an early age. He started writing In the Heights while attending Wesleyan University, setting the story in the Washington Heights neighbourhood where he still lives with his wife Vanessa Nadal, whom he’s known since high school. They have two sons, 10 and six, with the eldest named after Sebastian the crab from The Little Mermaid. Clearly, Miranda’s love of Disney runs deep. Today, we’re sitting in the shade at San Diego Safari Park, with giraffe, rhino and Somali wild ass grazing on an ersatz savannah behind us. In a separate enclosure nearby, an impressively maned African lion named Bo lazes in the sunshine. The location has been chosen by Disney for its long association with The Lion King franchise: legend has it that animators visited the park ahead of the 1994 original for inspiration and promptly added Timon to the script as comic relief after falling in love with the meerkats.
That first Lion King marked a turning point both for Disney and for animated film. While it was mostly hand-drawn by animators in the traditional Disney style, it was also the studio’s first production to incorporate CGI technology to flesh out crowd scenes, most famously in the dramatic wildebeest stampede sequence. The film was an unprecedented box office success, banking $978m to become the highest-grossing 2D animated film of all time, but it also marked a changing of the guard. The following year saw the arrival of Toy Story, from Disney subsidiary Pixar, the first entirely computer-animated feature film.
