Follow your heart is the moral that runs throughout "Hans Christian Andersen's Thumbelina," a full-length animated feature about the 2-inch-high fairy tale heroine.
And follow his heart is indeed what Barry Manilow finally got to do when "Thumbelina's" producer-director Don Bluth ("An American Tale," "The Land Before Time") approached the recording star to compose songs and the underscore for his latest cartoon feature."I started off wanting to be a composer," explained the Brooklyn-born performer, who has sold more than 50 million recordings worldwide. "I wanted to write Broadway musicals, actually. In fact, I met Bruce and Jack (Sussman and Feldman, "Thumbelina's" lyricists) at the BMI workshop and we were on our way" to becoming songwriters for musicals.
But Manilow got sidetracked - into writing commercial jingles and playing piano for New York performers like a then-little-known Bette Midler. Then "Mandy" hit. The lush, romantic, 1974 ballad took Manilow into the pop music stratosphere. Easy-listening classics such as "I Write the Songs," "Copacabana" and "Looks Like We Made It" kept him up there for more than a decade - and where a recent greatest-hits boxed set and accompanying, sold-out tour indicate that Manilow still remains.
"That all just took me into a world that had nothing to do with where I started, or anything I had ever thought of," said Manilow, a tall, slender man in his mid-40s. "I never considered singing or being an entertainer or getting up on stage and fronting a band. I had never even thought about it until I found myself compelled to do it. But in my heart of hearts, I really wanted to make a career as a songwriter for Broadway musicals. I just knew my way around it. Instinctively, I knew how to do it."
Of course, cartoon movies aren't exactly Broadway shows. Yet, with the recent massive success of such animated Disney musicals as "Aladdin," "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast," many have observed that the film genre has become the closest thing to classic musical theater. Indeed, "Beauty and the Beast" has inspired a live, Broadway stage show.
Manilow admitted that even though "Thumbelina" represented a major step toward achieving his heart's desire, film scores are separate animals.
"It wasn't so much that I wanted to score a film," said Manilow, who collaborated on "Thumbelina's" underscore with William Ross ("Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves"). "Because that's a craft that I respect enormously, and it's something that you really have to study and learn your way around.
"But I wanted to do this one, because I wanted the music of the whole film to sound like it came from one source. Instead of having an underscore guy and another one to do the production numbers, I really wanted to make sure the music felt like a cohesive piece, one composer's vision."
Although he was confident he could pull off both musical tasks, Manilow admitted that it was a daunting job. "When you do an animated movie, it's all music," he said. Practically all of "Thumbelina's" 86-minute running time had music on the sound-track.
When the film's half-dozen production numbers aren't taking center stage, the movement and rhythm of the animation is more dependent on complementary background music than a live-action film's would be. Indeed, many animated sequences are drawn to match a pre-existing piece of music, giving the animation composer an unusually high degree of storytelling responsibility as well.
It left Manilow with an appetite for more; he already has written eight songs for Bluth's next feature, "The Pebble and the Penguin." But he's not going Hollywood. "I'm not sure that I'll want to do the next Arnold Schwarzenegger film," he deadpanned. "It's not so much that I want to score movies, but because I hear a certain style to the songs that I want to keep to the entire underscoring of a film."
Besides, with renewed interest in his own song catalog, Manilow doesn't have a lot of time to sit in movie dubbing stages. "If you'd asked me a little while ago, I might have said that composing was more rewarding than performing," he said. "But at this point, I have just fallen in love with these audiences all over again. I don't know what happened over this last year, when I went on the road with this greatest-hits tour, but I love being in the same room with all of these people who are so happy. I think that's what entertainment is all about."
The recent tour even gave Manilow something that has eluded him for much of his career: critical respect from the rock-oriented music press, which often had dismissed his work as lightweight and sappy.
"I guess if you just hang in there long enough, they respect you for that," he shrugged. "I don't really take it that seriously. I do what I do, and the rest of it really just rolls off my back. Unless they're real mean-spirited, and then I say `hey, stop it.'
"Other than that, y'know, I became obnoxiously popular there for about 10 years. Annoyingly popular. The press had just had it with me, and I understood why. Now they're having trouble with Michael Bolton - which has taken some of the heat off me."
Well, almost. Manilow recently had to take action against Los Angeles radio station KBIG-FM (104.3) for a promotional campaign that targeted him as an act that they would not play. "Stop it already, is what I said," he recalled. "I didn't like it. I called Mr. KBIG and I spoke to Ms. KBIG, who is the program director. I said, `I just saw your ad on television. Do you have to do that?'
"She said, `Well, that's the way we want to make a difference between KOST (FM-103.5) and us.'
"I said, `But it really is hurtful. Do you have to do it like that?'
"She said, `That's the way we want to do it.' So I called my lawyer and said, `Sue (them).' And they pulled (the ads) right away."
On a more positive note, "Copacabana," a show derived from the TV movie, is hitting the stage in London. "It turned from the TV movie into an Atlantic City casino show, which I directed. Now it's a full-fledged, two-act musical, for which I wrote five more songs and collaborated on the book.
"It's not the musical that I've always wanted to write, but it is my toe in the water. And if this is the entertaining evening that I think it is, it will just encourage me to go on and do the one that I've always wanted to."