Broadway sensation Lin-Manuel Miranda has gone from rapping American history to singing Disney’s popular tunes. The Hamilton star and creator took over Disney Animation’s Instagram account on Sunday as a way to entertain the account’s 1.3 million followers.
Disney executives gave Miranda permission to use the Instagram account as part of their promotion for Moana , the upcoming animation flick that stars newcomer Auli’i Cravalho, Nicole Scherzinger, Alan Tudyk, and Dwayne Johnson. Miranda helped with the movie’s soundtrack, which is just one of the projects that he contributed to the Disney brand.
In the first video, Miranda starts off with telling followers to name the Disney movie by figuring out which song he is singing. The short clips shows Miranda singing “A Whale of a Tale” from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea .
The next clip shows Miranda singing a song that comes from the 1992 film, Aladdin .
Miranda also sings a short tune from the Disney musical, Newsies .
Miranda takes a page from the classic Mulan , while singing a verse from “I’ll Make a Man Out of You.”
While singing a song from The Little Mermaid , Miranda clearly has fun mimicking the musical tones of the original singer.
Miranda wasn’t the only one to appear on Disney Animation’s Instagram account on August 7. Dwayne Johnson makes a cameo in one of the short clips with Miranda.
The two actors sang lyrics from the song “Gaston” from the 1991 film, Beauty and the Beast . The was improvisation to some of the lyrics to the song, with Miranda singing, “As a specimen, yes, he’s intimidating. Oh my god, that is The Rock.” Johnson flexes one of his muscled arms in the background.
Lin-Manuel Miranda also contributed non-singing clips during his time on Disney Animation’s Instagram. While Miranda is used to Twitter’s 140-character count on his own social media page, he typed in the caption of his joy that Instagram doesn’t use a character limit.
The actor went silly in the caption: “I just realized I just realized there’s no character limit on here. NO CHARACTER LIMIT! #linstagram #moana Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious If you say it loud enough, you’ll always sound precocious Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”
Miranda snapped a photo of music composers Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. The two men are behind the music for the upcoming Mary Poppins sequel titled Mary Poppins Returns . The film has a scheduled Christmas, 2018 release date.
The newest Mary Poppins film stars Emily Blunt as the title character and Lin-Manuel Miranda as lamplighter Jack . While Miranda will participate in the film, he will not contribute any new music to the soundtrack. Mary Poppins Returns is the first major film that Miranda will star in.
Miranda also showed off his dog on the Disney account. The Broadway star uploaded an image of his dog, Tobillo, while using the hashtag #Linstagram and #Moana to promote the film.
Miranda praised the Cuban coffee he drank. He uploaded the photo of him holding the tiny coffee cup in front of his face.
The Broadway singer-actor-composer did a selfie image with Moana directors’ Ron Clements and John Musker, who also directed The Little Mermaid . Miranda stated in the image’s caption that The Little Mermaid inspired the multi-talented man to get into music in the first place.
Moana is the second film that Lin-Manuel Miranda contributed songs to Disney Pictures. Miranda first created some music for Star Wars: The Force Awakens , after director J.J. Abrams invited Miranda to contribute music for the soundtrack. Miranda composed music that’s featured in Maz Kanata’s Cantina, after Star Wars composer John Williams decided to concentrate more on the orchestral score.
Disney’s Moana will open in theaters on November 23.
[Photo by Yana Paskova/Getty Images]