Thumbelina’s “Soon” Keeps Finding New Fans On TikTok Three Decades Later

Some songs just refuse to stay in the past, and “Soon” from 1994’s Thumbelina is proving to be one of them. More than thirty years after it first played in theaters, the gentle ballad keeps resurfacing on TikTok, where a steady stream of singers post their own renditions and caption them with some version of “this song lives in my head rent free.” For anyone who grew up with the film, watching it rack up a new round of covers and comment sections full of shared nostalgia feels like a small miracle, and also makes total sense once you look at where the song actually came from. Thumbelina was directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman and distributed by Warner Bros. Family Entertainment, not Disney, even though it gets tagged that way constantly on TikTok today. The confusion is understandable. The film has that lush, old school hand drawn animation and a fairy tale premise, and its star, Jodi Benson, had already voiced Ariel in The Little Mermaid a few years earlier, which only deepens the Disney association in people’s minds. The entire score was composed by Barry Manilow, working with longtime collaborators Bruce Sussman and Jack Feldman on lyrics, and “Soon” stands as the quiet emotional center of that soundtrack. It is a solo number for Thumbelina, sung by Benson, built around the simple, aching hope that somewhere out there is a person and a place where she truly belongs.

Thumbelina did not exactly light up the box office back in 1994. It came out the same spring as a wave of bigger studio releases and never found the audience its makers hoped for. But home video gave it a second life, the way it did for so many mid nineties animated films, and “Soon” in particular became the kind of song that stuck with kids long after the VHS tape got put away. That is the version of the story TikTok is now rediscovering, one cover at a time. Search the song title on the app and you will find theatre kids treating it as a vocal showcase, adults posting through actual tears in the caption, and musicians mashing “Soon” together with the film’s other big ballad, “Let Me Be Your Wings,” for wedding entrance videos. Creators regularly get asked in the comments to redo their take, sometimes months after the original post, and they do, because the demand never really goes away. It helps that 2026 has turned into something of a banner year for this exact kind of nostalgia. The “2026 is the new 2016” wave that has taken over TikTok and YouTube, with users revisiting the fashion, music, and online culture of a decade ago, has only widened the appetite for throwback content in general, and a sincere, big voiced ballad like “Soon” fits right into that mood.

TDN has actually been tracking this song’s staying power for years now. It started back in 2022, when Jenna Lea Rosen posted her own cover of “Soon” on TikTok and set off a wave of nostalgic comments. Two years later, we came back to the trend and found it hadn’t slowed down at all, breaking down why the song kept getting covered long after its initial moment. Last year, we widened the lens further and looked at “Soon” alongside The Swan Princess as part of a broader look at why non Disney 90s animated ballads keep captivating TikTok. Rosen herself has stayed part of that story too, most recently turning her attention to “Somewhere Out There” from An American Tail, another animated throwback ballad that clearly scratches the same nostalgic itch.

What keeps pulling people back to “Soon” seems to come down to how unguarded it is. There is no irony in it, no wink to the camera, just a small character singing about hope in the plainest possible terms, set to a melody built for a full voice and an open heart. That combination happens to be perfect material for a TikTok cover, and it explains why, three decades on, a song from a movie that barely made a dent at the box office keeps finding its way back onto everyone’s For You page.