Waking Sleeping Beauty

Official movie poster

This is the house that Walt built. The house that his nephew, Roy, nurtured. The house that the triumvirate (Eisner, Wells and Katzenberg) grew into an animation powerhouse. And though Waking Sleeping Beauty does include the story of those men at the top, it is also a story of their supporting cast–the animators–bringing Disney Animation through a decade that could have ended quite differently in less capable hands.

Their story is told by director/ producer Don Hahn and co-producer Peter Schnieder, who also played a pivotal part in reinvention of Disney Animation. Hahn was the producer of “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King,” and Schneider was first president of animation and then chairman of the studio. And although documentaries told from the inside generally take a view too biased to be reliable, the duo generally does a good of presenting the circumstances such as they were.

The film is a mosaic of Disney home movies, archived news footage, old and new interviews, first- and final-cut versions of the animated films, awards ceremonies like the Golden Globes and Oscars and caricatures and sketches to illustrate events where there was no actual footage. In that respect, the only way to produce a documentary that goes as far as this one does into the history, business and politics of the Disney corporation, the filmmakers would have to be insiders. But Hahn and Schnieder’s goal is to make sure that by the end, the audience also feels like a bit of an insider, even down to the smell of pencil shavings, the sheen of the linoleum floor and the hum of fluorescent lights. If he weren’t an insider, how would you possibly learn that Goofy’s original name was Dippy Dawg or that Sebastian the crab wasn’t originally Jamaican?

It’s as if you sat down with Papa Don while he pulled out his scrapbook from “the good ole days” or are listening to him reminisce as he walks you through the halls of the animation studios. He even has the perfect Disney voice to narrate the film. The Morgan Freeman of light-hearted documentaries. Along the way, Papa Don introduces his enthralled listener to quite the quirky cast of characters. There’s the unsmiling, young Tim Burton covered in fake blood, the pie-in-the-face antics between Frank Wells and Michael Eisner and the full-scale reenactments of Apocalypse Now featuring the entire animation crew.

Oh those animators! They are indeed the gifted children of Disney, constructing every bellydancer and neon sign of Aladin’s Cave of Wonders while simultaneously goofing around the office and playing pranks on their coworkers. But it’s clear after watching them interact at their margarita party that they share a bond closer to family than coworkers.

But even though these idiosyncratic animators were essentially the ones to bring Disney Animation out of it’s slump, credit went to the higher ups, and that added to the already existing tension between the two sides. Jeffery Katzenberg had told his animators they needed to “wake Sleeping Beauty” and create their next big animated movie. The Black Cauldron had flopped (so badly, in fact, that Schnieder consoled himself saying he couldn’t do any worse than that) and executives had changed the title of Basil of Baker Street to The Great Mouse Detective, causing quite a commotion amongst its creators and even resulting in a joke memo renaming all the Disney classics.

Despite the level of detail Hahn and Schnieder provide to orient the most clueless of viewers, sometimes it seems that Papa Don leaves out a view details in his trip down memory lane. For those who are old enough to remember the coverage these stories received in the papers and on the nightly news, it will make more sense. But for those raised on the movies featured in the documentary, events and key figures may get a little confusing. Even still, the joy of going behind the scenes of the movies many of us grew up with, is consolation enough to forgive the lack of extended explanation.

Be advised: after seeing Jodi Benson sing “Part of Your World” as Ariel swims around her underwater cave of treasures and Angela Lansbury in the studio recording the voice of the bubbly Mrs. Potts in “Be Our Guest,” you may feel the irresistible urge to speed home to watch all the animated classics back to back to back.