I wanted to see Waking Sleeping Beauty from the moment I heard about it. A documentary about the revival of Disney animation in the 80s and 90s directed and narrated by the producer of several of the films from that time sounded right up my alley. I had hoped to go out to New York to see it, but the timing never worked out. So I was very happy to discover that the film was coming to my home state, specifically one town over from where I live.
Waking Sleeping Beauty tells the story of one decade in the history of the Disney animation studio, from the lows of The Black Cauldron‘s abysmal box office performance to the highs of the successful release of The Lion King. As a Disney insider, Don Hahn is able to illustrate the tale with behind-the-scenes footage from the time and artists’ caricatures of key players and events. But Hahn’s involvement with this movie was also one of my main concerns going in. How much perspective could someone who worked and continues to work at Disney have on the company’s history? Would the film be anything more than a puff piece, assuring viewers that Disney animation was revived in the 80s and just kept getting better?
Happily, Waking Sleeping Beauty is refreshingly frank about its subject matter. The very beginning offers a preview of the film’s conclusion, which is not the colossal success of The Lion King, but the disintegration of the already shaky relationship between Roy Disney, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Michael Eisner. There are clips from numerous major players from the Disney studio, all speaking with remarkable honesty about what was happening at the studio during those years, both good and bad. Though the Disney films themselves are shown in a very positive light (except for Black Cauldron), the hard work and personal battles that went into making these movie are not hidden behind a veil of pixie dust.
Although the documentary spends much of its time on the men at the top, the artists who actually made the successful Disney films from this time period are not overlooked. The directors, animators, and other creative people who brought the Disney movies to life are given their due. Howard Ashman, the gifted lyricist who created the songs for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and (partially) Aladdin alongside composer Alan Menken, is paid particular attention. I was very excited to see both footage demonstrating his attention to details as he directs Jodi Benson to sing with a breathy intensity reflecting her character’s desires, and a story about one of his occasional missteps, in this case a never used opening for Beauty and the Beast with a child Beast who the directors feared would would end up resembling Eddie Munster.
Anyone who goes into Waking Sleeping Beauty hoping to learn the formula for Disney’s success in the era covered or what could have been done to avoid the troubles Disney suffered later on will be disappointed. These are complex issues and the movie does not try to simplify the answers. No one person or factor gets the credit for either the rise or the decline of Disney animation. What I got from seeing Waking Sleeping Beauty was not a model for what Disney could be doing now to revive their animated films, but a sense of these people as human beings. It’s easy to chuckle at Michael Eisner lavishing praise on the animation studio, knowing that he would nearly destroy that same studio years down the road. But at the same time, the film offers a glimpse of a time when Eisner really did have an interest in keeping animation alive at Disney and believed that it was the company’s heart and soul. Jeffrey Katzenberg’s impact on Disney animation and animation in general is still a much debated subject and the movie doesn’t cast him as either the hero or the villain. He didn’t always make the right call – he nearly cut “Part Of Your World” from The Little Mermaid after it failed to connect with a test audience, predicted that Pocahontas would be a guaranteed hit, and had serious doubts about the potential of The Lion King. But there is no denying that he was a very hands-on studio chair at a time of great critical and commercial success for Disney animation. One of the film’s most interesting scenes relates how Katzenberg one day asked the animators directly what it was like working for Disney under him. The animators gave him honest answers, explaining how they suffered with everything from hand tremors to carpal tunnel problems to an inability to start a family due to the long hours they worked. Katzenberg was visibly moved by their stories and proclaimed that this was not right, that the animators should be able to have lives outside of their work. Nothing was done about the problem, but the film does not suggest insincerity on Katzenberg’s part. Rather, the continuing grueling pace at Disney animation is attributed to a combination of the animators’ devotion to their craft and a lack of a clear solution that wouldn’t compromise the momentum and success that the studio was enjoying.
There are a few players in the story of the revival of DIsney animation who dom’t receive such fair-handed coverage. Some are directors who didn’t get along with Eisner’s regime and were fired without their sides of the story being explored. But the most glaring oversight is Don Bluth. Bluth is mentioned towards the beginning of the film, but only as a polarizing figure who eventually led a group of like-minded animators out of Disney to form his own studio. All of the subsequent focus on Bluth is limited to how his departure set back the production of The Fox and the Hound and how his departure dealt a major blow to an already weakened Disney. The lack of explanation for why Bluth left Disney is puzzling, especially considering how frank the movie is about the condition of Disney animation at that point and the animators’ dissatisfaction with the work they were producing and the similarity between Bluth’s desire to be given the freedom to show what he could do and the desire of the animators – and much later, Katzenberg – to do pretty much the same thing.
The movie ends with Katzenberg’s departure after the release of The Lion King. While it’s made clear that only ten years of Disney history are being covered, I feel that cutting off at this point was a mistake. “The studio politics will fade away while the films endure” is a nice sentiment to end on, but it also highlights a very important piece of the puzzle which the film leaves out. The main reason that Eisner, Katzenberg, and Disney are interesting is because of the movies made during their time with the animation studio. The question left hanging at the film’s end is “How did the end of the relationship between these men, and Katzenberg’s departure in particular, affect the movies?”
Even with the gaps in its narrative, Waking Sleeping Beauty provides a fascinating look inside an animation studio at the top of its game. Like all good documentaries that deal with the creative process, it shows how the making of an animated film is a difficult journey with numerous wrong turn and dead ends along the way. It may not reveal the magic formula that could help Disney recapture the success of the past, but it does reveal how a great movie or a great studio is combination of many people and factors coming togther at the right time. Waking Sleeping Beauty is a must-see movie for anyone interested in world of studio animation.
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Tags: behind the scenes, disney, hand-drawn animation, movies, now playing
