Below are the film's trailer and my review from last fall. Enjoy!
Part of Your World
Waking Sleeping Beauty
Review by Cate Hahneman
I am a child of Disney. Films like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King defined my youth in many ways; the songs rolled constantly through my cassette player, my closets were filled with the movies’ Happy Meal figurines, and my birthday cakes were iced with Disney princesses. My younger years are a testament to the ways in which the company has capitalized on its brand; over several decades, Disney erected theme parks across the globe, plastered their logo on lunchboxes, and infiltrated the imaginations of children everywhere. But in the years before I was born, the corporation had lost its way. The animation department, which gave Walt Disney’s company clout with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, was all but demolished. As Roy Disney, the master’s nephew, delicately stated, mass marketing the characters without creating new animation is like “running a museum.” That just would not do.
Director Don Hahn’s intimate documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty details the company’s decade-long recovery between 1984 and 1994, championed by three executives from Paramount: Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. The trio could not be more different; Eisner is the doughy-faced CEO, Wells the daring man behind the curtain, and Katzenberg plays the self-promoting, tyrant boss. The movie is about what show business does to the egos of ambitious men, but it’s also about the universality of animated features, especially those with music as a core ingredient. It’s a refreshingly honest amalgam of film clips, corporate stock footage, amateur home video, and photographs that reanimate (pun intended) this revolutionary period. There are no talking-head interview shots, only voices echoing over caricatured versions of the company’s leaders, likely sketched by amused employees. We don’t need to see who these executives are now, because this is a story about who they were back then, when everything changed.
The lowest point at Disney came when the studio’s feature The Black Cauldron, which had exceeded its budget by millions, lost at the box office to The Care Bears Movie. The company’s dominant legacy was swiftly fading. Soon after, the bustling animation department received a memo evicting them from the historic building in which the earliest versions of Mickey Mouse, Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty appeared in graphite strokes. The artists were moved to a shabby fort in Glendale, where they willfully surrendered their jobs in a mock reenactment of Apocalypse Now. The film cherishes the hidden animators of Disney, likening them to Walt himself; they’re children at heart. The craftsmen wear wrinkled t-shirts to the office and throw impromptu margarita parties. You can even spot a recognizably sullen Tim Burton hiding beneath his bushy hair. On the surface their jobs look like a lot of fun, tinkering with models and flipping frame after frame to make sketches come alive. But a closer look reveals that the animators are slaves to their drafting tables, sometimes seven days a week. Their eyes look wearily on as Katzenberg leads a meeting early enough to beat the sunrise. Making magic is a lot of work; many of the artists felt a strain on their marriages and, ironically, a distance from their children. The second Golden Age of Disney animation left a bittersweet toll.
The grown-up in me is a bit disillusioned at the chance to peek inside the magician’s hat; beneath the drawings is a jumble of creative tug-o-wars and public jealousies. After Frank Wells is killed in a helicopter crash, Katzenberg offers himself as a replacement, something both Eisner and Roy Disney disdain. They retaliate at a crew screening by announcing a new multi-million dollar headquarters for the animators. Katzenberg is scorned, knowing nothing about it. It’s strange to watch adult men act like petty boys, but this is the crux of the documentary. The kid in all of us is why these movies are successful in the first place.
Don Hahn discretely narrates from a screenplay (yes a screenplay) written by Patrick Pacheco. After all, this is a movie, released in a surprising twist by the studio itself. Waking Sleeping Beauty is a film as triumphant and tragic as any of Disney’s animated tales. Eisner, Roy, and the artists are a bumbling bunch of heroes and Katzenberg, fairly or unfairly, is the villain. There is tangible drama when members of the Disney family are lost; in addition to Wells, composer Howard Asher succumbs to AIDS before ever seeing Beauty and the Beast completed. In the film’s most heart-breaking moment, it’s revealed that Asher died wearing his purple “Beauty and the Beast” sweatshirt. Even as I write this, I feel a crushing ache in my chest because I realize these men, who I’d never known or even considered before viewing this documentary, loved the Disney movies as much as I did. This leads us to the joy of the film. Floating in the wake of money and business are stories that have saturated our pop culture from vaulted VHS tapes to Broadway shows. Twenty years later, the impact of these films on feature-length animation is still felt in the box office (hello Pixar). As the credits roll, Ariel belts out The Little Mermaid’s anthem “Part of Your World,” a song that was nearly scrapped after a poor test screening. Every lyric remains stamped somewhere deep in the folds of my brain, recalled with a nostalgic ease. In a strange way, I’m grateful for the chance to be part of their world too.
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