In the mid-1980′s a series of mediocre movies and box office flops threatened to shutter the Disney animation department forever. Studies showed children “wouldn’t be caught dead” near a cartoon film like The Black Cauldron and live-action classics such as Flight of the Navigator were dominating the zeitgeist instead. Teetering on the brink of extinction, the department went through corporate and creative changes that brought about a modern resurgence and a new golden age of animated cinema.
Told using a treasure trove of archival footage, Waking Sleeping Beauty chronicles the influential decade where a parallel peak of hand-drawn animation met the contentious backroom battles of top executives. It’s a fun, fascinating look at the magic and mistakes that made such great films.
A conscious lack of reminiscing “talking heads” spliced into the home video keeps the story firmly rooted in the timeline; instead accompanied by candid audio interviews with the major players or the occasional deadpan delivery of director and Disney insider Don Hahn, who produced many of the era’s classics, like 1991′s Oscar-nominated Beauty and the Beast.
Hahn introduces the nephew of legendary Walt Disney, Roy E. Disney, who fought to preserve his legacy by keeping movies as the foundation of the institution. In a bold move, Disney hired the eager Michael Eisner and level-headed daredevil Frank Wells as CEO and COO, who soon brought in Jeffrey Katzenberg to turn around animation. Katzenberg would later promote himself as much as the movies — a tradition he carried with him to his current post at DreamWorks Animation — and his management style collided with others jockeying for credit when cartoon movies began to make money again.
Simultaneously, the film brilliantly sketches the landmarks in the rise of animated creativity. Included are the original pitch meeting for The Little Mermaid‘s “Under the Sea” and trivia like Rescuers Down Under becoming the first digitally animated movie with a little help from a tiny company called Pixar.
Caricatures hilariously lampoon the behind-the-scenes culture and peeks behind the curtain capture the child-like playtime of the artists, who coped with the pressures of downsizing by reenacting Apocalypse Now or goofed off in the office as the long hours took their toll. Seen participating in the antics are a young, lanky Tim Burton and a silly John Lasseter, who left to become a director at Pixar only to ultimately return as chief creative officer. It’s clear these animators are blissfully unaware they are at work shaping the childhoods of a new generation.
Nostalgia is impossible to fend off as the footage invokes those moments of wide-eyed wonder staring intently at Aladdin or dancing to the carefree philosophy of The Lion King‘s “Hakuna Matata.” Through the benefit of hindsight, those moving memories mingle with the documentary’s own emotional highs and lows for a touching experience as much as an informative one.
Waking Sleeping Beauty is a rare, honest film about the art and business of storytelling, and it’s a must-see for anyone affected by the results of a magical comeback in animation.
4.5 out of 5.
