Waking Sleeping Beauty is a new documentary that covers roughly 1984 to 1994 at Disney's feature animation division. The movie, as I understood it, chronicled these volatile years at the studio that lead from clunkers like The Black Cauldron to triumphs like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, and detailed the tribulations of future animation gurus such as John Lasseter, Tim Burton, and Brad Bird, all of whom got their start at Disney during the production of these movies. Please do not make the mistake I did in thinking this movie would be about the animators. This is a movie about the battle of wills between 3 Disney studio bosses: Michael Eisner, Roy Disney, and Jeffrey Katzenberg. If you go into this thinking it will be like a Disney-renaissance version of To Infinity and Beyond: The Pixar Story, you will be disappointed. This is a movie directed by a producer about producers, and while insightful and interesting, this distinction keeps the movie from being as invigorating as it could have been.
Regardless of promotional misdirection, this is a whale of a tale. One doesn't get direct insight into the minds and priorities of the men in charge of one of the most powerful franchises in the world everyday. Though they are far from loved, these three insanely powerful men with dollar signs in their eyes manage to take an aimless bunch of artists and turn them into the tightest animation unit in the world. The listlessness of The Black Cauldron and the mediocrity of Oliver and Company give way to the firing-on-all-cylinders bravado of The Little Mermaid and The Lion King. This transition is tangible on the screen, both in the attitudes of the interviewees and the general sense of excitement and drive in the execution. The inter-office battles are fierce, but only to match the passion kindled for these projects. And at the center are three ego-maniacal bastards, all clamoring for the biggest piece of the pie.
As director Don Hahn told us himself repeatedly before and after the screening, Waking Sleeping Beauty is “not a puff piece.” It gets tough on the studio bosses. Michael Eisner comes off as your classic devil in a designer suit, perfectly rational in his money-grubbing madness. Roy Disney fares the best here with his 'mellow grandpa' demeanor, but certain half-mumbled quips and passive-aggressive stances lead the viewer to imagine that not all was calm and reasonable concerning this heir to the Disney name. Jeffrey Katzenberg gets the brunt of the direct criticism, both from his peers and his former employees at the studio. At best, he comes off as a the personification of that classic Hollywood caricature: the studio boss who doesn't know his asshole from his elbow (and certainly nothing about animation), but nonetheless thinks he can test-screen and committee-produce your movie to death. Then again, it's entirely possible that Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Lion King wouldn't have been half as successful without Katzenberg at the wheel, so who knows...
Though the doc is critical of these men, it nonetheless implicitly tells things from their point of view, with some sticky implications. Most egregiously, the documentary treats the animators themselves – the boys and girls directly responsible for the magic up on screen – as a mass of people rather than as individuals. As if seen through the eyes of Eisner or Katzenberg, these talented craftsmen and women are treated more like chess pieces to move around than people. For a movie supposedly celebrating the artistic merits of this era in the Mouse's history, this is a morbid moral.
There is a much more interesting movie in here somewhere, and it was telling that at the screening we were at, half of the comments directed at Don Hahn (in person for a Q and A) were concerning how he should seriously consider making a sequel about the artists themselves. The unspoken and perhaps unrealized implication was that this was really the movie we all wanted to see in the first place. If this story would have been told from the point of view of the Disney artists, not only would Hahn still have been able to tell the Eisner/Disney/Katzenberg story, but he could have relayed it through the voices and personalities an audience could actually relate to. I'm not a CEO, and let's face it, you probably aren't either. I didn't care which of these three goons came out on top. I cared about what happened to the guy who was getting really pumped about animating Ariel during the 'Whole New World' sequence. I want to know what happened to that guy.
Hahn mentioned that NASA and Google want to show this movie to their respective staffs. This makes a lot of sense to me. This is a fable for managers and 'team leaders' who want to share how you can move a mass of people to do what you want. That it's being sold as the triumphant story of a ragtag group of artists is totally misleading. Sadly, I'm pretty sure Don Hahn thinks it is 'a triumphant story of a ragtag group of artists,' and that disturbs me. You hope that managers, producers, and business leaders at least understand the implications of treating people like chess pieces, but it's painfully clear in this example that Hahn does not. He really just thinks of people as malleable objects. That messes with my head...
Magic Moment: Idea man, songwriter, and tragic AIDS victim Howard Ashman totally steals the show when he tornado-s into The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast. We're presented with archival footage of Ashman pitching the song Under the Sea to the animators, and, oh yeah, let's make the crab Jamaican. This passage is priceless, and at that point, there's no denying Ashman's mad genius.
If I haven't scared you away, Waking Sleeping Beauty is playing at Starz for the remainder of the week. I was more disturbed by the movie than most seem to be, so by all means go and form your own opinion!
-Ben