Waking Sleeping Beauty (Friday, March 26, 2010) (23)

This is a very interesting documentary about Disney animation from 1984 through 1994 - arguably the most important time in the history of the company and the era that created the entertainment behemoth that Disney is today. In the early 1980s, Disney animation was at its lowest point since the death of Walt in 1966. They had a string of bad movies that were not interesting to viewers and not making money. Around 1984 the board of Disney brought in Michael Eisner and Frank Wells to turn the studio around.

Up to that point, the company was making most of its money on the theme parks and live-action movies. Eisner brought in Jeffrey Katzenberg as the Chairman of Disney and the two of them developed a strong interest in re-launching the animation arm, the bedrock of the company's legacy.

The animation department was being run by Roy Disney, Walt's nephew. Roy and Katzenberg worked tirelessly, along with executives like Dick Cook and Peter Schneider to reorganize the creative process and come up with ideas that would be both appealing to people of all ages and make them want to spend money to see the works. They all worked closely together and almost all of them hated the others. There were a lot of big egos involved and they all were puffed up by their huge paychecks.

The film is really about the historical elements of the change (going from The Great Mouse Detective to The Little Mermaid to The Lion King) and the political forces that played in the background. Eisner famously didn't promote Katzenberg when Frank Miller died, which sent Katzenberg out the door and on to DreamWorks, now a major rival to Disney (animation and live-action).

As interesting as the story is (it really is a fascinating and engaging story), the film does not really do enough to bring the viewer in and interest them. There is only a small amount of animated material shown onscreen and almost no music (considering it's a documentary about animated musicals, I think this is a shame). More unusual, and frustrating, is that all of the interviews with the principle people are used as voice-overs and you never see a 'talking head'.

I think the point of this is that it is supposed to help focus on the old footage on screen. What it actually does it makes it more confusing because it's never clear if we are hearing an old or a new interview. If you had the visual footage along with it, you could tell if it was shot recently or 20 years ago. Disembodied voices are hard to follow or pay attention to. This is especially hard when you have to juggle the names and voices of a few dozen people without a face or other visual clues to fall back on.

Sadly, we see very little about how the style of Disney's animation changed in this time. They get so wrapped up in the history they forget to mention that a movie like Beauty and the Beast looks different than earlier 2D Disney fare, like The Black Cauldron. There is also not enough discussion of how Disney got to work with Pixar so frequently at the end of the 1990s and through the Aughts.

This is a very interesting, Shakespearean chapter in Hollywood history (almost King Lear meets Henry V), but it is not presented in the best way.

Stars: 2 of 4