Peter Schneider and Roy E. Disney passionately believed in the importance of Disney animation and played lead roles in the renaissance that began in the mid-1980s.
From the death of Walt Disney through the early 1980s, Disney Animation was far from “Hakuna Matata” (no worries). Not only was there the challenge of upholding the values and quality of family entertainment, as Walt had set forth, but also in creating entertainment without the guiding force of the man who started it all. And it wasn’t always going swimmingly. The Little Mermaid, which would change the face of animation, had not yet been released, and it was a tense and uncertain time that included a string of box office sleepers.
Waking Sleeping Beauty, a new documentary directed by Don Hahn (producer of Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, among others), takes you on a real-life journey to show you the astonishing truth of what occurred behind the scenes while revitalizing Disney’s animation. It was not all done with a smile and a song. The reality is that during that period from 1984 to 1994, there were power struggles, tension and chaos in the wake.
Waking Sleeping Beauty allows us to be a fly on the wall in Disney Feature Animation, to spy on what was really going on behind closed doors at that time. That’s because the film’s producer, Peter Schneider, and producer/director Don Hahn were both there, and they were key players in Disney’s animation at that time (Peter was vice president of animation and Don was producer).
Peter told D23, “What I was so impressed by is that everybody participated (in this film). I don’t think anybody said no to this.”
“I think part of it is that people felt connected to either Peter or myself and felt comfortable about talking to either Peter or myself and there was a level of trust there,” Don says. “They hopefully knew we weren’t going to take cheap shots and when we said we want to be honest, they felt like there was going to be some sort of integrity to it. When we showed it to Michael (Eisner) and Jeffrey (Katzenberg) and Roy (E. Disney), they all had different emotional reactions, but no one said, ‘How dare you’ve done this to me?’” Don particularly recalls Jeffrey’s reaction, “He a very forward- looking executive, so to stop and look back at the beginnings of his career in animation, and now he’s one of the greatest animation producers of all-time. I think it was very emotional for him to see that and [composer] Howard (Ashman’s) death and relive some of that time.”
Waking Sleeping Beauty Director Don Hahn (left) and producer Peter Schneider.
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By narrating the film along with others who were part of that world at the time, and using memos, caricatures, home movies and other rare film and video footage to tell the story, viewers are almost literally taken back to the Disney Studios in the 1980s and ’90s. As Don described it, “It’s a YouTube generation kind of movie because people don’t care about the quality, they want to know what the reality is.”
The film is really a time capsule of The Walt Disney Company during that critical time in the Company’s history. It is not only entertaining, educational and historical, but Waking Sleeping Beauty is nothing less than a revelation.
By D23′s Scott Wolf.
