'Waking Sleeping Beauty' a review

If you didn't know Disney are those guys who produce all the films from your childhood that you still know the words too. In Waking Sleeping Beauty Don Hahn (Disney producer nominated for an Oscar for Beauty and the Beast) takes us behind the scenes of what it was like to work in the animation department in the House of Mouse during the Renaissance period of Disney before every second film was about talking snow dogs that you secretly hope are now being fed large chunks of meat with suspicious pills in. What could have been a nice insight into the egos, conflicts and etchings of the artists behind the pictures that would interest those from animation aficionados to slow-Joe-in-the-back-row ends up being one and a half hours of  Don hammering home the point that Hollywood execs don't understand anything about making movies and charging around from event to event in his home movies pointing at stuff just to make sure that we understand that it's bloody brilliant working for Mickey!  

I'm a bit of an animation buff if I'm honest, I love the stuff, the magic of pencil on paper projected at the screen at 30 frames per second in vivid colour with talking animals and rousing musical numbers is my idea of a great time. In the beginning I was determined to like Waking Sleeping Beauty, I wanted to see the faces behind the magic; those that had poured their heart and soul into every frame that would fly past the screen in less than a second; the tortured loners, the eccentrics, the one's that saw beauty in every blade of grass but what I got was a rather lengthily documentary about how three old guys (Jeffrey Katzenberg, Michael Eisner and Roy Disney) pretended to like each other and made some films in the background at the start because they thought: "That's what Walt would have wanted." and then because it made them a boat load of money. For a movie that is supposed to be about making movies the main theme seems to be that of corporate backstabbing and office politics rather than the geniuses that actually created the films from idea to implementation. What is worse is that we never even really see any actual backstabbing, the real story comes only from what we can infer with Hahn unwilling or unable to show us the real showdowns between the three and we are left to deduce where most of the conflict comes from from sideways glances and everyone insisting that they wouldn't be invited round each others houses for Christmas.

Katzenberg constantly set up for a fall - and a mauling.

Hahn sets it up from the off that you should hate Katzenberg lining him up as a ruthless self promoter and ignorant to the artistic process of making a film only seeing the audience as walking dollar signs ("Did you know that he wanted to cut 'Part of that world' from the Little Mermaid? Only the most important song in the whole film!" Or "He flew us all to London for a meeting to tell us that we had no more money for the film, just to fly us back?" Squawk several interviewees during the documentary.) When the documentary shows a real life lion attempting to maul Katzenberg on stage during the promotion of The Lion King the camera lingers a little too long on the incident as if Hahn behind it was willing the beast on, just even to take a little chunk out. In the end though I realized that I had enough bile to be thrown at all three men and was happy enough to dislike them all equally. They were the only one's that I could see that were stopping me from seeing more of Belle, Ariel and Simba - when they shut up and went away I'd be able to see more of what Disney did best, the only problem is that they never did.

Frequent insights into the animator's minds are brilliant - and a little scary!

Spliced around the home movie footage there are interviews with various people either to camera or on the phone. The problem is that often the floating voices are speaking while their counter-part on the screen is moving their mouth making it uncertain who is speaking to the point where I was certain that the sound had to be broken on the rented disk that this was playing off. It was off-putting enough that I missed the emotional climax of the documentary with the death of Howard Ashman (Composer on The Little Mermaid) before he had ever seen the finished cut of the film he was working on at the time (Beauty and the Beast). After a quick rewind and a re-watch there were tears in my eyes as colleagues recount Ashman's battle with AIDS and how he passed away on a hospital trolley still wearing his purple Beauty and the Beast pull over. The only time that I was truly lost in the narrative and captivated by the human drama of the piece.

The film provides a solid overview of this period of Disney history but if you are already familiar with the events (and I suspect that this will be the case with virtually everyone thinking of seeing this), it doesn’t really have much to offer aside from some fascinating glimpses of the likes of John Lasseter and Tim Burton toiling away in anonymity before they got their big breaks. There's also some great artwork from the artists working on various projects lampooning their bosses or recording events in the office as little comic strips. 

For the most part it feels like a tabloid article that hash enough superficial gossip to keep audiences interested but lacks any real bite. Animation buffs are likely to find it fascinating, at least when it deals with the nuts-and-bolts of the filmmaking process, but for everyone else, Waking Sleeping Beauty is essentially a lengthy DVD extra that Disney is charging people to see.