Waking Sleeping Beauty

In the middle of the eighties the Disney animation studio is in a bad way. The films are not working, the old master animators have retired, the young ones do not know what to do, and the studio is moved out of the main building. The documentary starts there and tells ten years. New management arrives, conflicts begin, projects are cancelled, and then The Little Mermaid appears. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King follow. The studio is saved. The documentary also tells what that success cost. Don Hahn directs; he was a producer at the studio in those years and was inside the events he describes. The documentary uses no new footage; it is built entirely from home video shot at the time, studio recordings and archive. Material the animators shot on their own cameras is its main substance, and those recordings were not made for broadcast. The narrative does not hide the conflicts in management; the tension between three executives is described directly. It treats Howard Ashman's illness and death in detail, and that section is its heaviest passage. The matter it treats is whose doing the success was; the film credits no single name. Its limit is position; the director is from inside the studio and is careful on certain matters. Who it is for: anyone curious about the history of animation and how a studio works. Who it is not for: it asks for inside knowledge, its structure is bound to the archive, and it does not go beyond the period.