Waking Sleeping Beauty

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JOHN:

Elton John, up at Pinewood on--

What's the date?

WOMAN:
The 12th of--

JOHN:

Twelfth of March.

It's me, split track, 20--

Thirty-frame center track.

There's the tone.

MAN:

Quiet, please.

JOHN:

Here we go.

HAHN:
It was the spring of 1994

and we were just finishing The Lion King,

which would go on

to earn great reviews

and about three-quarters

of a billion dollars at the box office.

Not bad for a group of artists

who were kicked off the Disney lot

and an art form that was given up for dead

just ten years earlier.

HAHN:

I produced The Lion King

and the cast-and-crew premiere

was coming up fast.

It was tradition for all of us

to get up on-stage

and give warm thank-you speeches.

But this time

I decided to film all the speeches instead.

HAHN:
Whenever you're comfortable.

You are rolling?

HAHN:
Yeah.

Okay.

With all the many varied businesses

this company is in, it is clear--

It becomes clearer every day

that animation is its soul, heart,

and most of its body parts.

You guys have done an unbelievable job

over the last decade,

culminating in Lion King,

in pushing forward the company,

the culture and the quality of artistry.

Congratulations from me,

from anybody who is not on this tape,

from our board, our shareholders

and my children.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

Thanks, everybody.

Thank you to everybody

for another absolutely incredible job

on another marvelous movie on the way

to the next great movie.

To an outsider,

it looked like a perfect world.

Thank you.

But backstage,

the tension had reached a peak.

HAHN:
Thank you.

Okay?

That was it?

Yeah, perfect.

Even though it was the moment

of our greatest success,

the wheels were coming off the car.

This is the story of how we got there.

HAHN:

Let's back up to the early '80s

on the Disney Studio lot

in Burbank, California.

The animation band is spreading

its holiday cheer to the employees

with banjos and jew's harps,

as was the tradition.

And that's me on the right,

trying to play"Jingle Bells" on the bass.

Like so many of us,

I grew up on a diet of Disney films.

And every four years,

I'd make a pilgrimage

to the drive-in theater

to see their latest animated masterpiece.

When I was 20, I got a job at the studio

delivering artwork and coffee

to the animators

and I felt like I won the lottery.

HAHN:

This was the house that Walt built.

Walt Disney, the toast of Hollywood,

the genius behind Disneyland

and the producer behind the first

animated feature, Snow White.

By the 1950s,

Walt was losing interest in animation

and his attention turned

to live-action films,

the new medium of television,

and building the first theme park,

Disneyland,

and planning futuristic cities

of tomorrow.

WALT:
By far, the most important part

of our Florida Project,

in fact, the heart of everything

we'll be doing in Disney World,

will be our Experimental Prototype City

of Tomorrow, Epcot.

Walt died in 1966,

but the studio still made sweet, harmless,

animated comedies for kids,

supervised by his master animators,

the Nine Old Men,

and produced by Walt's son-in-law,

studio head Ron Miller.

I'm Randy Cartwright

and this is Ron Miller.

How are you?

How are you?

Good to see you. This is Randy.

Great way to start the film.

Is this a new--? Your first commercial?

Ha, ha. Yup.

What is this for?

Just home movie.

LASSETER:
It's a documentary.

Home movie?

Documentary of the animation studio.

Hi, Mom.

Well, we're off to a good start.

Here it is, April 9th, 1980.

This is the past

to all you folks out there.

And we're gonna go inside

and see what it's like. Come on.

For some reason,

the halls of the Disney Animation building

always smelled faintly of swamp coolers

and pencil shavings and old linoleum.

This is the infamous Rat's Nest.

Animation had been in

this slow downward spiral for a long time,

even since Walt Disney was alive.

As veteran animators retired, new kids,

mostly from the Disney-sponsored school,

CalArts, filled the hallways.

LASSETER:

Why, Ruben, you're from CalArts also.

Right.

And who are you?

LASSETER:
Me?

Yes.

LASSETER:

I'm John Lasseter.

He's the cameraman.

He's leaving in a little while.

Could I show you animation?

He's got six days.

Could I show you animation?

This is animation.

Could I flip something for you?

This is it. Look at that. Peter Pan.

Oh, looks up and... Ah.

CARTWRlGHT:
Weird.

It's better than the magic

we're making today,

but we can't help that.

We were full of a lot of pent-up youthful

creative energy that had to go somewhere,

so it was channeled into things

like long lunches, volleyball games,

the annual caricature show,

and my perennial favorite,

the holiday show

that starred Eddie Fisher and Doris Day,

for some unknown reason.

I hate Zsa Zsa.

CARTWRlGHT:
This is one of our

animators here. This is Ron Clements.

He's working on a scene of the Widow

from The Fox and the Hound.

Magically, here is Mr. John-ald Musker.

Thank you, thank you.

CARTWRlGHT:
Another animator here

at the magic factory.

LASSETER:
This is Glen Keane.

CARTWRlGHT:
Keane.

LASSETER:

He is a directing animator.

KEANE:

I've been here since 8:00 this morning.

LASSETER:
Hi, Tim.

CARTWRlGHT:
This is Tim Burton,

another one of our people here.

Ron Miller knew that

Walt's guys were retiring fast.

He had to raise a new crop of animators,

but he was cautious about it.

He got burned five years earlier

when he entrusted a charismatic animator

named Don Bluth to lead the department.

But Bluth polarized the animators.

Some adored him

as the messiah of animation and others...

Well, others thought

he was just another Walt wannabe.

lronically,

Bluth himself became disillusioned

with the studio's Animation Department.

So on his birthday in 1979,

he resigned

and took half the animators with him

to start his own studio.

The bombshell set back the release

of The Fox and the Hound by six months

and left Miller and the studio betrayed.

CLEMENTS:
It was this interesting

cross-generational thing

where you still had a few

of these legendary Disney artists

who were now in their sixties

and approaching retirement

and then a bunch of young people

in their twenties

who were really, really excited

and sort of passionate about this medium.

It was thrilling to learn

from the masters.

But there was a feeling like that somehow

we could be making better films.

Around that time,

the studio did a survey

that revealed

a majority of teenage moviegoers

wouldn't be caught dead

near a Disney movie.

We were just waiting,

waiting for something, anything to happen.

On Monday,

we reported that Walt Disney Studios

was on shaky financial ground,

because of its troubled Film Division

and weak earnings

from the Epcot Center in Florida.

However, since that report,

there have been dramatic developments.

In just four days,

Disney stock jumped 16 percent,

topping off at around $58 a share.

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