Waking Sleeping Beauty: Requiem for a Studio

Watching this film, I got the feeling that Don Hahn and Peter Schneider made it because they realized their best days were behind them and they were looking to celebrate and mourn the end of their greatest successes.

This film covers the period of Disney animation history from the change in management in 1984, when Frank Wells, Michael Eisner, Roy Disney and Jeffrey Katzenberg took over from Ron Miller until Katzenberg's resignation after The Lion King. Because the film is bookended by these two changes in management, the film gives the impression that the rise and fall of the studio during this period was due to the people at the top. While they undoubtedly had a strong influence, such as deciding which films were made, the quality of those films was determined by the literally hundreds of people who created them.

Those people are portrayed as bystanders to management politics and the film is curiously selective about who gets identified. I don't believe that Andreas Deja or Eric Goldberg, while they are shown, ever have their names on screen and (except for a deleted clip in the extras) Goldberg is not heard either. I spent a great deal of the film wondering who I was looking at or knowing and waiting in vain for the film to identify them. In an odd way, the film is like a monster movie where giant executives face off while anonymous artists run for cover. Even when the artists are identified, there is no sense of what part they played in the making of the films or their individual sensibilities.

The film is fascinating for anyone interested in animation history, but I think that overall the film is a failure. It doesn't explain why the animated features became successful except to talk about management shaking up the animation staff and the presence of Howard Ashman. There is no doubt that Ashman was a major influence in terms of the musical numbers and story construction, but he had nothing to do with the creation of the visuals. Those are left unexplained.

The film takes for granted the status of the animated features, measuring them only by box office. There's no further attempt to evaluate them in terms of quality or dissect why some were more successful than others.

The management infighting that led to the collapse of Disney animation is spelled out and no one comes off looking good. Once Frank Wells died, the remaining executive team was jealous of each other and couldn't put aside their differences for the good of the stockholders or the art form. The studio may have run out of energy anyway, but it took only seven years from The Lion King to Atlantis: The Lost Empire. For an explanation of that decline, see Dream On, Silly Dreamer.

There is one segment in the extras that shows perfectly what's missing from this film. The recording session for The Little Mermaid's song "Part of Your World" was videotaped. Inside the recording booth, Howard Ashman and Jodi Benson work on getting the interpretation right amidst the chatter from the control room. While Benson hasn't yet nailed what Ashman is looking for, her performance is superb. Her voice is beautiful and her phrasing is masterful. Music is more cinematic than animation in that it can be created in real time, but this is perhaps the only example on the DVD of the creative act, the thing at the center of the films that this documentary is supposed to be celebrating. The Disney artists were Benson's equal in their own field, though the film doesn't acknowledge this. No matter how sharp Wells, Eisner, Katzenberg, and Disney were, they were not the ones writing, directing or drawing. In this film, all the glory goes to the jockeys and too little to the horses.

It's only the popularity of the films covered in this documentary that justify its existence. Few would care to see a documentary about Hanna Barbera during the same time period. But as this film does little to explain the success of the animated features from 1984-'94, what's left is little more than a souvenir for the crew and those fans with a hunger for a look behind the scenes.

A Gaggle of Guests

(Updated at the bottom.)

Paul Fierlinger

It's only the second week of classes at Sheridan College, but due to a variety of circumstances, we've been lucky to have three industry guests in three days.

Paul Fierlinger was in Toronto to attend the Toronto International Film Festival screenings of his new feature My Dog Tulip. I was able to reach Paul and arrange for him to speak at the college, but the notice was so short we wedged him into a first year animation lecture and then spread the word to students from other years.

My Dog Tulip

Fierlinger spoke about his long career as a freelancer and independent film maker, urging the students to be original and to use their originality as their main selling point. He said that except for corporate logos, he never did a job that wasn't in his own style. It wasn't enough for him to say that his style was better, he had to show the client (often with sample animation) that his approach would work better than a design approach they put forward.

Fierlinger was very bullish on the internet, urging students to find communities that exist on line and figure out ways to serve them through animation. He mentioned a friend who was a 5th grade teacher who made simple animations for his students as a hobby, and now other teachers were now requesting copies and the friend was making several hundred dollars a week marketing the shorts while continuing to teach.

Fierlinger stressed the power of the internet, both in terms of making sales but also for doing research and for collaborating. Fierlinger was able to research the location of My Dog Tulip without traveling to England thanks to the internet and he found Shay Lynch, the composer for his next film (on John Slocum, the first man to sail around the world solo), after hearing his work on The Animated Life blog on the New York Times.

Fierlinger has been freelancing continuously for 51 years and his example is a good one for animation students, who often only think of landing a job at a studio. His determination to work with his own artistic style and his ability to deal with adult content in films like A Room Nearby and Still Life with Animated Dogs, point in directions that students need to consider.

Don Hahn

On Wednesday evening, Don Hahn made an appearance at Sheridan College. The event was held in the large theatre on campus and over a hundred students were still turned away. Hahn did a presentation about Walt Stanchfield, artistic inspiration and the production process. After his presentation, he signed copies of his recent books. Hahn was also in town for the Toronto International Film Festival, where his documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty was screening. The film is about the revival of Disney animation in the 1980s and '90s.

Walt Stanchfield was a Disney animator who taught drawing extensively at the studio. Stanchfield's notes on various drawing and animation topics have circulated in photocopy form for years, and Hahn has compiled the notes into a recently published two volume set called Drawn to Life. The presentation on Stanchfield included lots of his art and several videos of him teaching at the Disney studio.

Hahn showed a great many pieces of illustration art that inspired Disney's original artistic crew and more recent work that had an influence on the newer generation.

Not by design, Hahn started off by taking the opposite tack from Fierlinger, saying that animation is a team sport and talking about the pleasures and necessities of collaboration. He stepped through the entire production process, showing sample art and video for each step. He showed rejected character designs and played a bit of the first version of "Circle of Life" to make the point that you want to fail fast and fail often. It takes going down wrong paths before you find the best solution and the collaborative process allows for many more variations to be examined before the best solution is found.

Hahn was enthusiastic for the future of animation and drawn animation in particular, saying that he greatly admired what he had seen on The Princess and the Frog, but should it fail at the box office, Disney would still continue to make drawn features. He talked about how international animation has become and the many opportunities thanks to that and technology that were not available when he started. He was excited to see what films would be made in the next 10 years by the people who were currently students.

Hahn was asked what his most pleasant working experience was and he answered that it was working on Atlantis. While he admitted that the people had to judge for themselves how successful the film was, he said that he was working with people he had known for 10 years and very much liked. By contrast, the toughest working experience he had was on Beauty and the Beast, where the production had to deal with Howard Ashman's death, having its budget cut and Hahn having a child during production.

Joe Haidar

The last guest of the week was Joe Haidar, a veteran animator who has worked in Canada, England and the U.S, including 15 years at Disney. Joe was in Toronto to visit friends and family and brought along Animated American, a live action and animated short film he co-directed with James Baker and that was produced by Susan Cohen.

I had Haidar as a guest in my second year lecture, though many third and fourth year students sat in. He screened the complete film and then talked about how the film was made. When he and Baker were laid off at Disney, they decided to do something for themselves rather than just look for another job. The two wrote the story and then brought in screenwriter Tim Talbott to polish the script. The live action was shot over 4 days and then Haidar and Baker did the bulk of animation themselves over more than a year.

Haidar was surprised and sorry to discover that people from live action were far more cooperative and generous in helping the film get made than people in animation. He also mentioned that when they started the film, they realized that they knew hundreds of artists, but no business people and he suggested to the students that they don't limit their professional relationships to other artists.

Animated American is currently playing festivals and Haidar and Baker are planning to do a live action feature as their next project together.

The best thing about these guests is their varying viewpoints. Fierlinger is the lone independent, Hahn is the corporate team player and Haidar is the new director looking to launch his own projects. If nothing else, they demonstrate that animation, as an occupation and a medium, has greater possibilities than many people realize.

(Update: Paul Fierlinger posted his impressions of how My Dog Tulip was received at the Toronto International Film Festival here. The Globe and Mail has an article dealing with both My Dog Tulip and Waking Sleeping Beauty here.)