Revisiting ‘Waking Sleeping Beauty’, One Of The Best Documentaries Ever Made About The Walt Disney Company
(Welcome toOut of the Disney Vault, where we explore the unsung gems and forgotten disasters currently streaming on Disney+.)The Walt Disney Company is laser-focused on creating and preserving its legacy. As the conglomerate approaches its 100th anniversary in 2023, it’s easy to understand why the company looks back at its own history and wants to ensure that a specific version of that history is what becomes common knowledge. “It all started with a mouse” is the easy go-to quote from Walt Disney, even if that’s not really true. (Mickey Mouse wasn’t the studio’s first hit character, let alone the studio’s first hit animated character.) Of course, the flip side to wanting to create your own legacy is that people might become skeptical that the version of history you’re telling is actually whathappened.That inherent skepticism is one of many reasons thatWaking Sleeping Beauty, a Disney-sanctioned and distributed documentary about one of the company’s crown jewels, is so shocking to watch a decade later.
Walt Disney Animation Studios is the linchpin of the company, and always has been. They may own Fox and Marvel and Lucasfilm and Pixar now, but none of those acquisitions and none of the related dominance would exist were it not for the feature films and shorts from the animation unit. Thus, it tracks that Disney as a whole would green-light a documentary about the studio, and specifically a massively important period in that studio’s history. That, in essence, is the pitch forWaking Sleeping Beauty: the 85-minute documentary is all about the period of time between 1984 and 1994 as Disney Animation swung from its nadir to the soaring heights ofThe Lion King. The film is co-produced, directed, and narrated by Don Hahn, the Academy Award-nominated producer ofBeauty and the Beast.By the late 2000s, the Walt Disney Company had already begun to crystallize its legacy in documentary form. Though they weren’t released on the same wide scale as major animated or live-action releases, documentaries about some of the studio’s most well-known creative figures had become available sporadically. In 1995, the studio releasedFrank and Ollie, a loving look back at two of the fabled Nine Old Men of Disney Animation, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, longtime collaborators and friends. And just months before the release ofWaking Sleeping Beauty, Disney released another documentary about its past,The Boys: The Sherman Brothers Story.That documentary may one day be worth its own entry in this column, if only because it, too, is surprisingly unflinching. (At least, for a Disney-released documentary.) The short version is thatThe Boystells the story of Richard and Robert Sherman, the composing team of brothers behind the songs ofMary Poppins. The longer version is that the documentary talks fairly frankly about the dysfunctional and fractious relationship between Richard and Robert, one that is arguably not fully repaired by film’s end. (That documentarywillbe on Disney+ — according to their site, it’ll be around on May 22 of 2020.)
The Legacy
This movie is all about legacy.Waking Sleeping Beautymay present a slightly less-than-happy view of the goings-on at Disney Animation in the 1980s and 1990s, but the result is still the same. The studio that was nearly on death’s door in the mid-1980s was unstoppable in the mid-1990s. And even though the rise of computer animation changed the trajectory of Disney Animation over the last quarter-century, they’ve never had such grim moments as those when Jeffrey Katzenberg tried to edit, on his own, the rough cut ofThe Black Cauldronhe was presented with upon arriving at the company.Waking Sleeping Beautyis a fine starter for anyone interested in exploring the documentaries on Disney+. Though I wish it was longer — and there’s plenty of reason for it to both cover more ground and spend more time doing so — for anyone averse to dry and staid non-fiction filmmaking, this speedy film works quite well. The other in-house documentaries are varying levels of successful, depending on your mileage. (I preferThe BoystoFrank and Ollie, if only because the former is more willing to acknowledge the awkwardness of being paired with someone in the public eye despite not liking them very much.)What this movie offers, though, is just a taste of the true history of Disney Animation. Hahn is one of the best people around to tell that story, in full or in brief. It’s not surprising that in the last few years, he’s gone on to direct another documentary tied to this period: it’s calledHoward, and it’s all about Howard Ashman. Though it was shown at a few festivals, don’t worry that you missed out.Howardis coming to Disney+ in 2020. It’s just one more way for Disney to keep doing what it did withWaking Sleeping Beauty: burnish its own legacy to a fine mirror shine.
