Arriving at Disney shortly after it released the bomb “The Black Cauldron,” Jeffrey Katzenberg urged the animators, “We have to wake Sleeping Beauty.”
Five years after the unit hit its Nadir, it was producing a string of classics starting with “The Little Mermaid.” Interviews with Katzenberg and other key executives and creatives involved in the renaissance (up to 1994 and the glory that was “The Lion King”) add up to a somewhat compelling but not completely satisfying documentary.
The movie skips around various story lines, the highlight of which is the rise and demise of Howard Ashman, the “Little Mermaid” and “Beauty and the Beast” lyricist who brought Broadway to the animation. Immediately after a press preview of 1991’s “Beast,” Disney leaders rushed to his bed at St. Vincent’s Hospital to tell him it was shaping up as a hit — as he lay dying of AIDS.
Despite the impressive marshalling of materials such as the animators’ ruthless caricatures of their bosses and a home movie of the crew re-enacting “Apocalypse Now,” “Waking Sleeping Beauty” doesn’t have as much behind-the-scenes juice as you’d hope.
We learn that both “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” and “Beauty and the Beast” were subjected to budget restrictions but are given no sense of how financial issues affected those seemingly flawless films. And such issues as how much credit Katzenberg ultimately deserved remain a muddle.