Interview: Waking Sleeping Beauty’s Creative Team

Many men and women in their early twenties in some way, shape or form grew up with Disney. Whether that would be with the emergence of The Disney Channel or their live action family films, there is at least a small form of influence the House of Mouse had on our childhoods.

Such is the case with myself, practically weaned on Disney animated features in the proclaimed ‘golden years’ of their animation company. When you see films like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King, you’re so completely enveloped in that world of bright colors, rich story line and musical sequences that you can’t stop yourself from becoming addicted. Waking Sleeping Beauty not only cradles that important era in time of the Disney history, but it opens up all of the struggles, pains and successes that came from it.

Don Hahn, the director of Waking Sleeping Beauty, was right in the middle of it. He served as a “young turk” producer within the company and had his hand in a couple of features during the time period of 1984-1994. Peter Schneider came on board the Disney animation family in 1985 as one of the leads of that department, a daunting task ahead of him along with Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Frank Welles and Roy Disney in regards to completely revitalizing their once-great sector of the studio.

Despite what a majority of us would suspect, there was a lot of events and issues going on in the background of this department that had yet to be showcased on the big screen. ” I’ve been trying to make this movie for ten years after I left the company in 2001. I thought, there is a story here. I knew that even before I left the company. Part of it was too much history, too much anger, too much animosity amongst all of the players to try and get it off the ground,” says Schneider.

“In roughly about 2008, everybody suddenly said yes, all of the pieces came together magically and we did it.” Unfortunately for Schneider’s sake, Hahn was not entirely ready to take on the director’s chair for this picture. ” I didn’t leap at it right away,” says Hahn. “We looked for other directors, figuring out a way to tell this with who wants to fund it and who’s going to want to do it. I ended up becoming really passionate about this because I know this story, I lived it, I was in the middle of it.”

It was not always sunshine and rainbows in the Disney Animation department. Under the layers of music and sketches was a spreading flame of envy and ego that went on between Roy Disney, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner. When you’re showing certain people in not the most flattering of lights, you would normally think there’s a form of hesitancy. “We weren’t really afraid,” states Schneider.” I think that it was the time to do it, and I’m really glad we did it because Roy Disney just died in December. Therefore, we captured his story from one of the last interviews we ever did. We celebrated his legacy and what he did, which has not been celebrated, so that’s what we did.”

The animation department was taking major hits at the time that Peter Schneider came into power as the head of the animation department before he crept his way up to studio chief in the late nineties before resigning. He reflects on his feelings when he first came into power. ” …really exciting. I always refer to it as the field that has not been turned in awhile, and there is this terrific soil and no one saw it. All you do is take the tiller, go through the soil and turn it up. Then you look at how beautiful, rich and what spectacular stuff was there. You weed it out, put some seeds in there and boy did the flowers just grow.”

“It’s just a good metaphor,” continued Schneider. “Beneath it all was this field to do interesting things. It just took some people to come in like Jeffrey Katzenberg, Roy Disney, myself, Don (Hahn) and others coming in and saying ‘C’mon! (claps hands) We can do it!’” Once these magic men took the reigns, there was no place else to go with the sector than up. With that, the pressure came crashing down on all of the artists in the building. ” It takes something to wake you up and go, ‘Oh, I can’t punch a time clock anymore and just work, have coffee and take long lunches.’” stated Hahn. “This is a serious business and making movies is hard work.”

“Therefore, all of a sudden you started being judged on how much work you did, how many hours you put in.” Schneider goes on about the new schedule of sorts,” That became part of the culture, the culture of an eighteen hour day. …they were still hourly employees who weren’t keeping track of their time cards, and that freed them up to be artists again.” With this new-found freedom of creativity, that’s the time that the department flourished. Then again, one could argue that it’s got several waves, and that there’s more than this particular time period where Disney animation was at it’s finest. Hahn explains a bit more about why the sudden restriction of time. ” We felt like we couldn’t tell the entire story of Disney animation, we had to put some brackets around it. 1984 to 1994 did seem, as we’ve said, the perfect storm of people, circumstances and it was a big chapter change.

“It was a big turn over right there with Jeffrey (Katzenberg) leaving, Michael (Eisner) having his heart attack, Frank (Welles) dying in a helicopter crash, all happening within a very short period of time. The culture of the studio would change, and we made great movies after that. It wasn’t like we dropped off of a cliff. It was just culturally different and a really logical point to end it there.” Of course it would be silly not to mention the different kinds of people that cropped up from this particular time frame, like Tim Burton, John Lasseter, John Musker and others. This includes the ones that spawned off to make names for themselves in other sectors.

“So, for story I think we had an extraordinary group of story tellers in that movie (Beauty and the Beast), and they’re all directors now. How to Train Your Dragon is coming out in a couple of weeks, Chris Sanders is directing that who was part of the story team on The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. Then there’s Brenda Chapman who’s directing Shrek was part of the story team for those two, the story team for Beauty and the Beast. So there’s this crucible, and out of it came all of this great talent,” says Hahn. There are some characters within the Disney realm of that time that left their mark, and one of those was Howard Ashman.

“Howard was great, and again it’s never quite as simple as that. Howard had been writing a song for Oliver and Company.” Schenider continues on with the history he shared with “Howard was well known to us. I had worked with Howard in New York, he was doing a song in Oliver and Company, he had talked about doing a musical. It was sort of like, “Let’s put these guys together, let’s put them together and see what they come out with.”

Although this age of Disney has passed by does not mean that animation has slowed down. At the least, it’s been speeding up quite a bit, and I’m not the only one who agrees. Hahn goes on to say,”In fact today if your in the animation industry its a boom town. You can go to work for a dozen companies that are making spectacular work.” Schneider and Hahn have not slowed down one bit, still working on all sorts of projects. Within the realm of Disney, Hahn is in the middle of post-production acting as executive producer on DisneyNature’s Oceans and will be serving as producer on Tim Burton’s stop-motion animated feature Frankenweenie.

There are all sorts of different people that helped bring together each feature film that came out of Disney, especially from the animation department at this special point in time. What we have been left with now is treasured animated classics that continue to touch each generation.

Waking Sleeping Beauty is out this Friday in limited theaters, so be sure to check to see if it’s playing in your area.