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by Jonathan Lewis – March 25, 2010

Don Hahn was an animator for many years at Walt Disney Animation before becoming one of its film directors, and producer Peter Schneider began in 1985 to bring the company into the corporate age. They bring their insider knowledge to Waking Sleeping Beauty, a new documentary about Disney’s misfortunes in the early 1990s and subsequent rise back to the top by the end of the decade.

GAY CHICAGO: What was the state of animation at Disney following Walt Disney’s death in 1966?

DON HAHN: Walt Disney had already lost interest in animated films, being more concerned with live-action films and theme park design. So the animation division had no champions for it.

GC: How did Disney create its renaissance?

PETER SCHNEIDER: Animation was still a bastion of old-fashioned thinking. My first challenge was to stop asking animators “what would Walt do?” and instead start asking what we as the new generation would do. We started bringing in newer, younger people, like lyricist Howard Ashman who had a fresh sensibility. He was openly gay (shocking within the company at that time), from New York and the world of musical theatre.

DH: Howard represented part of the new wave of creative talent that helped reinvigorate the company with their ideas and opinions. Before this, people weren’t allowed to have opinions in the company.

GC: In 1984, what was the prevailing idea in looking forward to the future of animation?

PS: The movies made in the wake of Walt’s death, Robin Hood, The Fox and the Hound, The Black Cauldron, they weren’t bad so much as they were not dynamic, not challenging. By 1984, our desire to tell aggressively interesting stories changed.

DH: There wasn’t some grand master plan. It was just make the best animated movie we possibly can. And if it works, maybe we’ll get a chance to make another one.

GC: Was Who Framed Roger Rabbit the turning point?

PS: Absolutely. It revolutionized the idea that we could make an aggressive family film.

GC: A darker film like The Black Cauldron just didn’t work for Disney. Did Disney’s own reputation hurt?

DH: We lacked the confidence to try something darker and weren’t committed to it 100%. In trying to appeal to older viewers, we also didn’t want to disorient our family audience. We diluted the intention.

GC: I loved The Rescuers Down Under, but it flopped. Why do a sequel?

PS: The original movie was a hit, so the studio decided it could capitalize on a previous hit’s name recognition. It was a wrong decision. Everyone at the studio loved the Outback story, but the mice characters from The Rescuers were the most boring things about it. It should have been a stand-alone piece.

DH: The visuals are the most extraordinary thing about that film because it was the first all-digital movie ever made. It was a landmark film, but it was not a success.

PS: At the time, I argued that we should not be in the sequel business. Instead of always looking behind us, we should take our talent, time and money to create all new stories.

GC: Movie musicals were a moribund genre in the 1980s, so why turn The Little Mermaid into one?

DH: It was somewhat evolutionary. Oliver and Company was a stepping stone with five songs but by five different people. It was people from the theatre, like Peter here, who said to get storytelling into the songs one songwriting team to have a unifying vision.

GC: Thirty-seven Oscar-nominated songs and 10 Academy Awards for Best Song, nine Academy Awards for Best Score. How important is music in Disney animated films.

DH: It’s everything going all the way back to the first movie, Snow White, because all the great moments in those movies are often the musical ones.

PS: Music is such an emotional hook that it lives on past the life of the movie in theatres.

GC: Yet after all the success of the musicals, why turn your back on the genre again when it had proven instrumental to Disney’s renaissance?

DH: You always have to be turning over your approach to the craft and the content. If you keep doing the same thing over and over, the audience will get fatigued with the pattern, and we were starting to show our format too much.

PS: We should not have gone away from the movie musical format, but we got stuck in not the best stories. We didn’t keep pushing our own boundaries. On the other hand, are you going to risk a $200 million movie on a few 30-year-olds who’ve never written songs for a movie?

GC: Disney does family entertainment. But other filmmakers and animation sub-genres, such as animé, stop-motion and now CG animation, are pushing the boundaries of animation. Will Disney ever do more adult storylines?

DH: In animation it is a razor fine line of taste. There is a degree of risk-taking but also an unspoken, unwritten, intuitive box that we work in when the film says Disney. It’s about audience expectation.

PS: Don’t expect movies about war, destruction and apocalypse, but Disney has always tackled stories that deal with classic life and death issues.

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