Inside the House of Mouse

One of Kirk Wise's less-than-flattering sketches of Jeffrey Katzenberg, from the SXSW documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty (Courtesy of Walt Disney Corporation)

Ya kinda expect guests at SXSW to say things like "I was out on the streets 'til 12 o'clock last night, throwing up." Not necessarily veteran Disney producer Don Hahn, director of Waking Sleeping Beauty, though.

Hahn's remarkable documentary gives an unprecedented view behind the scenes at the Walt Disney Animation Studios between 1984 and 1994. That's the time from the seeming death rattle surrounding The Black Cauldron through the re-birth of The Little Mermaid, the Best Picture Oscar nomination of Beauty and the Beast, and the cultural phenomenon of The Lion King. It's also about the change-over of the animation from Walt's Nine Old Men to the new guns – directors like Ron Clements and Gary Trousdale, Pixar maestro John Lasseter, and composers Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. But most importantly it charts the strange dynamic between Walt's visionary nephew Roy Disney, production chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO Michael Eisner, and little-known company president Frank Wells.

Hahn was on the ground as an animator and producer, and so created his incredible and moving documentary from old home movies and new interviews with key players ("No talking heads," he told the audience at the post-screening Q&A. "The instant you put on lights and make-up, people close up.") In addition to familiar clips from the films (if "Part of Your World" from The Little Mermaid doesn't make you blub, you have no heart) Hahn uses dozens of sketches of key players, many not very flattering, drawn at the time as the creatives and corporates wrangled. Such sketches, he added, are "the only way animators can fight back. We're not really verbal."

Waking Sleeping Beauty also includes the last interview before his death with Roy Disney, who many still see as the quiet heart of the company and the true heir to his uncle's best vision. Hahn said, "He told me about the time that he had chicken pox and Walt came up to tell him about the story of Pinocchio. He said he was disappointed because it was never as good as when Uncle Walt told it to him."

The issue of the recent perceived decline in hand-drawn animation also came up. Hahn noted, "Ten years to the day after The Lion King opened, Disney closed the hand-drawn animation department. Ten years up, ten years down." He was less worried than some about the ebb and flow, especially since Lasseter re-ignited the hand-drawn department in 2006. The studio has already released The Princess and the Frog (which, contrary to the common thinking, was a $264 million success and that's prior to DVD release and future cinematic re-releases) and has Rapunzel retelling Tangled in production now. "Animation's a lot like baseball. You have a winning season, then people age out."

So what's he up to now? Early on in the documentary, there's a brief glimpse of a young Disney sketcher: One Tim Burton. He and Hahn are now in pre-production on a stop-motion revisiting ("It's one of the oldest animation effects in cinema," said Hahn) of Burton's 1984 calling card short Frankenweenie. According to Hahn, Burton will direct, and they are currently working on puppets and sets.