DON HAHN, PETER SCHNEIDER OF “WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY” |
By Scott Macaulay

As filmmakers, we are genetically programmed to look to the future. The next script, the next movie, the next deal. After all, the films — on DVD, on hard drives, in canisters stacked in our closets — are their own memories.

Except, of course, that a film only tells part of the story. They are the ends of their tales, not the beginnings, and they only tell their own stories, and not the dramas of their making. If at all, those stories that circle around a film are only sometimes relayed in magazine profiles or in books written by people who have had little connection to the times and people they chronicle.

With Waking Sleeping Beauty, director Don Hahn and producer Peter Schneider accomplished what every filmmaker must dream of at one point in their career: revisiting their earlier successes — the revitalization of Disney animation — and entering their own version of the story in the historical record. The two were part of Disney’s epic animation run in 1980s and ’90s, a time whose industry coverage was dominated by boardroom dramas involving Disney CEO Michael Eisner, studio chairman Jeffery Katzenberg, board member and head of animation department Roy Disney, and President and COO Frank Wells. Schneider was President of Feature Animation and Don Hahn was a producer of the two biggest hits during this time: Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. As Schneider notes, it was a well documented era, most notably by James Stewart in his Disney War, but the creative energies that powered its animation department were never extensively detailed. Mixing voiceover interview, archival footage and, most notably, recently discovered home movie footage shot by Randy Cartwright and John Lassiter, Hahn and Schneider walk us through these years, balancing the requisite executive drama with the story of the hundreds of creative workers who include Tim Burton, Lassiter, Bob Zemeckis and, memorably, the late Howard Ashman, whose lyrics to The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast were a major part of the startling and successful reinvention these films represented.

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