Film Review - Waking Sleeping Beauty (2010)

Waking Sleeping Beauty is a documentary made by Don Hahn and Peter Schneider that chronicles the rebirth of Walt Disney Pictures as a viable fighting force in animated movies once again in the 80's and 90's, movies like The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin which became huge hits and changed the face of animated films as people saw them, but the road to success is never an easy one to travel.

As someone who loves going to animated movies at the cinema, I absolutely adored this documentary, it has a fantastic array of archival footage (the doco plays out in the exact same way the Senna documentary did in that it only has the voices of the participants and the footage from the time playing over it) as well as a wide array of people who worked there during that period from Hahn and Schneider to former chief Jeffrey Katzenberg to veteran directors John Musker and Ron Clements and down to the animators like Glen Keane.

Each and everyone involved has a fascinating story to tell and the doco also shows that while the films on the outside were enormously successful with theme park rides, huge ticket sales, glowing reviews from critics (Siskel and Ebert's reviews show up a couple of times) and high awards prestige, the inside story was anything but with the tragedy of losing Howard Ashman to AIDS, the fighting between the executives over the credit of their success and the eventual disintegration that led to the near 20 years of failure until 2010's Tangled signalled a new age of success for Disney once again.

There is however one complaint I have and that is I wished the doco had covered more of the production on Aladdin which would've made the doco about 10 minutes longer as Mermaid, Beauty and the Lion King are covered pretty well but Aladdin only gets a bit of a look in, I have no doubt that this is to do with what happened regarding Robin Williams and the deal that was made for him to voice the Genie and what happened afterwards, a bit of a shame but understandable at the same time.

But apart from that very minor quibble, this is a fantastic documentary that is a must see for any animation film fan out there or hell just film fans in general, 5 out of 5.