Waking Sleeping Beauty - Ethics

Research Paper: “Waking Sleeping Beauty”

Paola Gomez

Walter Lopez

City University of Seattle

Waking Sleeping Beauty

        This documentary is based on Disney’s Renaissance by the mid 1980s, when the animation studios had fallen on hard times. Is mentioned how the employees are treated, and what the organization does to help each team member. It was believed that the best days of animation were over and that with only a magic spell could produce a happy ending. Waking Sleeping Beauty is a true story of how Disney was losing a lot of money and how it regained the magic with only several movies ---“Aladdin”, “Beauty and the Beast”, “The Little Mermaid”, “The Lion King” and more.

        Disney Animation Studios is one of the most important departments that The Walt Disney Company have, because is the one that make us imagine and believe in all the stories that are told to us since we are kids. In this film it is told days before Walt Disney passed away in 1966, it says that he was very focused on making the new Disneyland Park by doing different parts of it like “Tomorrow land”, “Frontier land”, and the “Magic Kingdom” and didn’t had time to take care of all the stuff that was going on inside the Animation Studios. Then he passed away and Ron Miller took his position as the CEO of the company and there is when all the problems started.  

        It’s fair to say that conflict was created between the animation team members and all the studio chiefs because they were always competing against each other for the control and credits. As Peter Schneider observes, “It was not us versus them. Sure, the artists can be a subversive lot. Believe me, I look a lot of hits when I first arrived at Disney and they are in the movie. But we all got into the trenches together and that let to a mutual respect.”

        The Animation Studio received a new a group of animators which they named the Cal Arts Class that consisted with 4 famous animators like, Ron Clements, John-ald Musker, Glean Keane and lastly Tim Burton; they had a lot of imagination and did enjoyed working there. They did a lot of cartoons, like drawing scathing caricatures of themselves and their bosses. They always were working as a team, always wanting to put on a show. But then the chaos happened.
        Ron Miller, the new CEO of the company, needed a new building for all his co-stars like Robin Williams and Bette Midler for the movies that he had in plan. But the problem was that he wanted the Animation building. The animators didn’t had the chance to say that they were against that, they just received a memo saying that they needed to leave the building and nothing else. What kind of organization does this? The animators were furious because that building was the one that Walt Disney made for them. So they just left the building with anything to say.
        They went to a different building to finish their work and was a very filthy building. All the garbage was thrown in front of that warehouse but that didn’t changed the perspective they had. They even did all their parties in there and didn’t cared of how everything looked, the boys restroom was in the same hall as the working department and didn’t cared, they were happy because they had their own cubicles and could work with anyone interrupting them. They even were having fun with the names of the movies, for example “Pinocchio” was changed in a memo to “The Wooden Boy Who Become Real”. This memo ended up being a category in Jeopardy. They just wanted to make a huge movie that would take Disney from the bottom to the top. And there is when they had “The Little Mermaid” in their minds.