Waking Sleeping Beauty

Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009) is Don Hahn's behind-the-scenes documentary, and you can watch it online on iFILM. It charts the decade from 1984 to 1994, when Walt Disney's animation studio clawed its way back from collapse to the top of the box office.

By the mid-1980s the place was in trouble. Flop after flop, gloomy predictions that hand-drawn animation was finished and audiences had moved on. Inside, two camps pulled against each other: young artists itching to break the rules, veterans unwilling to hand over the reins. Hahn builds the film almost entirely from home movies and archival footage shot at the time, with no talking heads on camera. You see the real Roy Disney, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Glen Keane and the animators whose work became The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King.

This is no fairy tale. It is a candid record of ego, ambition and luck colliding into the Disney Renaissance. For anyone who grew up on those films, it shows exactly what the magic cost. Stream Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009) online on iFILM.