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When Peter Schneider clocked in as the head of Disney animation in the mid-'80s, the studio division had reached its nadir with a big-budgeted belly-flop called "The Black Cauldron." A creative lethargy had settled over the Magic Kingdom that had once pioneered feature-length cartoons like "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," "Fantasia," "Dumbo" and such. The situation got so bad that Jeffrey Katzenberg, the company's No. 2 man (after Michael Eisner), told a newspaper reporter that it was time to "wake up Sleeping Beauty," meaning to shake up the animation department.

"Waking Sleeping Beauty," with its storybook connotation of arousing a sleeping giant, is the title of an "inside job" documentary chronicling Disney's decade-long return to glory — an era of spectacular growth and reasserted imagination when their top-of-the-line output read like previews of coming Broadway attractions: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King.

(The feature doc gets released in select cities, including New York, on March 26.)

"Artistically, from my point of view, [the film] was very successful because people were much more candid in their speaking to us than they would have been with any others," says Schneider, who produced this documentary with director Don Hahn.

	Peter Schneider and Don Hahn

"There are no good guys and no bad guys. There's a group of people who really wanted to try and do something really remarkable. I think the issues between Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner have already been well documented by other people in terms of their combative relationship, but I would say that it was not 'us against them.' It was all of us working, I think, quite successfully together and producing some exceptional movies with all of the personal desires and egos that are always part of the creative process. Don Hahn and I thought that it was an extraordinary decade, so we set out to tell a story that hadn't been told quite as candidly before — and, at the same time, to capture the joy of that ten-year period."

The great advantage of working at a studio is that the cameras are always turning (for public consumption or not), and all sorts of interoffice mischief got recorded for personnel posterity. Even the office parties are documented with "home movies."

This fact beautifully abets Schneider's desire to recapture, and reclaim from the mists of time, that era of inspired growth. "I think the unique thing about 'Waking Sleeping Beauty' is that it's all done with archival footage," he beams proudly. "There's not anything in the movie that was not shot before 1994, but there are no talking heads, so what you see is footage: you have modern interviews with Jeffrey and Roy and Michael and me and Don and some of the artists, but all the visuals are footage of that time period. Our goal was to transport you back to this period of time and immerse you in all the drama and all the excitement of what was going on." Continued...