In your final year at Glasgow
University (at least in Arts), you write your dissertation. Lengths and
deadlines vary, but I was given a full year to write ten to twelve thousand
words on any topic I wanted. I toyed with doing it on social change reflected
in Batman movies (but that would mean watching The Dark Knight Rises again, so I wasn’t too keen), the depiction
of Britishness in Aardman films (which would mean being critical of Wallace and
Gromit, which I can’t do) or feminism in Disney. I went with the Disney one,
but it quickly turned out that everyone has
talked about feminism in Disney, and at considerable length. The idea moved
onto to feminism in fairytales, to fairytale adaption and then it took its
final form as a ten thousand word long fan letter to The Little Mermaid. Or, more academically speaking, an in depth
look at the history, influences on and marketing of Disney’s greatest ever film
(ever), The Little Mermaid.
Before I talk about the film
itself and why it’s awesome, it’s important to understand where Disney
animation was at this point in time. It wasn’t great. A steady decline in
quality since Uncle Walt died in 1967 meant that a company which had once
prided itself on innovation in technology and art was struggling to make more
than one animated film every five years, and the less said about the live
action department the better. Roy E Disney, Walt’s nephew and head of the
company, said that it was discussed at great length that the film department
should be shut down. No, seriously, that almost happened.
The thing to understand at this
point is that a lot of people thought Roy E. Disney was, well, dumb. And though
he wasn’t the most business savvy chap on the Disney board, he knew that
getting rid of the film department would relegate the entire company to
becoming a museum. He saw the executives ask each other ‘What would Walt do?’
rather than come up with new ideas themselves, therefore dragging down the
quality of the entire company. Something had to change, but it wasn’t going to
be shutting down the film department.
Instead, a boardroom coup led to
the Ron Miller, the CEO and Walt’s son-in-law, being fired, bringing in Michael
Eisner as CEO and Jeffrey Katzenberg as Head of the film department. They
really changed the culture at Disney, meaning that for the first time, Disney
was run by Hollywood bigwigs rather than kindly old men in cardigans. The
Hollywood types fired people, tore up drawings, kicked the animators out of the
Disney lot – but they also started dragging Disney films into the present day.
The animators who kicked up a fuss – people like Joe Hale, who balked at the
idea of editing an animated movie – were shortly fired, as were people who
refused to change. Something bad had to happen from the inside wake up these
people. That ‘something bad’ was The
Black Cauldron.
Even the poster is a mess...
Have you ever seen it? It makes
no sense on a very profound level. If you squint, you can almost see what the
filmmakers were trying to accomplish by taking seven books by Lloyd Alexander
(which are quite good and were very popular) and cramming them into one film, but the main question with The Black Cauldron is ‘why’. Why was the hero Taran so whiny? Why was the mystical pig played with
such a hideously irritating voice that all of the scenes it’s in are totally
unwatchable? Why on earth did it cost 44 million dollars to make, when the
average animated film cost around 20 million? The film is dark (literally and
figuratively), dull and about as much fun as tooth decay.
It is in short, not good. It
failed to make half of its budget back and was beaten at the box office by The Care Bears Movie. This was proof
that Disney was no longer the only animation house in town and the budget for
the next film, The Great Mouse Detective,
was slashed. It was not, however, scrapped. Roy E. Disney, now head of the
Animation Department, protected his workers as best he could from Eisner and
Katzenberg, but he realised that he couldn’t do it alone. He hired Peter
Schneider, who took a despondent and sullen department of people terrified for
their jobs and made them not only work together, but work with him. The
animators knew The Black Cauldron was
bobbins – what Schneider and Roy E. Disney did was make them think they could
do better.
The Great Mouse Detective was heralded as the return of Classic
Disney, which is a stretch. It’s a cute film, but incredibly weightless. As a
retelling of the Sherlock Holmes story but with mice, there’s only so much you
can do with the concept before it becomes clear that the only joke is ‘Look,
the mouse is wearing a Sherlock Holmes hat!’ Disney had already done this type
of story before, with Robin Hood, but
it was done so much better there. Robin Hood is sexy, courageous, devilish and
dashing, so it makes perfect sense for him to be a fox. The reason the animal version of Sherlock is a mouse is
because.... erm.... mice are cute?
Another point is that it also
looks terrible, with blocky, flat backgrounds and black outlines on all the
characters. The $10 million budget, which Eisner still thought was too much,
didn’t allow for the kind of artistic and technical innovation which made Walt
Disney the recipient of 32 Oscars.
Here is Sleeping Beauty,
made in 1959, and The Great Mouse
Detective, made in 1986, 27 years later. This is not what
artistic progress looks like.
The next film, Oliver and Company, was a bit better,
but whilst the artistry was there, the story and tone really wasn’t. Set in
modern day New York, it’s another retelling of a classic English Victorian
story, but instead of mice, it’s done with cats and dogs, and instead of
Sherlock, its Oliver Twist. I can’t
really top what the late Roger Ebert said when he pointed out that you
don’t watch a Disney film to see a man strangled by a car window. This is
totally what happens in this cute film about orphan kittens.
But, despite this, these two
films made money (not a lot, but enough to keep Disney Animation afloat) they
were also made within two years of each other, not, say seven and a half. Along
with the rerelease of the vast Disney back-catalogue, Disney was finally back
in the public eye, especially when Who
Framed Roger Rabbit? came out in 1988. That film was a monster hit, winning
the Disney Animation department an Oscar for the first time in decades, and,
more importantly, showed how Disney was still relevant and able to push the boundaries
of what could be achieved with animation.
Live action and animation had been
used before, but where Mary Poppins (for
example) used it as a fun aside for its showstopping Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious sequence, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? gives the animated characters as much
depth and personality as their human counterparts. You really feel that Roger
and Jessica Rabbit love each other and they work as a couple in a really fun
way. The villain is scary, the concept of The Dip (the only way to kill a
‘toon) is unsettling without being nasty and it’s a well constructed, deeply
satisfying film made with warmth and affection.
While the Disney studio in
England worked on Roger Rabbit,
Katzenberg and Roy E. Disney announced that Oliver
and Company would begin a new era for Disney, with a new film being
released once a year, every year from that point on. Already, production was in
full swing on three films at once: Oliver,
a sequel to The Rescuers set in
Australia and a musical version of The
Little Mermaid.
At this point, Disney hadn’t made
a fairy tale adaption in 30 years and the last time the company had made a full
on musical was with Robin Hood. Though
Disney had built up steam, they could still lose everything if The Little Mermaid failed. Rather than
trying to better other animation houses, they had Roger Rabbit as the bench mark – if Mermaid failed to equal it, artistically and financially, this ‘new
era’ that Katzenberg was so desperate for Disney to achieve would have failed
before it began.
Enter Howard Ashman and Alan
Menken.
Yay!
Ashman and Menken were Broadway
partners who were approached by David Geffen, a massive player for Disney in
the 80’s and 90’s and later the ‘G’ part of Dreamworks SKG, to work for Disney.
Ashman, who was influenced by the classic Disney films as a boy, was desperate
to work on Mermaid, and set about
writing songs whilst Menken scored the film. They worked very closely with the
directors, John Musker and Ron Clements, Ashman and Musker becoming producers.
Whilst Clements and Musker carefully created a fairy tale adaptation (more on
that next time), Ashman and Menken structured the film like a three act
Broadway musical.
The partnership worked beautifully, the atmosphere around the
production of Mermaid was described as
electric and the four men as geniuses. Everyone
wanted to work on the film – Glen Keane,
a big guy who specialised in animating monsters and scariness, was
reduced to tears when he first heard Jodie Benson record Part of Your World. He then went on to
become the lead animator for Ariel, saying that it was his calling to do this.
Disney were excited – very excited.
The film was a smash hit,
grossing over $100 million on release in 1989. It linked the modern, Jessica
Rabbit style of Disney with the beloved Disney of old, showing that Disney
could be creative, could be daring and could be above all good again. Now
nobody was asking each other what Walt would do, Disney was capable of being
new and fresh, without losing the heart and soul which made them everyone’s
favourite corporation. Disney’s Second Golden Age, its Renaissance, had begun.
