My Mickey Mouse Degree Part 1: The Disney Renaissance

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.