Essentially a Jeffrey Katzenberg take-down piece, Don Hahn's fragmented documentary about the massive changes at Disney Studios between 1984 and 1994 doesn't dare go near touchy subjects like Disney's blood-draining takeover of Manhattan's Times Square.
Walt Disney's nephew Roy Disney plays saint to Michael Eisner's egotistical money-hound, while Jeffrey Katzenberg tries too hard to upstage Eisner during the company's desperate attempt to reinvent itself in the face of competing computer animation technology.
What we see is a shift away from a small group of highly creative animators sketching furiously on their tilted drafting tables inside a small office building to a factory mentality of animator drones punching in for work at Disney's newly built monolith.
zsxjku"Waking Sleeping Beauty" is an insider's documentary that the no-doubt underpaid animators who work there will enjoy ripping apart in their break rooms.
For the rest of us, however, the film just seems like a see-how-great-we-are-in-spite-of-Jeffrey-Katzenberg dog and pony show.
Does anyone really care about such obvious backstabbing?
The stabbed person cares, as lonely as they may be.
Rated PG. 86 mins.
