Title is misleading
Someone on another thread wrote this:
I decided to check out all of the Disney animated films just to see what I thought of them.. so having no nostalgia towards those films, I can safely conclude that the only ones worth it are from Snow White to about Sleeping Beauty or so.. after around that time you can see the decline in animation as well as the story and the disappearance of the "Disney magic". And it just got worse and worse up until the late 80s, with The Black Cauldron hitting rock bottom. That movie was just awful.
It wasn't until The Little Mermaid came out when Disney picked things up again and that "magic" came back.
Sleeping Beauty was the last fairy tale Disney did for a long time, and the high production costs, coupled with the film's underperformance at the box office, resulted in the company posting its first annual loss in a decade, and massive layoffs were done throughout the animation department.
All this led to a new form of animation using Xerox photography that bypassed the inking process, thus saving time and money. However, because of the new technology's limitations, the Xerox was unable to deviate from a black scratchy outline and lacked the fine lavish quality of hand inking. So from 1961 (101 Dalmatians) to 1981 (The Fox and the Hound), the quality of Disney animation was rather poor and inferior to the previous films of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s.
In 1985, The Black Cauldron tried to reanimate the genre, but it was a major flop. However, the subsequent moderate successes of The Great Mouse Detective (1986) and Oliver & Co. (1988) gave the new management at Disney confidence in the viability of their animation department and led to the creation of The Little Mermaid (1989) whose major success -- critically, financially, and awards-wise -- signaled a renaissance for the company in the 1990s.
Based on the title, this is the story I thought was gonna be told in the documentary, how Disney animation lay dormant for 3 decades after Sleeping Beauty and how it took another fairy tale to revive it. But instead it focused mainly on the power-struggle between Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Roy E. Disney. Perhaps they could've done both -- the power-struggle and the animation -- if the documentary had been longer. At 86 minutes, it's much too short to encompass such an epic time frame. I would have much preferred Ken Burns take a stab at it. His documentaries are several volumes, but that's because they're very detailed. A lot was glossed over in Waking Sleeping Beauty, especially the animation aspect.
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