Tuesday, September 30, 2014

Waking Sleeping Beauty

The documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty opened me up to whole new side that I have never seen from Disney, and their crazy world of animation. We have all grown up watching and loving Disney animated movies. The documentary showed scenes from all the famous movies they have created over the years and it took me back to the days where I could watch my favorite Disney movies over and over again. What I never thought about was the creation process and just how much time and effort it took to make these classic masterpieces. It was an extremely stressful and competitive atmosphere when the animators were creating characters that they thought children would love and a clever enough idea to draw the audience in. Unsurprisingly the Disney team had to go through a lot of bad ideas before they found one that would become an instant success.

The standard was set very high for animated movies after Walt Disney created classics that resonated with children so much that those movies became apart of their childhood. After he was gone it was up to a new class of young excited kids to follow in Walt's foot steps. This proved to be a harder task then imagined. The team struggled to find that one movie that would bring them back to the glory days where Disney ruled the animation industry. While Disney stock was plummeting, the huge corporation brought in new management to help dig themselves out of a hole. Before watching this documentary I never thought of the struggles this company had to go through to produce the hits that they did, not to mention how they did it.


The fact that they used the process of sketching characters scene by scene and adding the voices in later while all this technology for animation was coming out made me think of it as a much more authentic way of doing things. We saw the process from pitching the idea, to making sketches, adding the sounds and music and everything else that went into making a Disney animated movie. To see the hard work that is put into making Disney what it is today shows just why they are the best at what they do.     

Chris Langone  

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