The Disney That Never Was: The Stories and Art from Five Decades of Unproduced Animation
Original written by Charles Solomon
© Walt Disney Company, 1995

DISNEY REDUX
NEW APPROACH, pages 191-195

During the mid-eighties, the Disney animators began to emerge from the lethargy that had gripped the studio since Walt's death.  By the end of the decade, their features had eclipsed the work of the rival Don Bluth and Amblimation studios, and Disney once again dominated the field as absolutely as it had during the thirties.

The renaissance of the animation department was the result of major changes at the parent Walt Disney Company.  The Disney family's management of the company ended in June of 1984 when Ron Miller, Walt's son-in-law, resigned under fire after fending off a take-over bid from financier Saul P. Steinberg.  Former Paramount president Michael Eisner became chairman of the board and CEO; Warner Bros. vice president Frank Wells, president and COO; Jeffrey Katzenberg, a long-time associate of Eisner's, became studio chairman.  One of the key players in this change was Roy Edward Disney (the son of Walt's older brother, Roy Oliver, who managed the studio's finances):

When that board meeting was over and Michael and Frank head been elected to the company, Michael looked at me and said, "Now that all this is over, what do you want?" After about fifteen seconds of though, I said, "Why don't you give me animation?" Of all the bits and pieces of this place, animation was probably — from the point of view of outsiders coming in, particularly people who are used to conceiving and shooting and releasing a film over a nine-month span — the hardest thing to understand and the one that would take the most time to find a rhythm of dealing with.

"I figured, well, I grew up around it, I must know something about it — by osmosis, if nothing else—," Disney continues with a chuckle.  "I was appalled to learn how little I really knew about the process; I think all of us were appalled to learn how little we really knew about it."

The new management team was faced with the immediate task of completing The Black Cauldron, which was overdue and over-budget.  Pre-production had also begun on the next feature project, The Great Mouse Detective, but work on it had been suspended during the corporate siege.

"John [Musker] and Ron [Clements], God bless them, had that whole story up on boards," explains Disney.  "They showed me a bunch of the material, and I said, 'This is cute, this is really sort of nice.'  So I dragged Michael and Frank down with a couple of weeks of their having come into the company — this was before Jeffrey [Katzenberg] even got there.  Ron and John had storyboards lined up down the halls and through doorways:  There must have been forty boards.  Neither Michael nor Frank had a clue what they were looking at; they were standing in the narrow hall, trying to see the drawings.  Michael saw enough of it to say, 'That is cute, we probably should go ahead with it.'  I've always thought that if there was ever a turning point in the recent history of the studio, that was the moment.  It didn't seem so at the time of course, because they never do, but that film served as a training ground for the executives, as well as the animation crew."

Looking back over the period that followed his uncle's death, Disney comments, "The animation departments was sort of allowed to do what it would for a number of years.  You accepted whatever came and tried to sell it.  We tried to make some cuts and work with Cauldron, but there was only so much we could do, because it was so near completion at that point."

All the members of the new team believed that animation was "the heart and soul" of both the studio and the company.  They stepped up the recruiting campaign for young artists and accelerated the studio's somewhat belated entry into the field of computer animation.  As senior vice president and, later, president of feature animation, Peter Schneider was put in charge of the department.  Schneider, who had helped to organise the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, had a background in theatre rather than animation.  He recalls his initiation into the process:

When I arrived here, I walked into a room with John Musker, Ron Clements, Burny Mattinson, Dave Mitchner, George Scribner, Rick Rich, and about fifteen other people.  They all crossed their hands and asked, "What are you doing here, and what are you going to do for us?"  I gave the same answer I'd give today:  "I'm here to help you create the movies you want to make and to help you get the decisions, the money, and the talent you need to make those movies."

They didn't get it, so I asked, "What problems are you having?"  Dave Mitchner said they couldn't get a decision as to whether to get Melissa Manchester to sing this song or to get somebody else — and they'd been waiting for this decision for three months.  I called Jeffrey and we agreed that we would go ahead with Melissa.  Next! I suppose they were blown away that I was able to get a decision made within thirty seconds, by my job is to help them get decisions made so they came make their movies within the structure of the company.

The Black Cauldron (1985) failed to generate much excitement.  But The Great Mouse Detective (1986) became the first in a string of hits that broke box-office records and re-established the Disney studio's position at the forefront of both animation and family entertainment:  Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Oliver & Company (1988), The Little Mermaid (1989), The Rescuers Down Under (1990), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994).