Disney War
Original Book by James B. Stewart
© Simon & Schuster, 2005

PART I, SECTION 2
THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY, pages 71-72

After the layoffs and the fiasco of The Black Cauldron, Roy [Disney] felt he was fighting for the future of animation, which he still believed had the potential to once again be the heart of the company.  At about the same time as the disastrous screening of Black Cauldron, Roy invited [Michael] Eisner, [Frank] Wells, and [Jeffrey] Katzenberg to a viewing of storyboards from a new project called Basil of Baker Street.  While most animators had been cut from the Cauldron team, Ron Clements and John Musker, both former alter boys from the Midwest, had been developing a story based on a book about mice living under Sherlock Holmes' London flat.  They'd used Ron Miller as the model for the villain Ratigan ("big, hulking, handsome, and personable"), and Miller had been the film's producer until he was abruptly dismissed.  Clements, bearded and redheaded, and Musker, taller and more talkative, set up nearly fifty storyboards that snaked through the corridor and in and out of rooms in the old animation building.  Unlike live-action features, Disney's animated films had rarely started with scripts; storyboards had scores of cartoon-like drawings that mapped out the story, and dialogue was added later by the animators as they drew.  Eisner, especially, seemed puzzled by this. "We should begin with a script, just like with out other movies," he insisted.

As they wandered along the storyboards, neither Roy nor the animators could figure out if the executives were really following the story.  Eisner startled them at one point by wondering aloud whether a song in a bar that had already been scored by composer Henry Mancini could be tuned over to pop star Michael Jackson.  Clements and Musker froze, their dismay evident.  Finally Eisner said, "Part of your job is to talk me out of bad ideas."

Eisner found Basil cute but confusing.  He liked the Sherlock Holmes angle; he'd produced The Young Sherlock Holmes while at Paramount.  But he thought it lacked dramatic structure, the traditional three-act "beginning, middle, and end" that had served him so well when judging scripts at Paramount.  But he and Katzenberg agreed that, at the very least, it would not be another Black Cauldron.  Toy pressed for a green light, pointing out that Disney risked losing its most talented animators if they didn't have something to work on [and they passed the time with chair races, cel sliding contests, and Trivial Pursuit games.]

Eisner asked the animators how much more time they needed.

"Two years," Clements said.

"I want it in one.  How much will it cost?"

"About $24 million."

"Nope," Eisner said, "$12 million."

In the end, they got the green light and the budget of $10 million.

PART I, SECTION 3:  THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY, page 84

As plans for Euro Disney picked up steam, the Basil animation project was nearing completion.  It had been renamed The Great Mouse Detective because Eisner though the "Basil" was too English.  Despite a constant effort to control costs, it was not meeting its $10 million budget.  Eisner had trouble understanding why a half-hour of television animation could be produced for half-million dollars, but a ninety-minute Disney feature couldn't be made for twenty times that.  To the Disney animations, this attitude showed a lack of understanding that bordered on contempt.  Disney animation featured seamless motion, not the crude, jerky movements of Saturday morning television.  Shapes were delicately outlined and richly shaded; they were not "cartoons."  Backgrounds were carefully rendered to suggest three-dimensional depth and perspective.  The thousands of cels were hand-drawn and coloured and sequences were drawn and redrawn until the directors were satisfied.  This is why The Black Cauldron, for all its shortcomings, had taken then years to produce, and why Disney produced only one animated feature every four years.

To most of the animators and to Roy, Mouse Detective became an ominous experiment in cost control.  The same low-cost labourers who did television animation performed much of the hand-colouring.  Shapes were boldly out lined in black and filled in with simple flat shapes.  While Roy was dismayed by the quality of some of the drawing, he told the animators that they had to go along to show Eisner and Katzenberg that they were "team players."

Despite all the cost-cutting efforts, The Great Mouse Detective eventually cost $14 million and took two years to produce.  By the time it was released, there was little enthusiasm for it within Disney, though Roy thought the film was delightful.  Even without much marketing it grossed $38 million, a modest success.