Dream On Silly Dreamer

Because of The Lion King, top business people who saw animation as the next new way to make a billion dollars jumped onboard. Dozens of appointed vice-presidents wound up on the Disney payroll. Creative executives entirely replaced story development departments. Katzenberg being fired and opening Dreamworks as competition led Disney management to overflow the animators with obscenely large bonuses. The animation at the studio had lost its magic and greed was running rampant as more and more executives were brought in figure out how to cut costs.

The management began comparing the success of digitally animated films like Ice Age and those of Pixar to the Disney bombs like Hunchback and Brother Bear. And then, on March 25th 2002, chief executive Tom Schumacher held meetings with each 2D animation department telling them that their services would no longer be needed.

Most of the interviews in the documentary were taped in the few weeks after this day and are expressed with eloquence and heart that merits several replays on your DVD player. The DVD includes a plethora of special features like original story art by Lund and footage from the film’s LA premiere, where we watch the reaction of the Disney artists seeing the doc for the first time. Perhaps the most engaging feature, however, is the extended interview clips, in which many of the artists voice very bitter feelings towards the administration. “I definitely did not want the film to be angry, but most of the interviews that I got were fairly angry because of the time frame they were taped in,” says Lund. “It would have been easy to make an angry film, and it was very hard to stay on the right path.” That path was one that took about two years from conception to final film, which, at several points, almost didn’t happen at all.

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Lund had a few other independent films under his belt when he decided to take his mini DV camera and casually started shooting interviews of his friends and coworkers. “I thought, ‘someone should collect stories about the good old days before people get bitter and stop remembering.’” Having to finish work on Home On the Range after the layoffs were announced was particularly difficult. “Knowing we were going to get laid off but still having to work on a really crappy movie was like a slow death,” he says.