The joy of cartoons meets the agony of office politics in this fascinating, inside- Hollywood-baseball documentary about how Disney, against all odds, revived the art of feature-length drawn animation. The film relies on corporate home movies to examine the making of The Black Cauldron (a 1985 disaster), The Little Mermaid (which in 1989 shot the form back into orbit), and, finally, Beauty and the Beast (1991) and The Lion King (1994). Squaring off like pit bulls are then-studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg, as obsessed as any artist, and then-CEO Michael Eisner, who kept his eye on the balance sheets.
