Don Hahn
Born to Chicago, Don Hahn has worked at Walt Disney Studios from more than thirty years and has produced many celebrated animated films, including Beauty and the Beast (1991); The Lion King (1994); and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996). In addition to the 1999 bestseller Dancing Corndogs in the Night, he has written three books on the art of animation.
WakingSleeping Beauty (2009) is his first documentary.

By the mid-1980s, the fabled Walt Disney animation studios were in crisis. They were divided between newcomers eager to innovate and veterans anxious not to cede control. This situation led to a series of failures and brought to pessimistic predictions. Perhaps the glorious days of animation were over. Perhaps the public no longer cared. To expect the situation to improve, one probably had to believe in fairy tales.Waking Sleeping Beauty is not a fairy tale but the real story of how Disney reclaimed its magic with an extraordinary series of hits - Who Framed Roger Rabbit? The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King and others - in the space of a decade.Director Don Hahn and producer Peter Schneider played a decisive part in the recovery.They were part of Disney's new recruits who produced some of its most sensational projects. Hahn's documentary offers a fascinating perspective of what happened in both the creative and management teams of Michael D. Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Roy Disney (Walt's grandson). The process was not always straightforward. Hahn (who still works at Disney) recounts with refreshing candor the conflicts between egos, the multiplication of costs, and the failure of experiments that others would rather forget. In tense moments, the cartoonists' favorite form of offense was to draw cruel caricatures of their bosses. Hahn showed the best ones, along with to interviews, amateur videos, internal notes and unedited videos. Everyone who is hungry for Hollywood gossip will appreciate this dish. Those who love animated films, on the other hand, will savor the history that does justice to the many writers, artists and composers who created the Disney phenomenon.The documentary also includes key figures who left the company, such as Don Bluth, John Lasseter and Tim Burton. At one time, children thought that the Walt Disney signature meant that the films were the creation of one man. This is a mature portrait that reveals the experience of a team in all its complexity.Thom Powers