I put this on my Netflix queue and it finally arrived last night. If you haven’t heard about it, it’s a documentary about the animation department at Disney. It primarily focuses on its re-awakening (hence the title) of a department that had been waning since Snow White. You follow how Disney was able to achieve success again with feature animated films in an industry and a culture that forgot about this medium. Very rarely does Disney lower their guard and allow people into the nitty gritty of their business, past the magic, because this achievement didn’t come easy. I was reminded that past all the magic of Disney, deep down, it is still a business.

An aspect of the documentary that I really enjoyed was seeing what kind of leaders and people were needed to achieve this goal. At the chairman level in a company, it requires a different breed of leaders. To be able to lead a company like Disney in a new direction required them to not only have an ability to see the bigger picture and a vision, but to get people on board with you, whether they liked it or not. It meant that not everyone will liked their ideas or even them as a person, but they had to be able to take the hate. I had no idea that a power struggle was going on between Roy Disney, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner. After watching how much work went into these films, I now have a whole new respect for them. Who knew they were about to cut the “Part of Your World” scene out of the film because management felt it wasn’t relating with their test audience. These are the things you’ll learn about from this documentary. Wow, I feel like a Reading Rainbow kid, summarizing a book. Oh well. But, you should definitely check this documentary out.

via /Film

I liked it. It’s very dialogue oriented, and the movie is basically the two characters going from place to place having interesting conversations, and falling more in love with each other as the night progresses. That’s it. There’s no other plot line. I really enjoyed listening to the conversations they have in the film, and even laughed out loud at some points. One of my favorite parts was in the beginning when Ethan Hawke’s character has to coerce the girl (Julie Delpy) off the train to spend the day with him in Vienna, Austria, since that’s where he was flying out of, so he says this:

“Alright, alright. Think of it like this. Umm-uh, jump ahead, ten, twenty years, okay, and you’re married. Only your marriage doesn’t have that same energy that it used to have, you know. You start to blame your husband. You start to think about all those guys you’ve met in your life, and what MIGHT have happened if you’d picked up with one of them, right? Well, I’m one of those guys. That’s me, you know, so think of this as time travel, from then, to now, uh, to find out what you’re missing out on. See, what this really could be is a gigantic favor to both you and your future husband, to find out that you’re not missing out on anything. I’m just as big a loser as he is, totally unmotivated, totally boring, and, uh, you made the right choice, and you’re really happy.”

I also liked it because Vienna is a place that I really want to visit.

I actually consider Shyamalan one of my favorite directors. I’ll be the first one to admit that some storylines in his movies are just stinking horrible, but in terms of creating the scenes and telling the story, Shyamalan is amazing. Also an extra thumbs up for always teaming up with James Newton Howard (Dark Knight) for the scores. Here’s the scene from The Village that did two things for me. Love this movie, and love Bryce Dallas Howard.

Hopefully you’ll watch this now, but I think I ruined it for you because of my hype. Oh well. Remember to watch it as a love story and not a movie with just an awesome twist.