Watched: 12/14/2025
Format: Internet Archive
Viewing: First
Director: Trudie Styler
Hoo boy.
So, this was probably not the final form of the doc The Sweatbox (2002), but it is the one that I found online at The Internet Archive. It's a little rough and incomplete, but was clearly heading toward a final cut. Why is it in this state? Apparently it's been quashed by Disney, and yet... here I am. A man who watched it.
The Sweatbox is a doc about the making of what became The Emperor's New Groove, a film which we recently watched. The film takes the viewer through the Disney process of making an animated film, giving viewers some insight into how the sausage is made, which may be surprising if your knowledge of film is based in live-action. The Disney animation tradition established by Walt and the original Disney animation team was always to run story, gags, etc... through a committee so you could be told honestly what worked and what didn't. When Walt was around, he would ask how you could "plus" something - ie: make it better.* Or, sometimes, be honest that something may need to change, and/or you may need to dump a favored idea.
As you may recall, in my post, I opined that The Emperor's New Groove seems both very different from what Disney had been doing and would do, and maybe looks a bit different. But it didn't start that way. Emperor's New Groove started under a different title and would have led to a fairly familiar looking late-90's Disney movie in style and intention. But through the process, as we watch, things change drastically.
Remember how Tarzan inexplicably featured the song stylings of Phil Collins? This time they were going to work with Sting. Thus, this doc is produced and directed by Trudie Styler, Sting's wife. And so the doc is in large part about Sting, who writes whatever he feels like most says, is thrown into the Disney process. Initially enthused, soon Sting doesn't know what he's writing to as the script isn't done. And then, as Disney Feature Animation are wont to do, at some point, the team re-engineered the whole movie's story, characters, look, etc... and Sting was kind of left adrift.
The titular Sweatbox is the nickname of the theater at Disney Animation where you go to show your work in front of people above your pay grade where they merrily tear it up. One person in the doc describes it as roughly: having your hands cut off, and then getting pantsed, so you're both standing in front of everyone with your pants down, can't pull them back up, and you're bleeding to death.
Which... does not sound great.
And it's hard to say, with Disney's hit rate, that it actually works very well. Especially if you have people at the top who just aren't in to what you're doing or aren't paying attention. Every story beat gets dissected by committee - but the reality is that there's people who are chairs of that committee whose voice has more weight. As a result, what we see are directors really trying, execs who seem a bit high on their own supply, and below all of them, people who seem like they're just kind of trapped in jobs where you don't rock the boat, because you finally made it as an animator at Disney, and this is how they do things. Where would you even go?
And, indeed, everyone interviewed seems like they have a gun pointed at them from off-camera, talking about how the process really works, and we must believe in the process. And they all keep talking about how *other* people must be really torn up about their work being disposed of while insisting they're fine.
There's a lot that isn't told in the documentary. We have no idea what the financial and studio pressures were, or if this movie HAD to get made after they'd sunk so much money into it. We have a rough idea of how people felt coming and going onto the project - but there's very little post mortem and even director Roger Allers, who is shown the door on the movie, allows for an interview, but he's clearly toeing company lines.
Frankly, this doc makes Disney at this time look like a mess and like the people making decisions seem capricious at best. While the participants finally admit that this go-round was unusual for Disney, it never seems like the process is working very well. And yet one of the producers who was throwing babies out with bathwater wraps the doc romanticizing the process and kind of shrugging off the actual final product - and it is *chilling*.
This is just a pinhole view into the Disney way of doing things, and in other cases, we know it works out fine. Frozen was intended to be based on the Ice Queen folktale before they decided that didn't work and they started over - and I'm the first person to say "Frozen is a phenomenal movie" and I mean it. I love that movie. But the same people who brought you Frozen went on to bring you first Frozen II, which has a baffling third act, and then the critically panned and much-unseen Wish. So, basically no one knows what they're doing - not really.
And, to that point, on Disney+, there was a docu-series called Into the Unknown: Making Frozen II that is shockingly similar to this film - with the caveat that we actually see a project manager this time. But, it's also clear in that doc that it isn't going well, no one knows why or what to do, but they have to deliver for Q4 of the year of release.
And somehow, twenty years later in the exact same building, no one has figured out that making a coherent animated feature takes as long as it takes - and rushing to a deadline is a terrible idea.
Anyway, as someone with armchair interest in animation and movie-making, it's pretty wild to see this documentary and realize what a miracle any movie is, let alone an animated film working it's way through the Disney method.
The irony of all of this is how I just watched a different movie and complained that maybe one shouldn't writer, direct and produce their own movies. So there's a happy medium in there somewhere.
*hilariously, Disney named their streaming service Disney+, which seemed a nod to Walt's phraseology of "plussing" ideas to improve them, but dumb-dumbs in marketing at other upcoming streamers decided that sounded neat, and now we have Apple+ and other + services who don't know it's a huge flag indicating they weren't first, and they don't read
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