The Sweatbox (aka It's Always Sunny In Burbank)

When The Emperor's New Groove opened in December 2000 to muted fanfare and lukewarm box office, it signified something of an end of an era for animation aficionados. Not only did the Disney Renaissance of the 1990s appear to be slowing to a grinding crawl - for as much money as their pictures continued to garner through the latter half of the decade, in terms of box office gross and cultural impact the Mouseketeers had consistently failed to engineer the next Lion King - there were signs all around that traditional Hollywood animation might be in trouble. The rival animation studios that had been established in the mid-90s in response to Disney's second coming generally weren't picking up the pace where interest in Disney was sagging, at least where their 2D output was concerned. The most prominent of these new rivals, DreamWorks Animation, founded by former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, had experienced a promising start with The Prince of Egypt back in 1998, but their follow-up effort, The Road to El Dorado, had crashed and burned earlier that spring. They had more success that summer with the stop motion Chicken Run, a co-production with Aardman Animations, an early hint that general audiences were starting to gravitate away from the Disney model that had dominated the industry for so long and craved a fresh new look (even if it didn't lie with stop motion animation in the long-term). The real chimes of doom, though, seemed to be coming from Disney's own bedfellows at Pixar, who now had three feature hits under their belt, having been around for long enough to have established themselves as a brand name name in their own right and to demonstrate that their early success with Toy Story in 1995 was no fluke. Katzenberg too sensed which way the winds were blowing, and he was ready to capitalise on it - Shrek would debut in just a matter of months, and after that the face of Hollywood animation would never be the same. Disney animation was about to take a serious tumble from grace, and The Emperor's New Groove was to be the first notable casualty in all of this. Not exactly helping the film's PR was the fact that Disney themselves didn't seem to be too enthusiastic about it - in the tail-end of 2000 they gave priority to promoting 102 Dalmatians, their big Thanksgiving release, and The Emperor's New Groove was treated as something of an afterthought. It was clear that Disney regarded this one as a B-picture, rather than the must-see event they had hotly proclaimed their preceding Renaissance fare - one you could safely sit out unless you were a Disney completist or a parent in need of an 80-minute babysitter.

So it was that The Emperor's New Groove failed to leave much of a dent within its theatrical lifespan. And yet when the film was released on home video in 2001, word started to get round that, if you had skipped this one when it played in theatres (odds are that you did), then your loss entirely. Because it's actually rather a good little picture. Shockingly good, in fact. The discs started circulating, people who entered in with low expectations came out grinning, and before you knew it the film that nobody cared about suddenly had an avid legion of adoring fans. The Emperor's New Groove still isn't regarded as one of Disney's heavy-hitters, but it is without doubt one of their most vibrant, their most quotable and their most authentically, consistently funny. If you ask me, it holds up infinitely better than Shrek.

Most Disney aficionados were well aware of the picture's troubled history. It was common knowledge that the film was initially conceived as Kingdom of The Sun, an epic reworking of the Mark Twain classic The Prince and The Pauper set against the backdrop of Inca mythology. The film was to have been directed by Roger Allers, coming off the back of his 1994 smash hit The Lion King (which he co-directed with Rob Minkoff, after original director George Scribner dropped out due to creative differences). Owen Wilson was at one point down to play Pacha, the humble peasant who meets his doppelganger in Manco, a spoiled but frustrated young emperor voiced by David Spade. The two of them trade places, only for malefic villainess Yzma (Eartha Kitt) to get wise to the switcheroo and transform Manco into a (non-talking) llama, so that she can control Pacha as a puppet ruler, threatening to expose the deception if he doesn't comply with her demands (which involved destroying the sun so that she can regain her lost beauty - I'm sure it all made sense in context). Meanwhile, Pacha falls in love with Nina (Carla Gugino), Manco's betrothed, but fears that she would not reciprocate should she discover his true identity. The film was to have featured songs written by English rock musician Sting (with collaborator David Hartley), in an effort to replicate the Oscar-winning success Elton John had bestowed on The Lion King. For a while, the film looked set to be another musical-adventure in the now-familiar Renaissance mold.

Then something went seriously awry with Allers' project during production. Things didn't appear to be becoming together as planned, and Allers was reportedly reluctant to make concessions. A co-director, Mark Dindal, was brought on in 1997 in the hopes that he could bring balance to Allers' vision (Allers himself had previously been the supplementary co-director for The Lion King with Scribner, giving him a bitter new perspective on The Circle of Life). Allers ultimately left the production, and the project was apparently in real jeopardy of being terminated altogether until Dindal, along with producer Randy Fullmer and writer David Reynolds, was able to re-imagine the entire scenario as a sort of feature-length love letter to the work of Chuck Jones. It was a radical shake-up compared to the film Allers had aspired to make, but it worked, and the project was salvaged. The film emerged as The Emperor's New Groove, only six months behind Kingdom of The Sun's allotted release in the summer of 2000 (a slot instead filled by Dinosaur, Disney's early flirtation with 3D animation). Some key elements of the original narrative survived in the finished production - notably, Yzma turning Manco, now renamed Kuzco, into a llama (unintentionally, in this version) as part of an underhanded scheme to usurp the throne, although Yzma's obsession with regaining her beauty was dropped and she no longer bore any ill will toward the sun. Pacha's character was heavily altered - he was now a middle-aged family man voiced by John Goodman - although the basic plot point about an unassuming peasant teaching an arrogant emperor how to rule remained intact. But in most other respects the story was transmuted beyond recognition. The Inca setting, which had so fascinated Allers, was now basically incidental, the character of Nina was completely abandoned and the film's Prince and The Pauper connection was no more. As a consequence of this extensive overhaul, all of the songs Sting had prepared for Kingdom of The Sun were discarded, since they were no longer pertinent to the story in question. Sting was understandably disappointed by this development, but remained attached to the project and wrote two new songs which were used in the final picture, although the film was not a traditional musical as Allers had envisioned.

It's worth acknowledging that The Emperor's New Groove was not the only Disney production to have suffered such severe gestation troubles, although it was a particularly extreme example. I've already alluded to the difficulties that Scribner had in getting his vision for The Lion King, then titled King of The Jungle, off the ground, and in that instance, it was Allers who ultimately saved the production. It's also well-known what an absolute nightmare Toy Story was at one time shaping up to be under the guidance of Katzenberg. But not only was The Emperor's New Groove light-years apart from the film Allers was aspiring to make, there was an unusually juicy twist in all of this, in that this deluge of behind-the-scenes trauma had been captured and preserved by outside forces and was, at one point, intended for public exhibition. See, when Sting had first agreed to come on board and do the project, he had done so on the condition that his wife, film-maker Trudie Styler, would be permitted to document the production process. Styler, along with her co-director John-Paul Davidson, were present and filming while many of these unpleasant decisions were being made, including the critical moment where Sting received confirmation from Fullmer that all of his song-writing work was about to be canned. Styler had captured Disney with their pants down and their hands chopped off (an analogy one person actually makes in the film), and the results, Dame Hearsay had it, were far from pretty.

Styler's project was ultimately assembled into a feature documentary called The Sweatbox (named for the screening room established by Disney at his studio in Burbank). It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2002, and played in a tiny number of other select venues in the festival circuit. For a while this was the only glimpse of daylight the poor picture ever got, except in cherry-picked snippets which showed up here and there on "making of" featurettes on home media releases of The Emperor's New Groove. Word began circulate that Disney were deliberately holding Styler's film captive because they were concerned that it painted a less-than-flattering image of the company - particularly executives Tom Schumacher and Peter Schneider, who were essentially the villains of the piece, if Mouse Planet writer Wade Sampson was to be believed. Sampson, who had attended a screening of The Sweatbox at the Florida Film Festival, wrote an article that for years dominated the general public's impression of the film. And while Sampson acknowledged that he did not consider the film to be "anti-Disney", for a period he almost single-handedly bolstered the mythos that The Sweatbox had been locked away in the Vault because it represented such a deep personal embarrassment to Schneider and Schumacher. Says Sampson:

"At the late night screening I attended, every time Tom Schumacher, then president of Disney Feature Animation, or Peter Schneider, then the Disney Studios chairman, appeared on the screen, there were howls from the audience that was partly composed of animators from Disney Feature Animation Florida.

The two executives did come across as nerdy bullies who really didn't seem to know what was going on when it came to animation and were unnecessarily hurtful and full of politically correct speech. They looked like the kids in high school that jocks gave a "wedgie" to on a daily basis. How much of that impression was due to editing and how much was a remarkable truthful glimpse is up to the viewer to decide."

Firstly, it is funny how convinced Sampson seems that the jocks who gave wedgies to nerds on a daily basis were the real victims and the kids they so mercilessly abused had it coming. That is one heck of an unpleasant analogy. Secondly, I'd bear in mind that those animators who heckled the executives during the Florida screening would have inevitably brought their own emotional baggage along with them. Perhaps Schneider and Schumacher really were as difficult to work with as Sampson suggests, but whether that's what's actually represented in the film or Sampson was simply responding to the energy of that particular audience is a whole other matter.

So yes, some of what Sampson wrote was always highly questionable, but back in 2007 we didn't have any reason to believe that the basic essence of what he was saying - that Disney were locking this one away in the vault for all eternity because it presented an overwhelmingly negative impression of the company - was anything other than true. Surely Disney must have had something to hide, or why else would they want to bury it? We likewise had little reason to believe that we would ever have the chance to see The Sweatbox for ourselves and form our own opinions, because how could Disney be expected to change their minds on such a thing? And as it turns out, they didn't. But life found a way regardless. One fateful day in March 2012 The Sweatbox randomly appeared online, albeit as a work print with a big intrusive timecode slapped across the bottom, and the internet erupted into a tirade of, "QUICKLY! GRAB IT! DON'T LET IT GET AWAY!" The video was subsequently removed by the YouTube police, but by then everyone with an interest in the documentary had already created their own copy and there was no going back. I understand that the work print in question had a different opening to the finalised version, and there are no end-credits, but otherwise I think that the picture unexpectedly bestowed on us was more-or-less the same as what those festival-goers saw back in 2002. The Documentary That Disney Didn't Want You To See now belonged to The People. This was a moment in history. We were about to gaze into the deep dark abyss of Disney production and see that sordid underbelly they were so determined to shield from public view.

Or not, because the resounding reaction, once the film had been seen by enough eyes around the web, was, "Really? That's it? What was all the fuss about?" As it turns out, there was nothing in the least bit scandalous about The Sweatbox. What we had was a brutally honest account of how the Disney magic gets made and the terminal drudgery that accompanies the process, but nothing more defamatory than that. Based on the rumors, I think a lot of us were expecting screaming matches, animators throwing paint at executives, producers and screenwriters being locked in offices together until they reached an agreement, and an all-round hurricane of blood, sweat, tears and tantrums. Certainly, there is a very strong sense throughout of all parties struggling to keep their emotions in check and to avoid being forthright about what's actually on their mind. But, you know, that all comes with the territory of being a professional. Sensibilities are tested, hearts are broken, ambitions are thwarted, but such is the reality of the creative process within the studio system. And given the absolute wringer that Disney put her husband through, Styler's film absolutely does not come across as the work of a person with an axe to grind. The much-hyped moment in which Fullmer communicates to Sting the bad news that his songs were now unusable is there, and it's an uncomfortable scene for sure, in which you can really feel Sting's deflation seeping through, but it's nowhere near as squeamish as you might expect. If anything, The Sweatbox endeavors to elicit tremendous admiration for the fact that the various individuals attached to the project were able to weather so many setbacks and still have a product at the end of it all, even if said product bore little resemblance to the one they had initially set out to make.

As for Schneider and Schumacher...based on his wording, I'm not convinced that Sampson actually understands what "politically correct" means, as it's not really an apt description of anything the so-called nerdy bullies are saying here. What I think he's getting at is that Schneider and Schumacher are blatantly choosing their words carefully so that they can lambaste Allers' work whilst retaining a guise of friendliness and enthusiasm, but...I'll refer back to what I said earlier about being a professional. And I really am scratching my head as to what point in the documentary they are "unnecessarily hurtful". Let's put it another way - do Schneider and Schumacher ever come across as wheedling and insincere? Yes, absolutely they do. There is one moment in particular where Schneider, following the disastrous test screening of Kingdom of The Sun, talks about how this is all part of the process and how you have to go through what doesn't work to find out what does - which, contrasted with Allers' more winded response, is liable to prompt a viewer reaction of "Well, that's easy for you to say. You're not the one who just had your labour of love ripped apart." But at the same time, The Sweatbox never infers that what Schneider and Schumacher are doing is anything less than what their own jobs demand - ie: the onus is on them to oversee a production that will perform well for the company.

If stories of the picture's salaciousness turned out to be wildly exaggerated, then why were Disney so keen to keep the public from ever seeing this one? We can only speculate. Maybe Disney just didn't appreciate the joke implicit in the film's title (sure, it's a direct reference to the Disney screening room, but it also functions as a not-very-subtle nod to the arduous and emotionally trying time the crew had making this film). Perhaps the underwhelming response to The Emperor's New Groove in 2000 played a part, as the film's failure, at least in the short-term, possibly made their decisions therein look foolish and misguided. Maybe the reaction at the very screening attended by Sampson convinced them that the film was more defamatory than it was. Or maybe Sting's biting assessment of the Disney ethos simply cut a little too close to the bone? "I'm alloyed to this organisation that seems to want to take the best of different cultures and suck them up and then spit them out into something that's like a hamburger." Having uttered that very damning statement, Sting immediately tries to take the edge off by admitting that he doesn't think this is actually their intention, but I don't think I ever heard a more astute summary of the Disney brand, particularly Renaissance era Disney, where the process of McDonaldization swiftly took a hold, and their output began to feel as calculated and unnutritious as the Happy Meals they were at least partially designed to sell. (As a disclaimer, I like all of the Renaissance films except Hercules, which is pure 100% celluloid Happy Meal, but I'm not above the occasional good-hearted jibe at their expense.)

To my mind, The Sweatbox is an important film. It's the most thorough and candid insight we're ever likely to get into the Disney film-making process, one that feels worlds apart from the self-congratulatory fluff pieces that constitute "making of" featurettes on the company's official media releases, and that makes it a must-see for any Disney fanatic. I'm glad it was made, I consider it doubly fortuitous that it happened to be made about this film in particular, given how radically the picture was transmuted during production, and I'm endlessly grateful to the plucky anonymous who enabled it to miraculously escape the Vault. After watching The Sweatbox for the first time, I had only one key complaint, and that's that it didn't reveal nearly enough about Allers' original vision for my liking. The glimpses we got were titillating but they merely whetted my appetite. But then if I'm totally honest, I'm not convinced that anything less than the full animatic that played so disastrously to Schneider and Schumacher would have satisfied that craving. That's what I really wanted to see, dammit. I wanted to know exactly where this was headed so that I could judge for myself who was right and who was wrong - particularly as the majority of criticisms we hear from Schneider and Schumacher on the subject are so infuriatingly vague. But having watched the film numerous times, and knowing Renaissance era's various tics and eccentrics as I do, I think that we actually get a sufficient enough inkling as to why Allers' picture wasn't working. There's one comment in particular from producer Don Hahn that I suspect summarises what was going wrong for Kingdom of The Sun in perfect little nutshell:

"The frustrating thing about this film is that there are so many great elements. If I sat down to describe it to you and said, oh we have this movie set in Peru, and by the way Sting's doing the music, and there's Eartha Kitt, and by the way David Spade's in it too, you'd be going, oh my god, where do I go, how can I give my money to go see this movie? And so it's incredibly frustrating when we look at it and say why aren't the pieces coming together? Where's my movie?"

Think back to what I said about McDonaldization, and to Sting's hypothetical hamburger. By this point in the Renaissance, Disney had grown accustomed to creating films according to a specific formula - a sort of one-size-fits-all model into which any folklore or cultural mythology could be fed, ground down, processed and reassembled into a highly marketable and digestible package (Sting's hamburger analogy seems particularly witty, given that Disney films inevitably set out to present their reiterations of classic stories, no matter what their cultural origin, in a manner that seemed cosy, familiar and entirely unchallenging to Western sensibilities). The ideal Disney picture, according to the Renaissance model, would be one that incorporated a princess (or nearest possible equivalent), a campy villain, a SNL comedian somewhere within the cast, some form of animal sidekick who could guarantee a run of plush toys, a love song, a comic song, a song in which the villain lays out their nefarious scheme, and lashings upon lashings of awe-inspiring eye candy. It seems that Kingdom of The Sun was indeed going for all of those, and I suspect that's where they tripped themselves up - they were so concerned with the various fragments, and with ensuring that all of the items on the Disney checklist were accounted for, that they were giving less attention to the way it gelled as a cohesive whole. On that basis, I can buy that Allers' project, while undoubtedly assembled with love and passion, was as messy and unfocused as Schneider and Schumacher indicate that it was. At the start of the film, Allers recalls how, when he first pitched his outline to Michael Eisner, he was assured that it has "all the elements of a Disney classic", which with hindsight might have been an early sign of doom. It's this obsession with manufacturing Disney classics via obligatory elements that led to some of the more questionable decisions of the later Renaissance fare - eg: the three animate gargoyles from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, who feel wildly out of place in what would otherwise have been one of Disney's darker and more ambitious pictures, but were there because wisecracking sidekicks voiced by popular comedians were a requisite.

In spite of the difficulties he faced in bringing the elements together, Allers was reluctant to drop a single one, believing that he could make it work if given sufficient time. When Dindal took over as the project's sole director, he was more open to making sacrifices in order to streamline the narrative, and one of the elements he figured the story ultimately didn't need was the romantic arc with Pacha and Nina. We learn effectively nothing of lost Disney princess Nina in The Sweatbox, other than what's evident in the love song Sting prepared ("One Day She'll Love Me", which still appears on the official soundtrack release), although one jettisoned character we do gain a little flavour of is Hucua, Yzma's sidekick, who was ultimately replaced by Kronk in the finished film. It's never stated in The Sweatbox, but he would have been voiced by Harvey Fierstein - there's a point in the documentary where we see a short animated sequence of Hucua saying, "This time I'm putting my foot down!", and there's no mistaking those vocals for anybody else. Fierstein, of course, is a highly esteemed person around these parts, since he also voiced Karl in the Simpsons episode "Simpson and Delilah", and I must admit that my loyalties here are somewhat divided. I think that Patrick Warburton is wonderful and hilarious as Kronk and I couldn't possibly imagine Disney's llama flick without him. On the other hand, we could have had Harvey Fierstein. So I don't know what to think. At least Fierstein got to voice Yao in Mulan, so he wasn't completely squeezed out of the Disney legacy. Oh and, incidentally, if you're a Yzma/Kronk shipper then congratulations - your ship is confirmed as canon in The Sweatbox. At the very least, animator Joe Moshier seems to be under the impression that Kronk is "Yzma's boyfriend".

The gradual transition of the picture from Kingdom of The Sun to The Emperor's New Groove (and Kingdom in The Sun somewhere in between) is absolutely fascinating to watch. The painful part comes in seeing the artists who've put their hearts into their allotted contributions discover that it was all for nought, and that they now have two options - begin again from the beginning or exit the project (which they might have to do, if their particular contribution was no longer relevant). In addition to Sting and Allers, there's animator Andreas Deja, who at the start of the documentary talks with great enthusiasm about how being assigned Yzma is "a dream come true" for him, because he's always wanted to animate a female villain. Deja clearly backs Allers' vision - before that terrible test screening, he voices his confidence that the story is "tight, terrific and entertaining". As the transmutation process gets underway, Deja reflects on his initial relief that Yzma was still in the picture at all, but his frustration that she was no longer the same sun-loathing, immortality-chasing narcissist he had grown so invested in animating, as her obsession with youth and beauty was what really captivated him about the character. "I would have gone all the way with that," he admits ruefully. (Deja ultimately quit the production and went to work on Lilo & Stitch, while Dale L. Baer took over as Yzma's animator.) Eartha Kitt seems more divided. She muses that the Yzma Allers came up with was "more profound" and had "more native intelligence", but also admits to enjoying Dindal's more simplified, comedic take on the character. "I adore her, because she goes after what she wants, and even though she gets a bit obstreperous about it...in the end I think you end up liking her." Elsewhere, other artists are being led around in circles as the revised narrative is being ironed out and various story elements are switched around and retooled on a daily basis, and many of them aren't even certain if they still have jobs or not. Among them is Doug Frankel, the animator assigned to working on Chicha, Pacha's wife. The preliminary screening for The Emperor's New Groove goes a whole lot better than that for Kingdom of The Sun, although Schneider and Schumacher are at odds with the story team as to whether Pacha should have a family at all, believing that their scenes are dead weight as far as the narrative is concerned, and Frankel's work hangs persistently in the balance as they barter this out between them. Frankel gets used to saying, "Whatever's best for the movie", to the point that it clearly loses all meaning. (In the end, the creative team wins this particular round, and Chicha makes it all the way into the final picture.)

It's a slow and bewildering process, but at long last things seem to be looking up for the troubled production. There is, however, one further and particularly bitter clash on the horizon, this time between Sting and the production team. Sting expresses dissatisfaction with the film's original ending, which sees Kuzco spare Pancho's village, but build his eyesore of a leisure resort anyway, on a neighbouring hill, thus desecrating the local environs and polluting the landscape with his continued self-indulgence. In other words, Kuzco doesn't really change too much in this version of the story, and the ostensible message of a common man teaching an arrogant man about leadership ends up feeling a mite insincere. Was this an intentional move (albeit a somewhat misjudged one) from a film that refused point blank to take itself in the slightest bit seriously, or was the picture really that thoughtless about the implications of its ending? We see a meeting in which Schneider and Schumacher discuss Sting's objections with Dindal and Fullmer, and they all talk about how great it is to have this additional feedback. Roy Disney is also suddenly there and...you know, I must confess that I've never been able to look at him in quite the same way ever since seeing his highly unpleasant remarks on the company's history of animal abuse in the 1982 documentary Cruel Camera. Never mind Schneider and Schumacher; if I'm going to howl at and heckle anyone on screen, it's Roy. Thankfully he's not there long.

It's here that Sting delivers his damning hamburger analogy. As noted, he immediately doubles back on it, but for a moment it's as if he's cut through the lie and exposed Disney, in the most naked possible terms, for what it really is - that is, a giant corporation eager to trample over everything, make the world into its personal amusement park and affix unsightly little mouse ears to all. Suddenly that alternate ending, in which Kuzco purports to be bringing the community together in their mutual pursuit of wholesome family fun, but is merely satisfying his own egotistical ends by stripping down the world around them and reconstructing it in his own image, plays like the most uncomfortable of Freudian slips. Disney rethinks the ending and changes it to the one we see in the final film, in which Kuzco abandons plans for his resort altogether and, in lieu of rebuilding the world in his own image, chooses to assimilate himself into the local culture and form a sincere connection with the villagers. In spite of the prickliness of this particular moment, The Sweatbox does not settle upon an anti-Disney stance, and closes out with Sting making the following reflection: "I have to say, as much as I've bitched and moaned about having to write for a committee, and having a censor, an artistic censor, every time that I've had to go back and work it, it's better, it's gone better. So if I'm being honest I have to say the process does work."

Inevitably, The Emperor's New Groove will always be one of Disney's most divisive animated features. Many believe that Allers was given a rough ride by the suits and could have produced a masterpiece on a par with the best of the Renaissance era had the studio trusted in his vision. Others argue that the Disney Renaissance was already wearing itself into the ground through over-familiarity and laud The Emperor's New Groove for bringing something wildly fresh to the table. Personally, I have a foot in both camps. I've got a lot of sympathy for Allers - there's no doubt in my mind that he cared passionately about the film he was making, perhaps even to a fault - but I also love The Emperor's New Groove and would be extremely resistant toward the idea of living in an alternate timeline where it doesn't exist.

One thing that's not evident from Styler's picture, and this is something that Allers' supporters are at pains to point out, is the full context as to what was going on with the Disney feature landscape post-Lion King. In between Allers' original hit and this particular project there was Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Mulan and Tarzan. Those films generally did well at the box office, but not as well as Disney would have liked. The Disney Renaissance was already in danger of going stale, and there was additional pressure on Allers amid all of that to deliver something more commercial. His intentions for Kingdom - epic, spectacular, serious, ambitious - skewed too close to the Pocahontas and Hunchback model for the higher-ups' liking. From that perspective, one might hypothesise that Kingdom of The Sun really could have been as great a film as Allers believed it could be; it just wasn't the film that Disney desired at that point in time. Allers had his heart set on making the project as he had always conceived it, whereas Schneider and Schumacher, conscious of the company's waning box office, began pushing for something with a little less grandeur and a lot more fun. Although therein lies the paradox. Hercules was a zany action-comedy, closer in spirit to Aladdin than to the triad of epics that had fallen in between, and it performed relatively poorly by Renaissance standards. Eisner himself was reportedly nervous when he heard that The Emperor's New Groove would be an all-out comedy for that very reason. It surely wasn't a matter of how earnest and portentous versus how zany and light-hearted the pictures were - rather, I think audiences were tiring of Disney feature animation full-stop because the freshness was fading. They were beginning to feel more conspicuously like calculated products, with whatever spontaneity might have been lurking in those earlier productions carefully weeded out of them. Back in 1992, nobody had ever seen a performance in a mainstream animated feature quite like that which Robin Williams gave in Aladdin. By 1998, when Eddie Murphy was delivering a very similar kind of performance in Mulan, audiences knew the drill. The world had downed enough Happy Meals within the last few years, and it was numbing to the taste.

I'm emphasising this because, irrespective of how Allers' film would have turned out (and all of this talk about "elements" throughout The Sweatbox does instil me with trepidation), The Emperor's New Groove works precisely because it is so marvellously atypical for a Disney production, particularly coming off the back of the Renaissance era. Of all the animated features the company had put out since The Lion King, this one felt the least calculated, the most experimental and by far the most purely joyous. Gone was the tremendous sense of self-importance that had marred many a late 90s Disney production for numerous viewers (Hercules included); The Emperor's New Groove is unfussy and unassuming, and it's entirely at ease with how unfussy and unassuming it is. It doesn't bear the self-conscious air of a product designed to bait Oscars or sell fast food, but simply to generate as much ludicrous delight as possible from its farcical scenario. It didn't translate in terms of box office sales - by then, traditional Disney animation was too out of vogue, and Disney's own indifferent marketing strategies didn't help matters - but it did ensure that there'd be an appreciative audience for this film once the dust had settled. The Emperor's New Groove might always have been a little too quirky and off-centre for mainstream tastes, but its eccentricities have enabled to live on as fondly-regarded cult classic long after Disney's more prestigious productions for that year (Fantasia 2000, Dinosaur) were forgotten. Regardless of whether you side with Schneider and Schumacher, it has to be said there is a kind of irony in the fact that this degree of executive meddling, in this instance, resulted in one of the liveliest and most idiosyncratic Disney features of all-time.

There is, however, one misgiving that I have about The Emperor's New Groove. In 2014, Allers gave an interview to Italian animation site Fumetto Logica, in which he was asked about Kingdom of The Sun. He gave what I feel was a very sincere response in terms of the ill-fated production:

"The Kingdom of the Sun was such a heart-breaking experience for me. I put four years of my heart and energy into that one.  Though I may have seemed calm for the camera (as I always tried to be for my crew) inside it was a chaotic struggle resulting in annihilation.  I was creating an “epic” picture mixing elements of adventure, comedy, romance and mysticism. The head of Disney Features at the time was afraid that we were doing, in his opinion, too many films in the same vein."

He then says of the head of Disney Features:

"He was also uncomfortable with the spiritual and cultural (Inca) aspects of it."

This is an interesting revelation, as it's not something you see first-hand in The Sweatbox, and it's one that I do find very believable. Again, it goes back to what Sting says about different cultures and hamburgers, and how Disney simultaneously wanted the exoticism and mysticism of various cultural mythologies but nothing that could be perceived as too different or startling to American sensibilities (you see ample evidence of that in Hercules, where Hades is basically represented as Satan). As I previously noted, the Inca setting is entirely incidental to The Emperor's New Groove, informing only the most basic of world-building (emperor, llamas, etc). There's a moment in The Sweatbox where an unnamed female animator talks about the various rumours she's heard regarding the new narrative directions being debated for Kingdom of The Sun, among them that the story might be relocated to Nebraska and the llamas changed to sheep. I'm not sure quite how serious she's being on that point, but given how thoroughly uninterested the finished film is in the Incas themselves, such a transplant wouldn't be beyond the realm of possibility. It stands to reason - it was Allers who was really fascinated with the idea of making a film about Inca mythology, and Dindal evidently didn't share his enthusiasm. The rapid-fire anachronistic humour is, of course, a huge part of the charm, and it works a whole lot better here than in Hercules, but this this is the one area in which The Emperor's New Groove does come across as glibly calculating - its total lack of passion for the subject at hand.

Really, though, if there's one thing that I'm inclined to take away from the whole Sweatbox saga, it's an infinite amount of admiration for just how consistent and cohesive a picture The Emperor's New Groove is, in light of just how difficult a time it had in the making. I mean, if you'd seen this film and knew nothing about its background, would you have guessed that it had such tortured origins? The only real hint, I feel, of its troubled production lies in how modest much of the animation is compared to other features of the era. There's nothing especially extravagant or showy about the visuals, cluing you in that this was done on the cheap. But in terms of narrative, character and humour, the whole thing flows smoothly from start to finish. There's no sense of any identity crisis, or of the film being cobbled together from various bits and pieces. It's a film that knows exactly what it wants to be, and sticks with it. For an example of a film that does wear its painful gestation upon its sleeve, you need look no further than DreamWorks Animation's The Road to El Dorado, which at one point seemed destined for a rivalry with Disney's Inca pic as vicious as that between A Bug's Life and Antz, but was ultimately hampered by its own extremely troubled production. The Road to El Dorado featured songs by Elton John and Tim Rice, in a conspicuous effort to replicate the success of The Lion King (as eager as Katzenberg was to really stick it to Disney, at this point he was also quite happy to leech off of their popularity). They feel curiously out of place in the finished film, however, as if they were intended for an earlier version of the story but were retained regardless because everybody knew that this was their big draw. Can you imagine if The Emperor's New Groove had done the same with Sting's original songs? Disney's approach may have been cutthroat, but it got way better results.