Bringing a Classic to DVD

Naturally, the reason for this interview would be addressed in detail. At long last, Cinderella is making its way to DVD, as the last of the canon to come to the format and as the sixth in Disney's Platinum Collection for their top-selling animated classics.

Hahn on the challenges of bringing the film to DVD: We wanted to do justice to the original movie. The first challenge was to go back to the film itself and to clean it up and make it as beautiful as we could. And the other challenge is that we wanted to make sure that once you put the DVD in your player at home, you get not only the movie but all the great history and backstory to it all in the most interesting way possible. We have producers and people at the studio who really go into depth and try to find things in our archives and sketches and drawings and songs and stories that probably have never seen the light of day since the movie was originally made and find old interviews with some of the animators like Frank Thomas and Eric Larson and Woolie Reitherman and get them on the screen. So when you see the movie, you also get the backstory and get to hear the voices and the talents of some of the amazing artists who worked on it. Some of the most amazing artists of the 20th century were animators, I believe, and I really feel like you get to see their best work on Cinderella.

Hahn on the phenomenon of recreating a film's magic for a major DVD like this: For me it is kind of a treasure, which is maybe an overused word. These are films -- Cinderella in particular -- that have stood the test of the time. You can put it in today and really enjoy it with your family as much as any time. Also artistically to look at Cinderella and the artistic accomplishments. There's a great paradox in animation where you spend millions of dollars and hundreds of people and your goal is to have the audience not see the hand of the artist. It's ironic because they work so hard to get the characters to be alive and to have you believe in the flesh and blood of the characters, whether it's a stepmother or a mouse or a cat or whoever. All that effort is meant to be transparent, like a magician who doesn't want you to see the trick. That kind of artistic treasure is wonderful. What a disc like this shows you is a little peak behind the curtain so you can see some of the magician's tricks, hear some of the stories, and get a sense of what it must have been like to work on such an artistic achievement.

Woods: It (also) means that I was the luckiest girl in the world. At least out of 350 girls, I was the luckiest girl in the world I think to get the part and to work with a genius like Walt Disney and all of his wonderful artists.

Hahn: It's interesting because Walt had such an amazing ear for music, and Ilene and I were talking briefly before the call, about what a great pitch-perfect voice she has, on the disc and some of her radio performances and TV appearances with Perry Como, in an era where there were only live performances and you couldn't go in and do multi-track edits and all that that you can do today. Her pitch was so beautiful and so right on and it was a real testament not only to Ilene but to Walt and his artists that they really appreciated and knew that that was something that was rare. It really was rare.

Woods: I loved live television in those days. I made a boo-boo in the song as you probably heard with Perry and we made a fun thing out of it. (Laughs) I was embarrassed when it happened but I was happy that it happened after because Perry made such a fun thing out of it, and of course, Perry Como held my hand for the rest of the show, which was lovely.

Hahn on the DVD's bonus features: There's a lot of great behind-the-scenes material. Of course there's things like games, they've got a DVD-ROM game and those things, but to me, the wonderful parts of it are some of the accounts of the making of the film. Like Ilene just said, there are some great stories on about how she got hired or about how Mary Blair approached her artwork for the film. There's some wonderful radio programs with Perry Como and Ilene on television and on radio, you can really get a feeling for the time and get a feeling for the artists that made the movie and why they were so hungry to make this a hit and kind of the desperation that Walt and Roy Disney were in at this point in their careers the studio really bet everything on this movie. That's the fun of the bonus material on this particular disc is you get a real sense of history and a real sense of what a couple of filmmakers went through to get Cinderella to the screen

Unfortunately, he wasn't equipped to answer UD's question that will likely come to mind for many Disney DVD collectors -- why so much of the bonus material has little to do with the film and why there wasn't more that did? Why was there no audio commentary and only a sequence of live-action footage and yet plenty of space allotted to a commercial princess makeover featurette and new music videos?

Hahn: There's a fair amount of the live action; we see glimpses of it. Live action is a really interesting thing - it's a combination of shooting live action as reference, and also doing sketches of the voice actors and actresses and studying the whole gamut of actors' emotions.

Hahn confirms that the featurette "The Cinderella That Almost Was" could be done on any number of Disney films.

Hahn: Sometimes people feel "Oh it's Disney studios and they must have this wonderful gift for putting things down perfectly on a piece of paper." We work on it harder than anyone and there are a lot of failures along the way. What's interesting about the Cinderella disc you can see some of these song moments and story ideas that didn't make it to the screen. There's a lot of songs that were written that never made it into the movie, all of which are on the DVD. That was certainly the case with Beauty and the Beast. Aladdin probably had five songs that never made it to the screen - Aladdin had a mother and all other subplots that never made it. I think part of the challenge of animation and part of the legacy of Walt Disney is he never settled for an idea that wasn't quite right or didn't quite connect. He would always push to get the best possible solution - sometimes that meant throwing things overboard, sometimes that meant not using songs even though they were great. That is a legacy if not a tradition at the Disney studios for all these movies up to present day with songs and moments and sequences that didn't quite make it into the movie.

Literally every one - Lion King, Mary Poppins had dozens of songs that the Sherman Brothers wrote that didn't make it into the movie and a couple of them even made it into Bedknobs & Broomsticks a few years later, you see that as part of the process, and that's something that's very Disney and makes the movie as good as they are.

UD also asked about Cinderella III, an upcoming direct-to-video feature which reconfigures the reality of the original Cinderella is promoted on the DVD with a 2007 release date.

Hahn: As with all of our movies, if they are successful, the audience has a hunger for more and to see more stories about those characters. Having not seen it, it's hard to comment completely. But I think it's good, you know it is called "show business" and there is a place I think for sequels that take the story further. Having said that, there is one classic above all and that's always the original movie that got everyone interested in the story in the first place.

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