It may not be here tomorrow, once Disney’s lawyers hear of it:
It’s a video for internal use detailing the long and painful process of making ‘The Emperor’s new Groove’, starting where it was still called ‘Empire of the sun’, showing all the hard work that went into it, how they eventually threw three years of work away because it just wasn’t working, together with interviews, animation tests, research, everything.
If you liked the movie, or want to know about what’s necessary to get a project this big off the ground, I can really recommend it.
Not really surprising – most animated features go through incredible gyrations, dead ends, and radical changes before they get released, and sometimes they never do. Aladdin was originally going to be closer to the original story, with Aladdin having a widowed mother. Fantasia famously had several other possible sequences, and the ones that survived were often in different form – the Pastoral Symphony sequence with the Greek Mythological creatures was at one time contemplated as a serious bit of art, not cutesy-poo.
And if you really want a heartbreaking story, look up Richard Williams’ Nasruddin, released in a horribly changed form as The Thief and the Cobbler.
Kingdom of the Sun
Empire of the Sun is the Spielberg movie with young Christian Bale.
Thank god it ended up like it did, because it’s hilarious.
I hear Sting was pretty pissed, though.