Word: disneyisms
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Katzenberg, who during his 10 years at Disney was involved with the making of cartoon hits from The Little Mermaid through The Lion King, believes he has everything to prove. For years, he was known as "the golden retriever"--the superefficient executive who, revved up on diet soda, worked from dawn to dinner. But the nickname contained an implicit insult: Can a dog--even a clever dog--be creative...
...overall quality of the live-action pictures that Disney cranked out under Katzenberg made that a fair question. But when it came to animation, the dog had his day. After initial indifference, Katzenberg fell in love with the medium. Disney's animated films climbed an arc that peaked in 1994 with the $755 million that The Lion King grossed worldwide. But that film opened just weeks before Katzenberg was ejected in a play for advancement that went sour. Disney's subsequent cartoons--Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules--failed to replicate that level of success. Was it animation...
Obviously, Katzenberg hopes that The Prince of Egypt will answer the latter question affirmatively. It is a wish intensified by the fact that he is in the midst of a contentious legal battle against Disney chairman Michael Eisner, the man who didn't think Katzenberg was good enough to be his second-in-command. Katzenberg claims he is owed 2% of the profit from every project he put into production during his 10 years at the company--an amount that could reach $250 million or more...
Soon after he left Disney, Katzenberg formed DreamWorks with David Geffen and Steven Spielberg. He raided a goodly portion of Disney talent, including Prince of Egypt producers Penney Finkelman Cox and Sandra Rabins and composer Hans Zimmer. He readily admits that The Prince of Egypt has a special resonance for him; one of his animators has even drawn a cartoon of Katzenberg as Moses confronting Eisner as Rameses. But it's not just a matter of personal vindication. Animation is such a key part of the DreamWorks business plan that many in the industry believe a failure by The Prince...
...quickly became clear that certain elements typical of Disney-style animated films would be out of place. A talking camel was cut. Comics Steve Martin and Martin Short, cast as charlatan priests, were directed to turn in subdued performances. Lucrative tie-ins were another sensitive issue. Katzenberg says, semiseriously, "We came up with the Red Sea boogie board. We had the 40-years-in-the-desert water bottle. We had the parting-of-the-Red-Sea shower curtain." But ultimately, both DreamWorks and its partner Burger King concluded that they would be doing themselves "a terrible disservice" if they pushed...