The Sweatbox (2002)

In 1997, musical performer and composer Sting was asked by the Walt Disney Company to write the music for a new animated feature called Kingdom of the Sun. It was to be directed by Roger Allers who was basking in the success of his work on The Lion King. Sting agreed, on the condition that his wife, filmmaker Trudie Styler, could document the process of the production with their own production company, Xingu Films…

Sting’s wife was given unlimited access when it came to Production No. 1331 (aka “Kingdom”). She and her camera sat in on story meetings for the movie, rolled while actors auditioned as well as taping Sting while he recorded the score. No one expected two years into the production, it would shift direction drastically.

The Sweatbox is at turns infuriating, hilarious and enlightening. You’ll cringe in sympathy with the Disney artists as you see the gross bureaucratic incompetence they had to endure while working at the studio in the 1990s. The film not only captures the tortured morphing of the Kingdom of the Sun into The Emperor’s New Groove, it also serves as an invaluable historical document about Disney’s animation operations in the late-1990s. If any questions remain about why Disney fizzled out creatively and surrendered its feature animation crown to Pixar and DreamWorks, this film will answer them.

The Sweatbox, whose title refers to the air-conditioning-bereft screening room Walt Disney set up to evaluate his employees' work, premiered at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival but has gone virtually unseen by the public ever since. Disney owns the rights and never officially released it. This is possibly because the years-long process of turning Kingdom of the Sun into The Emperor's New Groove was a messy one, full of waffling, bound in bureaucracy and spearheaded by Peter Schneider and Tom Schumacher, the indelicate heads of animation at Disney at the time.

NOTE: this is workprint copy.