Is Antz producer Jeffrey Katzenberg taking revenge on former employer Disney?He spoke to David Eimer
When Antz, the first animated feature from DreamWorks SKG, overtook the $67- million box-office take of Beavis and Butthead Do America in November 1998, it became the most successful non- Disney animated movie ever.
Still riding high, Antz is the first shot in a war that will determine whether Disney can maintain the monopoly it has held since 1937, when Walt and Co put out Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the world’s first full-length cartoon. And, just to intensify the competition, Disney’s own insect feature, A Bug’s Life, has shot in at number one in the United States.
The man largely responsible for ushering in this war of the animators is Jeffrey Katzenberg, the 47-year- old former studio chief at Disney who left acrimoniously in 1994.
He is delighted by the success of Antz, but Katzenberg knows that far more rests on his company’s second animated film, The Prince of Egypt (opening in South Africa in March). With a budget estimated at nearly $100-million, it tells the epic story of Moses. The brief from Katzenberg was to make it look as if it were drawn by Gustav Dor, painted by Monet and photographed by David Lean – showing the studio’s artistic ambition.
Disney makes cartoons. DreamWorks makes animated movies. Katzenberg can’t resist a swipe at his old bosses in explaining the difference. “Sixty-odd years ago, Walt Disney took a technique called animation and told the first long-form feature and he chose, because of his interests, a fairy-tale; he wanted to make a movie for children. And because he was the only one using the technique of animation, today animation is a genre and the genre is fairy-tales for toddlers.
“So the idea that you could take the technique of animation and tell a variety of stories in different genres has simply never happened before. That’s both the good news and the bad news. The good news is you can take the audience on a ride they’ve never had before.
“The scary part is that you’re trying to do something different and you’ve really got to get an audience to open their mind, to come in and see a John Ford movie in animation, a David Lean movie in animation, or a Steven Spielberg one.”
It was Spielberg who originally came up with the idea for the Moses film. “He said: `Why don’t you do the Ten Commandments?’ and as soon as he said it all three of us – David Geffen [third man in the DreamWorks troika] was there – just said that if we start DreamWorks, that’s going to be the first animated movie. We actually decided on that before we’d even started the company, that was how obvious it was to us. Here’s a story that continues to be one of the most powerful, profound, important stories in the heritage of two-thirds of the people on the planet. I’m not sure how you pick a better story.”
Having said that, The Prince of Egypt is not the easiest film to market. Trivialising the characters by utilising the tie-ins with fast food franchises that have traditionally helped sell cartoons to kids was out.
“This is not our story,” Katzenberg emphasises. “We do not have the right as storytellers to simply do with it as we please. Walt Disney took these stories and re-engineered them to tell happy fairy tales. I did The Little Mermaid at Disney – read the original, it’s a horrible, depressing story, but that’s not in the movie. But we were not going to treat this as a fairy tale.”
Katzenberg acknowledges that there is a tremendous amount riding on the success or failure of The Prince of Egypt. “It obviously has financial implications, but I think emotionally it has even bigger implications for us because it’s four years and a lot of passion and hard work. So it would be rough on everybody if it doesn’t work. But it’s possible, it’s a hugely risky movie and I don’t want people’s expectations inside our company to be unrealistic.
“I will point out that when I went to Disney in 1984, they had a 60-year tradition, a studio, buildings, hardware and several hundred artists. Well, DreamWorks started with nothing, not even a pencil – everything had to be done from scratch. People need to get their expectations in line with the gamble that we’ve taken.”
Which is precisely why The Prince of Egypt is following Antz into the cinemas. To help offset the risk, Katzenberg wanted the light, enjoyable Antz to open first, he says. The problem is that Disney claims Katzenberg simply lifted the idea when he left.
For Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computers and a backer of Pixar Animation, which has made A Bug’s Life in partnership with Disney, it’s simple. “Jeffrey knew all about Bug’s the day he left Disney,” he said. “We pitched it to him.”
The animosity between Katzenberg and Disney turns on their alleged failure to honour his contract when he left in August 1994, after the head of the company, Michael Eisner, declined to make him his number two.
In Katzenberg’s 10 years at the studio, he had taken it from a $244-million profit in 1984 to a staggering $4,8- billion in 1994, thanks to such hits as Aladdin and The Lion King, the most profitable animated movie ever made. Katzenberg’s contract included a clause that he was entitled to 2% of all those profits.
Disney said he’d forfeited it by leaving with two years still to run on his contract. Although the matter has been settled out of court, Katzenberg is adamant he’s the injured party.
He needed the money because the first $100-million of DreamWorks’ $2- billion start-up costs came from the three founders. Finding $33-million wasn’t a problem for Spielberg or Geffen (who went from managing Crosby, Stills and Nash in the late Sixties to owning a billion-dollar record company) but it was hard for Katzenberg.
The dispute has had a huge impact on the once-cosy community of Hollywood animators. Where they used to exchange ideas and help each other out, they now guard their projects jealously. At the same time DreamWorks has aggressively recruited many of Disney’s best people, and salaries, which were low by film- industry standards because good animators used to have jobs for life, have jumped accordingly. Not for nothing does Katzenberg refer to DreamWorks’s plush, 15-acre animation base in Glendale as a “talent trap”.
Establishing Hollywood’s first new studio in 59 years was an awesome proposition, and success has not been instant. There has been no mega-hit; there was speculation the TV and music arms of the company would be sold off. But Antz and Saving Private Ryan, a co- production with Paramount, have ensured survival for now.
“We have one of the great entrepreneurs in David Geffen; without question, Steven is the greatest dreamer of our time, and I’m a builder, that’s what I’ve done all my life. So you take an entrepreneur, a dreamer and a builder and you put them together. Steven said it best. He said, `The greatest promise for DreamWorks is that each of us can make one another a little better,’ and I think it’s true.”