The Sweatbox

Holly-Beth3.5

i'm sorry, Sting, but you've thrown off the emperor's groove...

Daniel Gallegos4.0

On one hand, I want to see the original Kingdom of the Sun. On the other hand, that would mean a world with no Kronk, which is truly the darkest timeline

Matt Singer3.5

There is a lot of Sting in this documentary, for the simple fact that it would not exist without him. (His wife, Trudie Styler, co-directed it and, at least according to Wikipedia, his deal to contribute songs to The Emperor’s New Groove also gave her the rights to document the process.) I like Sting just fine, but his is actually the doc’s least interesting part: He writes some songs, the songs get cut, he writes some other songs, he grows disillusioned with work via committee, he writes more, he begrudgingly admits he likes the end result.But by following Sting’s journey on the film, Styler wound up with unprecedented outsider access to Disney’s creative process during this period. There are a million documentaries about the making of movies. But I can’t think of another one that actually puts you inside the room where studio executives give their screening notes — which in this case are often mercilessly brutal. There’s an unguarded quality to the interviews that you never see in stuff like this, almost as if the talking heads assumed the film would never see the light of day. (Which was kinda true.) For example, in one part an exec says (describing his decision to replace the original director and shift what was supposed to be an epic musical into a slight slapstick comedy) “It’s not like we killed anyone!” and another producer sitting next to him gives an involuntary nod that reads as “Yes, that is true. We have murdered an artist’s vision, one he spent years pouring himself into. But on the plus side: We let the man live!”