Behind-The-Scenes Details From Disney Films

The productions of Pocahontas and The Lion King were underway at the same time. However, more animators wanted to work on Pocahontas because they thought it seemed like it would be the bigger hit.

Atlantis: The Lost Empire is very different from most Disney flicks because there are no songs and more explosions. The filmmakers also brought in linguist Marc Okrand to help create an actual alien language for the film. Okrand had previously created the Klingon language in Star Trek.

Co-director of The Little Mermaid Ron Clements told CinemaBlend, "[Then-Chairman of Disney] Jeffrey Katzenberg had different ideas, I think. And for whatever reason, a lot of what he saw early on was black-and-white animation footage, which are just pencil drawings. And [Ariel] sort of looks blonde."

“Walt [Disney] told me after one story meeting that he didn’t care how long it took, but to do it right,” sequence director Eric Larson said about Sleeping Beauty. It was this perfectionism that led to the production inventing new colors.

There's a reason why Phil Collins won a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Golden Globe for his work on Tarzan. For the "Trashin' the Camp" sequence, Collins — a world-renowned drummer — created all the percussion sounds himself.

The Emperor's New Groove started out as Kingdom of the Sun, a film inspired by Incan myths. The initial stages of production were caught on camera for the documentary The Sweatbox, showing the animators slowly realizing that the film had to be completely reworked.

The Emperor's New Groove had a revolutionary type of female character: Chicha, Pacha's wife, is pregnant during the movie. According to the audio commentary on the DVD, this made her the first pregnant woman to ever feature in an animated Disney movie.

At just ten years old, Kathryn Beaumont took on the role of Alice in Alice in Wonderland. Although she was voice-acting, the young actress played an additional role in the movie. She performed the movements for her character to help the animators during the illustrating process.

Kathryn Beaumont provided the voice and live-action reference for Alice in Alice in Wonderland — and she was so good Disney asked her to do the same for Wendy Darling in Peter Pan. She was the model for Tinker Bell, too!

The animators of Pinocchio had their work cut out for them — beyond putting pens to paper. Film historian J. B. Kaufman told reporters in 2017 that the animators had to physically make the clocks in Gepetto's workshop to show they could hypothetically be real clocks.

In the early 1930s, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was nicknamed "Disney's folly" because no one believed audiences would sit through a full-length animated film. It was such a huge risk that Walt Disney had to mortgage his house to secure the money for its budget.

Tim Burton has The Fox and The Hound to thank for starting his career in Hollywood. Kind of. "I remember I worked on The Fox and the Hound, and I was just terrible," he told South China Morning Post in 2016. "I was supposed to draw the foxes and I just couldn’t do it. They looked like they’d been run over by a car."

Everyone has their favorite period of Disney, but which Disney classics represent the end of certain Disney eras? Peter Pan was the last feature distributed through RKO Pictures before Walt Disney created his own distribution company.

One Hundred and One Dalmatians meant animators had to create a lot of spots — like, a lot. According to press materials for the film's re-release in 1979, there are exactly 6,469,952 spots in the movie. That would be a good quiz question!

As the "Mistress of All Evil," Sleeping Beauty's Maleficent needed a great design. Imagineer Marc Davis gave her a headdress styled after goat horns and a cape of flame with a reptilian quality. He was also greatly inspired by a religious painting he found in a Czechoslovakian art book.

Disney originally wanted the Beatles to voice the vulture in The Jungle Book — but John Lennon turned them down. The story goes that Lennon told the band's manager that Disney should try their luck with Elvis Presley.

Lyricist Howard Ashman has become an essential part of Disney lore for his contributions to Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin. But his past experience in musicals might have initially made him seem like an odd choice — he had adapted Little Shop of Horrors for the stage.

Everyone remembers the first time they witnessed the horrible death of Mufasa in The Lion King, but did you know that it took almost three years to complete the sequence? Part of the reason was that it was a real technological feat, with the production inventing computer technology to achieve the desired result. But there was another reason.

During a scene in The Incredibles when Elastigirl flies a plane, she uses real terminology when talking over the radio. In the audio commentary of the movie, director Brad Bird said Holly Hunter, who's the voice of Elastigirl, was adamant about learning the meaning of each term.

Audrey Hepburn might never have voiced a Disney character, but she definitely inspired one or two. During the making of Sleeping Beauty, animator Ron Dias explained to Arts and Living Mag, "Originally, Sleeping Beauty looked a lot like Audrey Hepburn; she was softer, rounder, more like the 'designy' Disney girl."

Animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston were tasked with bringing the three Sleeping Beauty fairies to life. The two analyzed the behavior of older women at weddings and during shopping trips to get their attitudes just right.

In Hercules, the villain, Hades, is given a prophecy by the Fates. During the scene, six planets are seen aligned. Most people know that there are eight planets in our solar system — yet this is not an animation gaffe.

At the beginning of The Little Mermaid, Ariel explores a sunken ship. According to a maritime expert at Texas A&M University, both the build of the ship — a Spanish galleon — and the way it had deteriorated were completely accurate.

Linda Larkin was cast as Jasmine before “A Whole New World” was added to Aladdin. She told Media Mikes in 2010, “When they added the song they came to me and asked, ‘Do you sing?’ And I said, ‘I do… but not like a princess!’ And they said, ‘No problem, we’ll find a singer to match your voice.’”

If you were to consider the real-life proportions of Rapunzel and her hair, then there's a high chance that she probably wouldn’t be able to move. According to the Tangled animators, her hair is 70 feet long and has 100,000 strands in it.

According to director Pete Docter, the Inside Out team thought long and hard about the shape of each of Riley’s personified emotions. Although Joy and Sadness were pretty obvious — a star and a teardrop, respectively — the others weren’t as readily apparent.

Toy Story 3 contains a hilarious detail that could easily go unnoticed if you're not paying attention. You'll remember in the first film that Buzz Lightyear and Woody end up in the hands of their neighbor and known toy-breaker, Sid.

It turns out that Frozen has more than just a discography full of catchy tunes — it also has an Easter egg related to another animated flick, Tangled. At the start of Frozen, Elsa and Anna’s parents travel to attend the wedding... of Tangled’s Rapunzel and Flynn.

At one point in Toy Story, the heroes end up in the house of Andy’s neighbor and toy-mangler Sid. Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that Buzz and Woody traipse over a carpet that has the exact same pattern as the hotel from The Shining.

An early cut of Disney’s classic Beauty and the Beast featured a little sister for the main protagonist, Belle. Her name was Clarice, and she lived in fear of their Aunt Marguerite. But screenwriter Linda Woolverton didn’t feel the pair served the storyline.

The First Queen appeared in an early cut of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. However, her scene was deleted, so little information on the character can be extrapolated from the finished film.

In an alternate universe, Señorita Cactus is the third recruit to Woody’s Roundup gang in Toy Story 2. Similar to the Prospector, Señorita Cactus isn't fond of kids and prefers to be left on the shelf and admired rather than tossed around on the floor. The character ultimately made way for Jessie in the final Toy Story 2 cut.

"I don't know why I picked Snow White," Walt Disney once said. "It's a thing I remembered as a kid. I saw Marguerite Clark in it in Kansas City one time when I was a newsboy. They had a big showing for all the newsboys. And I went and saw Snow White."

Disney animation legend Marc Davis provided some insight into Walt Disney's mind in Charles Solomon’s Disney Editions book, A Wish Your Heart Makes: From the Grimm Brothers’ Aschenputtel to Disney’s Cinderella. It turned out that Disney had a soft spot for Cinderella.

When The Sword in the Stone began its production, Rickie Sorensen provided the voice of Wart. He was known for TV series such as Hazel and The Danny Thomas Show at the time. But the production took three years and Sorensen's voice changed so much he had to be replaced.

One of the masters of fantastical cinema, Tim Burton was always going to do something a little different with Lewis Carroll’s much-loved Alice in Wonderland. He didn’t disappoint with his 2010 adaptation, which brought Alice, the Mad Hatter, the White Queen, and co. firmly into the CGI age.

Prepare for all your swashbuckling illusions to be shattered: Orlando Bloom’s heartthrob blacksmith Will Turner, Johnny Depp’s eccentric Captain Jack Sparrow, and the rest of the cast weren’t really in the middle of the high seas while shooting 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.

Guardians of the Galaxy ripped up the rulebook when it arrived in 2014. Which other superhero film would put together a walking, talking tree, a bounty-hunting raccoon, and a man-mountain warrior? Former wrestler Dave Bautista continued his transition into Hollywood by playing the last of these, known as Drax the Destroyer.

The accent Dick Van Dyke adopted to play Bert has been the subject of much glee over the years. It is, after all, regularly regarded as one of the worst accents in cinema history. And no one likes to mock it more than Van Dyke himself.

The Mary Poppins songwriters, Richard and Robert Sherman, actually wrote more than 30 songs for the movie. A large number of them, of course, never saw the light of day. But a few were salvaged...