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A documentary essay about the unsung animation visionary, John Halas. An Animated Utopia explores his desire "to save the world using animation" and highlights his prescient and influential work in exploring new technologies. Though he, along with his wife Joy Batchelor, headed the longest-lasting and most successful British animation studio, he remains an enigma - his achievements, his influence, his success still unknown to so many. This is his story.
Director
Writer
Status
Released
Original Language
EN

By the mid-1980s, the fabled animation studios of Walt Disney had fallen on hard times. The artists were polarized between newcomers hungry to innovate and old timers not yet ready to relinquish control. These conditions produced a series of box-office flops and pessimistic forecasts: maybe the best days of animation were over. Maybe the public didn't care. Only a miracle or a magic spell could produce a happy ending. Waking Sleeping Beauty is no fairy tale. It's the true story of how Disney regained its magic with a staggering output of hits - "Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast ," "Aladdin," "The Lion King," and more - over a 10-year period.

Combining archival footage with rotoscopic animation, Tower reveals the action-packed untold stories of the witnesses, heroes and survivors of America’s first mass school shooting, when the worst in one man brought out the best in so many others.