In 1994, the director of ‘The Lion King’ had his next big movie ready: a musical epic about the Inca Empire, with Sting composing the songs and Owen Wilson in the cast. Six years later, what ended up hitting theaters was ‘The Emperor and His Follies’, something radically different: an emperor turned into a llama, a good-natured peasant and meta jokes that broke the fourth wall. Animated on the fly from an unfinished script, all to meet the release deadlines promised to McDonald’s. A real debacle recorded in a completely inaccessible documentary.
The successor to ‘The Lion King’. Development of the film began in 1994 under the title ‘Kingdom of the Sun‘ (The Kingdom of the Sun), as an epic and dramatic adventure loosely inspired by ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ by Mark Twain. Its director was Roger Allers, who was coming off the biggest hit in the studio’s recent history, ‘The Lion King’. Allers introduced then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner, a story set at the height of the Inca civilization.
What was it about? The premise was ambitious: an arrogant emperor swaps places with a peasant who physically resembles him, while the villainous Yzma wants to destroy the sun to obtain eternal youth. For the soundtrack, following the model of Elton John’s success in ‘The Lion King’Allers signed Sting, who had already written several songs linked to the original plot. The team traveled to Machu Picchu in 1996 to learn about Inca architecture and Andean landscapes. It was exactly the type of production that Disney had been making since ‘The Little Mermaid’: epic, musical and very, very expensive.
So much for Disney. After the disappointing box office results of ‘Pocahontas’ and ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’, two films loaded with dramatic elements, studio executives believed that the project was too ambitious and serious, and that it needed more comedy. The solution was to hire Mark Dindal as co-director, and he was tasked with lightening the tone. Allers continued working on his dramatic epic while Dindal pushed toward the absurd. A test screening in 1998 revealed that schizophrenic tone, in two mutually incompatible directions. One of Disney’s executives threatened producer Randy Fullmer with canceling the project.
The McDonald’s problem. Added to all this was an extra problem: the film had to be finished in time to be released in the summer of 2000, since the promotional agreements with McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and other companies had already been signed and depended on that date being met. Allers acknowledged that production was delayed, but asked for between six months and a year of extension to solve the problems. It was denied. The director resigned, leaving Disney with at least $20 or $30 million already spent on animation. And no movie for the summer of 2000. Eisner gave Fullmer two weeks to prove the movie was salvageable. If not, the project was closed.
Dindal took control alone. He completed ‘The Emperor and His Follies’ in a year and a half, a record for a Disney production, and with an unusual need in the world of animation: it was produced without a finished script. Also in this process the cast changed: Owen Wilson was replaced by John Goodman, because the character of Pacha stopped being a double of the emperor to become a burly family man from the countryside. The hilarious character of Kronk, one of the film’s great discoveries, did not exist until the end: he was added during emergency rewrites.
The documentary that Disney doesn’t want you to see. Sting had agreed to compose the songs on one condition: that his wife, documentary filmmaker Trudie Styler, could film the production process. The resulting documentary‘The Sweatbox’, covers the long and troubled production. The title comes from the screening rooms at Disney studios, known for lacking air conditioning. ‘The Sweatbox’ premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2002 and quickly disappeared from circulation: Disney has never released it on DVD or streaming.
The documentary includes, among other moments, the call in which Fullmer tells Sting that his eight songs have been eliminated. Only two Sting songs survived on the final soundtrack. The documentary has been compared to ‘Hearts in Darkness’, the making-of of ‘Apocalypse Now’, for its portrait of the human cost in a decaying creative process. And of course, there is a copy of ‘The Sweatbox’ circulating unofficially on the internet.
Poor results. The film ended up grossing $169 million worldwide on a budget of $100 million, a disappointing figure compared to Disney’s other hits during the 1990s. The film found some success in the domestic market and became the best-selling DVD of 2001, which would spawn a television series (‘Kuzco: An Emperor in School’) and a direct-to-video sequel (‘The Emperor’s Crazy 2: Kronk’s Big Adventure’).
The footprint. Curiously, the influence of ‘The Emperor and His Follies’ is deeper than it seems. The film’s non-stop parody humor anticipated ‘Shrek’, released just a year later, and other animated films with which DreamWorks Animation would find success in subsequent years. This film is quite a visionary and remains one of the most unclassifiable films of modern Disney.
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