‘We’ll Never Make That Kind of Movie Again’

From Bilge Ebiri’s delightful oral history of The Emperor’s New Groove in Vulture:

Mark Dindal [the film’s director]: Story rooms, often someone will pitch an idea almost as a joke and then someone else goes, “That’s funny. But what are we really going to do?” This was the only movie I worked onDindal, who started working at Disney in the early 1980s, would eventually go on to direct Chicken Little, Walt Disney Feature Animation’s first computer-animated feature film. where someone pitched an idea like that and we went, “Let’s use that.” Like Yzma, [who’s been turned into a] kitten, is falling off the tower and we’re like, “How are we going to get her back up? She’s not going to splat.” I don’t remember if it was Dave or Don Hall, another story artist who’s become a director since, said, “What if there’s a trampoline salesman at the bottom and she hits that and bounces back up?” We said, “Oh yeah. That’s what it should be.” You can’t imagine a story session in Bambi where somebody says that. This quickly became a movie where a trampoline salesman makes sense.