Roger Allers and Sting working on Kingdom of the Sun, which would become Kingdom in the Sun and then finally, after a long painful process, The Emperor's New Groove. © Xingu Films. All stills courtesy of Disney Enterprises I

For the last dozen years or so, the book publishing division of the Walt Disney company has been putting out high-class art books celebrating each and every one of its "classic" animated features. That is, all except one: The Emperor’s New Groove.

Well, there’s a reason for that. The film’s creation was a mess. Not just that, but a scandalous one as well. The production imploded after the animation had already begun, leaving bad feelings all around and the film getting almost none of the hoopla A-level Disney toons generally get. Moreover, while initial box office was slow (the opening did worse than any Disney animated feature had done since The Rescuers Down Under a whole decade before), the film did eventually accumulate a respectable b.o. figure and has done well in home video…still at the time it was perceived by the studio and industry to be a failure…It wasn't the Lion King blockbuster that Disney had hoped for and was used to after a string of phenomenal hits.

How Did This Come To Be?
Just the thing for a juicy documentary and thanks to the miracle of contractual obligation, we've got one! Running 86 minutes, The Sweatbox was recently shown at the 2002 Toronto Film Festival, which I attended. Why did a documentary about a film which debuted on December 15, 2000 just come out? It was supposed to have originally come out in February of 2001. To spend a year and a half on a shelf is no mystery. What's surprising is that it came out at all.

The fear was that it would have been quite embarrassing for the Mouse to have its dirty laundry aired out in public. Hell, for those of us who follow these things, The Emperor's New Groove was already an embarrassment. It was dumped. A documentary about a film that the Mouse gave a bare minimum of support to when it came out? Get real!

...and yet....

Gordon Sumner, better known as Sting, was given the job of writing six songs for what was then called Kingdom of the Sun. As part of the deal, he got Disney to agree to let his wife Trudie Styler, and co-director, co-producer John-Paul Davidson, do the ‘making of’ featurette through her company Xingu Films.