Going for Popcorn

About pacing and attention spans.

A still from Panda! Go, Panda! – Rainy-Day Circus

Welcome! This Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter gets into the art of pacing.

During the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Jeffrey Katzenberg had immense creative pull at Disney. He was behind The Little Mermaid’s over-the-top ending, for example. “Die Hard had been a box-office hit,” recalled director John Musker. “So he came into the office saying, ‘We need The Little Mermaid to be more Die Hard.’ That’s how we got the second action sequence, with an Ursula who is as big as … Nakatomi Plaza.”

Disney movies of that time reflected Katzenberg’s taste — his crews struggled to get around it. And there was one note, in particular, for which he was notorious. “I’m going for popcorn,” he said, often. In other words: the film was slow, and the audience was tuning out.¹

Pacing was a fixation of Katzenberg’s. He wanted to keep kids in their seats — and he would make a movie bigger and faster until they stayed put. “He felt that unless a movie raced nonstop to its conclusion, an audience would inevitably lose interest,” said one director.²

For this reason, Katzenberg famously tried to cut Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid. It was too slow, he argued — it was losing kids. Howard Ashman (who co-wrote the song) ultimately saved the sequence. Yet he echoed Katzenberg’s worries.³

“Kids have such a short attention span,” Ashman said in 1989. “Cinderella sings a ballad while she’s scrubbing the floor. It’s a brilliant piece of animation … but the kids run up and down the aisles and get popcorn.”⁴

Jeffrey Katzenberg with a storyboard in the early 1990s, courtesy of Waking Sleeping Beauty