Don Hahn

A song arrives and the picture changes shape. A village sings about the girl who lives in it; a cub is held up on a rock while the whole savannah lines up to look; a skeleton in a striped suit complains in verse about doing the same thing every year. Don Hahn produced all three films, and none of those moments is his drawing or his line, which is the point of a producer. What he put in was the people: the directors, the songwriters, the animators, and the patience to let a song do the work.

He started at the studio in 1976 as a production assistant and got his first producing credit as associate producer on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Then came the run: Beauty and the Beast (1991), The Lion King (1994) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), with The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), made for Henry Selick, in between. Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale directed three films for him; Howard Ashman and Alan Menken wrote the songs for two. After that the work spread out: the live-action hosts on Fantasia 2000 (2000), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001), and two documentaries, Waking Sleeping Beauty (2009) and Howard (2018).

He has said that what he was really good at was "putting a team of the right people together to get a particular job done", and the results back him up. Beauty and the Beast is the one we would hand to anybody; the songs and the voice cast make its tenderness feel earned. The Lion King has grandeur and wit, even if it lectures. But where a team pulls in two directions the producer's job is to choose, and on Hunchback nobody did. Tony Jay's Frollo is a proper villain in a film that goes further into the dark than any Disney cartoon before it, and then three wisecracking gargoyles turn up to remind us it is for children. The join shows.

Then there is Fantasia 2000, the one time Hahn took a director's credit on a feature. The cartoons are the point, eight of them, three lovely and none dull. The links are the price. Steve Martin, Itzhak Perlman, Bette Midler, Angela Lansbury and others walk to a podium, say something about the piece to come and are wafted away, shot flat and bright against the orchestra by Tim Suhrstedt. We winced through nearly all of them. The words, which Hahn wrote with Irene Mecchi and David Reynolds, cannot decide whether they are explaining the music to children or apologising to adults for the interruption, so they do both.

Hahn's talent is for getting the right people together and keeping them there until the thing works; pointing the camera is a different job. He has lately made documentaries about the studio he started in, which suits him. Nobody has to walk to a podium.