At Disney, a Celebration That Was a Long Time Coming

The gathering at Walt Disney Animation here was supposed to be a giddy celebration. The studio had achieved the ultimate validation for its hard-fought creative rebirth: “Frozen,” its Nordic tale of two sisters and a wisecracking snowman, won two Oscars on Sunday, the same day the film crossed $1 billion at the global box office.

Blue snow cones for everyone! But the party Monday afternoon grew unexpectedly serious, as multiple Disney executives became overwhelmed recalling just how far the studio had come after a harrowing transition to computer-aided filmmaking. “There was talk of closing this place,” John Lasseter, chief creative officer for Pixar and Disney animation, said through tears. “And we said: ‘Not on our watch. We will never allow that to happen.' ”

Winning an Academy Award is a coup for any movie company, but the “Frozen” honors carry extra weight for Disney. Ever since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences created the best animated feature prize in 2001, Pixar has dominated the category, winning seven times. Rivals including DreamWorks Animation have won all other years.

Never winning was a humiliation for a lot of artists at Disney, the shop where the art of mainstream animation was essentially born and home to such classics as “Dumbo,” “Cinderella” and “The Lion King.”

With “Frozen,” which also won a best song Oscar for the power ballad “Let It Go,” Walt Disney Animation can claim to be officially, absolutely and at long last back in the animation saddle. It also represents the payoff of a high-stakes bet that dates to Disney’s 2006 acquisition of Pixar for $7.4 billion. Two Pixar co-founders, Mr. Lasseter and Edwin E. Catmull, were put in charge of Disney’s legacy studio, where layoffs and creative misfires had resulted in a crisis of confidence.

Disney’s hand-drawn pictures suddenly seemed hopelessly outdated as Hollywood and audiences moved toward computer animation. Disney also became unsure of its storytelling, worrying that even young moviegoers had become too cynical for the company’s signature brand of upbeat fairy tales. A parade of new films, including “Meet the Robinsons,” “Home on the Range” and “Chicken Little,” failed to impress.

Anxiety inside the animation studio increased with the arrival of mighty Pixar as a corporate sibling, recalled Andrew Millstein, general manager of Walt Disney Animation, as he spoke to his 800 or so assembled workers on Monday. “There was a little fear,” he said, recalling the grim vibe that prevailed. “There was a little touch of envy.” Maybe Walt Disney Animation was too broken to fix?

Instead of pulling the plug, Robert A. Iger, who orchestrated the Pixar acquisition after he took over as Disney’s chief executive in 2005, asked Mr. Lasseter and Mr. Catmull to step in. The two men, in concert with Mr. Millstein and Alan Bergman, president of Disney’s broader movie operation, started by ordering up a full restart of a gestating film that became “Bolt.” It took in a relatively modest $310 million at the global box office in 2008.

Then came “The Princess and the Frog,” a musical without many memorable tunes that became a box-office disappointment, taking in just $267 million, less than it cost to make and market. (The well-reviewed movie did, importantly, give Disney its first black princess.) But the 2010 release of “Tangled” finally started to reveal some real creative spark; the operational changes that Mr. Lasseter and Mr. Catmull put into place were working.

“Tangled,” an expensive, semi-musical retelling of the “Rapunzel” story, took in $592 million.

Last year, “Wreck-It Ralph,” which took in $471 million, became a serious Oscar contender, losing to Pixar’s “Brave” in a tight race.

Disneyphiles started referring to the turnaround work of Mr. Lasseter and Mr. Catmull as a “second renaissance,” a reference to a pre-Pixar fertile period in the 1990s when Walt Disney Animation delivered megahit musicals like “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King.”

But the retooled Walt Disney Animation still lacked a true smash hit, a film that not only ignites a box-office inferno but becomes a cultural phenomenon.

Enter “Frozen.” Directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee and produced by Peter Del Vecho, the film captivated women and girls in particular, thousands of whom started posting videos of themselves online singing “Let It Go.” The soundtrack, with original music written by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, spent five weeks as No. 1 on the Billboard album chart, beating a new release from Beyoncé.

“We knew that you had it in you,” Mr. Catmull said on Monday, his voice cracking.

“I don’t know that everybody else knew.”

Mr. Lasseter did him one better: “Let it go,” he advised the crowd of the studio’s dark period. “We’re never going back there.”

The path ahead may be only slightly easier for Walt Disney Animation.

Competitors are growing stronger all the time — witness “The Lego Movie,” the current hit created by Warner Bros. — and Disney’s next few animated movies are risky, ambitious endeavors. “Big Hero 6,” scheduled for release in November, is an action comedy about a robotics prodigy trying to save a high-tech city called San Fransokyo.

As Pixar has learned, running at the front of the pack can be mighty challenging, as consumers, Hollywood and the news media begin to hold output to a higher standard.

But rather than dwelling on all of that, Disney’s animators on Monday ultimately started partying hearty. Staff members rowdily posed with the Oscar statuettes, while two voice actors from “Frozen,” Josh Gad and Jonathan Groff, gave bear hugs to Mr. Lasseter, who snapped photos with his iPhone.

Along with Champagne and snow cones, the studio served a buffet that featured blue candy and Blue Moon beer. An in-house band, the Steamboat Strummers, played a ukulele version of “Let It Go.” (Mr. Iger had to miss the celebration because he was en route to Shanghai, but Mr. Millstein assured the group that he had “beamed like a Cheshire cat” when “Frozen” won.)

Still, the festivities never veered too far from deep appreciation for the attention Mr. Lasseter and Mr. Catmull had lavished on the studio. Ms. Lee, who based her “Frozen” screenplay on Hans Christian Andersen’s “Snow Queen,” summed up her feelings on the matter by quoting from a “Frozen” song.

“People make bad choices if they’re mad, or scared, or stressed,” she recited. “Throw a little love their way, and you’ll bring out their best.”

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of the writer of “The Snow Queen.” It is Hans Christian Andersen, not Anderson. The earlier version of the article also referred incorrectly to the box-office take of the film “Bolt.” It earned $310 million globally, not domestically.