By the mid-1980s, the fabled animation studios of Walt Disney had fallen on hard times. The artists were polarized between newcomers hungry to innovate and old timers not yet ready to relinquish control. These conditions produced a series of box-office flops and pessimistic forecasts: maybe the best days of animation were over. Maybe the public didn't care. Only a miracle or a magic spell could produce a happy ending. Waking Sleeping Beauty is no fairy tale. It's the true story of how Disney regained its magic with a staggering output of hits - "Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast ," "Aladdin," "The Lion King," and more - over a 10-year period.

The time is the early 21st century and a genetics lab has been destroyed in a fire seriously injuring a scientist and possibly killing his daughter. As two investigators begin to unravel the story of the lab and its experiments, they discover that the scientist may have started the fire himself with the intention of killing his own daughter. The journals of the scientist and of the lab's founder, Dr. Patricia Morella, tell the tale of genetics experiments going badly awry and of the deceit that was used to hide them even from some of those that were involved. Dr. Morella's legacy is a clone whose only goal in life is its own survival and reproduction...no matter what the cost!