It was shortly after the promotional campaign for Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame had concluded. Directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale and writer Tab Murphy had been summoned by producer Don Hahn to a crummy Mexican restaurant in downtown Burbank that is, mercifully, no longer there. “Don made it clear to me and Gary that if we wanted to work on another project and work with the same team, we had to come up with a project right away,” Wise remembered. Trousdale echoed the sentiment: “It was Don Hahn who pulled us together and said, ‘You’ve done a couple of movies, the studio is happy with you now, this is your chance – if we want to do another movie together, keep the crew together, and do something that we want to do, we’ll have to sit down and think of it or the studio is going to tell us what to do.’”