Maybe I’m totally reaching with this, but I’m gonna go for it…
Disney Animation and The Beach Boys are very similar to each other… Like, really similar.
Both are American, both have hailed from California, and both are as iconic as baseball, apple pie, and the red, white, and blue. Both also are more than what they seem, or what some make them out to be…
Walt Disney and Brian Wilson were innovators, had rough childhoods, earnestly tried to go beyond what was the norm, and so on. Both American masterminds. The closest the two ever got? The Beach Boys provided backing vocals on a song for Disney’s 1965 live-action comedy The Monkey’s Uncle.
Their beginnings couldn’t have been any more different. The early era of Walt Disney’s film studio was all about ambition, growth, and the desire to take the animated medium to places unheard of. Walt was on a quest, he was out to get the medium the respect it deserved.
Walt Disney’s first five features are the gold standard in feature animation. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio are perfectly-structured pieces of fantasy storytelling, with visual splendor and spectacle to match their narratives, with the right balance of sentiment and bite. Fantasia took that even further, creating an abstract and lengthy anthology of segments set to works of classical music.
Unlike anything seen back then, and unlike many films made today, Fantasia remains animation’s most ambitious film. Dumbo was the shoestring picture made to keep the studio afloat as World War II cut into the European box office, a big source of revenue for the enterprise. Dumbo used its budgetary limits to revisit the experimental Silly Symphonies short films Walt had made before the features, telling a poignant and often surreal story without fuss in less than 64 minutes. Bambi took everything from the previous four features, the storytelling, the visuals, and the abstraction, and ended this Golden Age of experimentation and innovation. Why did it have to end there? Walt Disney was forced to scale back his animation due to the poor box office results of three of his first five all-animated features, which was mainly due to World War II. His ambitions went elsewhere afterwards: Live-action films, television, and later… The embodiment of the world he envisioned… Disneyland.
With The Beach Boys, it was another story. The brothers Brian, Dennis, and Carl Wilson alongside cousin Mike Love, friend Al Jardine, and in-and-out Bruce Johnston… While eldest brother Brian Wilson always was in tune, listening intensely to his father play piano and his love for records by The Everly Brothers and The Four Freshman, the band ultimately was a pop group that capitalized on the surfing craze of the early 1960s. Engineered by the higher ups and their father, The Beach Boys weren’t even truly “beach boys.” Only Dennis surfed, but that’s where the scene was circa 1962-1963.
When the hits started coming, the demand soared. Every couple of months, The Beach Boys released a new studio album. Usually, the studio album would consist of a couple great singles, some serviceable tunes, and a chunk of filler. What is unknown is that Brian, and even the band to some extent, wanted to move on as early as 1964. To ditch the surf sound before it became stale. Even the much-detested cousin/co-founder/vocalist Mike Love, often painted as that guy who didn’t want the Beach Boys to change and hated artistry, had encouraged this direction. Hard times had fallen upon the band, Brian soon had to pull out of touring due to mental health issues, and their father had recently been fired as their manager. The result was the release of Today!, a studio album with nary a surf song or beach tune on it. Solid pop songs ruled side one, tender, emotional, and beautifully-produced ballads dominated side two. Brian’s love for Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound had paid off by this time, and his production was unlike any other’s.
The new Beach Boys were perhaps right around the corner, but their label – Capitol Records – weren’t pleased with the sales of Today! (Which is puzzling, considering that it reached #4, a position most artists would do anything to have.) Pressuring them to record a “summer” record, the boys complied and whipped up Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!) in mid-1965. There are no surf songs on the LP, but the theme is innocuous, innocent, warm-weather fun, save for a few tender ballads. Brian’s production elevates what could’ve been a step backward, into a step forward. It’s a sonically exciting record, even today. Capitol’s demands for a record like this perhaps suggested that The Beach Boys were always going to be pigeonholed, made into something they were never meant to be, and would truly stick by their name…
After all, the opening lyric to their first-ever song was, “Surfin’ is the only life for me, the only way for me.”
This early indicator of their undoing lines up with where the Disney studio was after the war. After spending years making anthology features (officially known as the “Package Films”) formed up of multiple short subjects with linking devices, Walt made the big return to single-story features with Cinderella. While Cinderella was a rich story not dissimilar to the first five animated features, it was lower budget, grounded by character animation based off of live-action reference footage, and lacking in elaborate effects or multiplane shots. Did it really do anything new for animation? No, but it was a great story nonetheless that had resonated with audiences. Walt still had immense respect for his audience by the middle of the 1950s, but his work had become rather soft in some ways. Fantasia‘s once-shocking ideas were nowhere to be seen, nor were the sheer frights of Pinocchio. The films did have some bite, but they were comfortable. Is the rat fight in Lady and the Tramp up there with Snow White‘s run through the forest? Is the Queen of Hearts’ rage anywhere near Pinocchio‘s Pleasure Island chapter or ‘Night on Bald Mountain’?
The introduction of Disneyland and the television programs began to cement Walt Disney and his enterprise as an all-American, family values sort-of entertainment provider. That may be so, but Walt did all of that so well. Still, he had wanted to take another risk in feature animation. Sleeping Beauty would be his true answer to the early features, a fairy tale story with the scares and action of those older films, and opulent art direction that suggested a new style for the studio. The early run of 50s films had Mary Blair’s stamp all over them, while Lady and the Tramp had perfected animated realism without a budget the size of Bambi‘s. Sleeping Beauty looked like a combination of all those previous styles, and something new… Concept artist Eyvind Earle’s bold, almost modern art style defined the look of the film. Like those early features, Sleeping Beauty was certainly a naturalistic work, but its visuals were highly stylized and kept the idea that animation could walk the fine line between sheer realism and pure abstraction. Almost a bridge of sorts between the Disney house style that had come to define the 1950s output, and the acclaimed, groundbreaking works of the UPA.
Sleeping Beauty ended up tanking at the box office because of its high costs. Despite being a rather popular film upon its release in the mid-winter of 1959, the receipts couldn’t cover the production budget. Its failure left a real impact on Walt and the studio, leading to severe cutbacks (for starters, the staff went from roughly 500 to a little over 100), while Roy O. Disney’s comrades began gutting the studio. Roy and those businesspeople saw animation as a costly waste of time, Walt still firmly believed in it but was very heartbroken. Production of animated short cartoons ceased, every once in a while you’d see a 20-minute animated featurette or an educational film. Walt continued to focus on live-action, TV, and theme parks.
While 1961’s 101 Dalmatians took complete advantage of the budget cuts, The Sword in the Stone felt rather safe and a bit bland. The latter film’s lack of focus motivated Walt to truly step back in, after the completion of Mary Poppins – the last hurrah of the long-dead Golden Age – he spearheaded The Jungle Book. Completed and released months and months after his death, The Jungle Book was a critical and commercial smash in the autumn of 1967. The film truly was a swan song, even if it hadn’t been as daring as his earlier features or as structurally tight. What stuck with audiences over decades were the characters and the sheer entertainment value of the offering…
It’s often stated that Walt’s spark died with him, and that his Nine Old Men simply couldn’t continue making the magic without him… That was not the problem, the problem was that those businesspeople had a lot of say once more. Without Walt advocating for the medium, the animation studio found themselves fighting for survival, doing everything they had to do to keep it all alive. The Aristocats (1970) and Robin Hood (1973) showcase a watered down version of Disney’s theatrical animation, despite being overall enjoyable features with their respective strengths and weaknesses. In a way, they were early roots of a Disney that Disney would like Disney to be.
The Beach Boys experienced this sort of thing much differently. After Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!) sold tons of LPs and spawned smash hit singles, Brian would begin work on what would become his masterpiece, Pet Sounds. To satisfy Capitol, who were hungry for a Christmas season album, the band recorded a rather strange record called Beach Boys Party! A collection of stripped down covers, a tape of noise from a house party was overdubbed onto the recordings, in an attempt to make the whole thing sound like it was (to quote the album cover) “recorded live at a Beach Boys Party!” Big hit, spawned the single ‘Barbara Ann,’ Capitol’s happy, Brian has plenty of time to perfect his masterpiece.
Pet Sounds, musically and lyrically, was unlike anything in the world of popular music. Brian was channeling classical, and a new era yet to be discovered, experimenting with various instruments and objects to create a rich sound unlike any other. Pet Sounds was partially a response to The Beatles, for Brian was blown away by the band’s late 1965 release Rubber Soul. It had challenged him to create an album of songs that all flowed, adding up to an overall theme or set of ideas. Not a platter with some singles and filler all around those 2-3 tracks. The album’s more somber mood and story of adulthood struggles effectively shut the door on surfboards, woody wagons, and bikini babes. “Goodbye Surfing, Hello God.”
Pet Sounds was released in May of 1966, underperforming in sales and garnering mixed critical reception. Capitol Records had bungled sales reports, so the album didn’t go gold when it was supposed to, as it had met the 500,000 units threshold by the beginning of 1967. Brian was heartbroken, but maybe he was happy to know that his album was a critical darling in the UK, and had nearly topped the British chart. What mattered at the time was that the album did not catch on at home… Were the fans of the early surf stuff turned off by its intimacy and mood? Were the hip kids unsure of an “in tune” album by “The Beach Boys”? As if The Beach Boys couldn’t do music like this?
The seeds were planted once more…
Brian embarked on another musical journey. He was going to top Pet Sounds… He was going to create the ultimate rock album… A “teen-age symphony to God,” in his own words.
A preview to this project, which had its title changed from Dumb Angel to SMiLE, would be a single. A demonstration of the new modular approach to recording that was the logical progression from the song structuring of Pet Sounds. Complex arrangements, fragments making up what was called “pocket symphonies.” The entirety of a masterwork compacted into 3 1/2 minutes… The result was ‘Good Vibrations,’ which was released in October of 1966… ‘Good Vibrations’ felt like the transition from the old Beach Boys to a new, unpredictable, and exciting Beach Boys. The public listened carefully, and sent the record to #1 in the US. It was a huge hit elsewhere…
SMiLE would’ve been a whole album of that… A whole album… It was far more daring, ambitious, and risky than most of what was being recorded in the autumn of 1966.
It was not to be. The following year was where it all fell apart… Brian’s drug use and mental health issues came to a head, he had mentally collapsed… Inner turmoil plagued the band, differences of vision, problems with Capitol persisted, Carl Wilson was avoiding the draft, demand for new product escalated. Shelving SMiLE, much to everyone’s dismay, Brian instead tried to make a single out of one SMiLE composition, ultimately making an unsatisfying single out of ‘Heroes and Villains,’ which was no ‘Good Vibrations’ in the summer of 1967. A time when it absolutely needed to be a smash hit. This, too, had hurt Brian greatly. The final nails in the coffin occurred a little later… The Beach Boys had been expected to show up at the legendary Monterey Pop Music Festival, their abrupt pull-out was the official death knell… The Beach Boys were no longer hip, relevant, or worth listening to. The American public completely and collectively turned their backs on The Beach Boys…
Where could they go from there? Instead of succumbing to what the record label wanted them to be, The Beach Boys went forward, two steps ahead of where the public was at. Smiley Smile was recorded and released in place of SMiLE in September 1967 to poor sales and mixed critical reception, but it was a smash hit in Europe. A very stripped down, even weirder reimagining of material from the SMiLE sessions, Smiley Smile was too strange and oddball for the pop crowd, and not cool or intense enough for the psychedelic crowd. A nail in the coffin for the band’s US reputation, it was.
A back-to-basics, straightforward, R&B-tinged record called Wild Honey – my personal favorite Beach Boys album – failed to do much better at the tail end of 1967. It too was unlike anything else released that year, hit big in Europe, and would age far better than most of the sounds of the times.
Capitol Records continued to advertise and promote The Beach Boys as a surf band, an image they had tried so hard to get away from for around 3-4 years by that point. Capitol coughed out pathetic greatest hits compilations and throwaway LPs, while the band continued to do what they wanted to do. Friends, a serene and minimalist album celebrating family life and the simple things, debuted when the issues of the times had driven America to its breaking point. In mid-1968, the LP was completely out of place. As we near 2018, it’s very much in place today as it was in 2008, and maybe 1998. Again, ahead of its time and completely misunderstood, downright ignored by the American public back when it was first released.
Mid-1968 also saw the release of the single ‘Do It Again,’ which sold respectably well in America, which was rather telling. It was a “surfing” song, a rather fun nostalgic callback to simpler times amidst Vietnam and the stateside troubles. This must’ve resonated with the old-time fans and the more pop-oriented audience, as it was much more accessible than something like the title track off of Friends or the weirdo-R&B of Wild Honey‘s title track. As if surfing was what The Beach Boys needed to specialize in, in order to score a hit. ‘Do It Again’ became the opening track of the 1969 leftovers grab-bag LP 20/20, which only did tepid business at best. It sold far better than Friends did, probably because of the inclusion of ‘Do It Again’ and the next modestly-successful single, ‘I Can Hear Music.’ A cover. It still was not enough. Shortly afterwards, The Beach Boys joined Warner Bros.’ Reprise Records, their output continued to be impressive and ignored. Their debut record for the new label, the masterful Sunflower, was yet another sales disaster yet it was critically acclaimed… They needed a real comeback, and badly.
Now unlike Walt Disney Feature Animation, The Beach Boys never experienced a prolonged rebirth period somewhere down the road. In The Beach Boys’ case, it was the continuation of making great music that would last, music that would often be rejected. Sporadically, they’d see actual commercial success in the 1970s. Most notable was the 1971 LP Surf’s Up, which is named after the legendary, ironically-titled SMiLE composition of the same name, also its closing track. Surf’s Up was mostly dictated by their then-new manager, a DJ named Jack Rieley. Rieley was determined to get the band the commercial success they deserved, and by doing that he pushed them to get “hip.”
Surf’s Up was met with decent sales, critical raves, and the tours around this time were huge sellers. For a little while, Americans began to dig The Beach Boys again, gimmicks or no gimmicks. That, obviously, did not last. The rather bizarre 1972 release Carl and the Passions – “So Tough” alienated fans, critics, and the hip crowd. Holland did moderately well a year later, as did a double live album. A hiatus ensued, and during that hiatus, Americans began to develop a sweet-tooth for the 1950s and early 1960s. The rock ‘n’ roll era. This was brought on by multiple factors… The Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal had created an aura of cynicism throughout the country, reflected in the cinema and music coming out at the time. After the smash success of George Lucas’ American Graffiti in 1973, Americans were hungry for more nostalgia… In came Happy Days, Grease, and soon enough… The Beach Boys.
(On a sidenote, in the recently-released Kingsman: The Golden Circle, the villain – played by Julianne Moore – lives in a hidden town of her own that’s built on this 70s version of the 50s!)
In 1974, Capitol Records – owning the rights to the material made from the beginning to 1965, and a few scattered recordings released afterward – released a 2LP set called Endless Summer. Reached #1, the first Beach Boys album – studio album or not – to reach a Top 10 position in nearly a decade, let alone the Top 5. A successor called Spirit of America also hit the Top 10. Concerts were sell-outs, they were in big demand. Huge demand! So what happened? They kind of went along with it. Soon, there was a real push to get Brian Wilson – mostly a recluse and in terrible condition – back to the forefront. Hastily, he was brought back as producer and leading man, but wasn’t quite ready… The resulting album was the questionable 15 Big Ones, half of which was covers of old 50s songs. Despite mixed critical reception, the album reached the Top 10 and sold very well. The nostalgia was still strong by mid-1976…
But by the time Brian had a real creative rush, it might’ve been too late. An album that was mostly all his, Love You, was released in spring 1977 when disco and punk began to take the center stage. The band’s album was yet again something that just wasn’t mainstream enough, nor was it cool enough. Pop fans were likely alienated by the gleeful weirdness of the album (what with its paeans to Johnny Carson and silly songs about the solar system!), while it wasn’t danceable enough for the disco scene. A truly divisive, polarizing record for everybody, it sold poorly. It is often called the last quality Beach Boys album.
By the end of 1977, the group was a mess. Differences in vision were prominent once more, but all three Wilson brothers had regressed by this point and gotten back into drug use. Mike Love and Al Jardine, being the more pop-oriented members of the group, wanted to keep the enterprise going. A subdued Brian simply went along for the ride, with Carl being in and out, and Dennis being mostly absent. 1978’s M.I.U. Album is mostly a rather slickly-produced but ultimately bland collection of retrograde pop and mushy adult contemporary, it failed miserably. The nostalgia wave was long over by 1978, and The Beach Boys went back to being those squares that needed to be left in 1964.
The following L.A. (Light Album) had a disco single on it (!), some leftovers, a few repurposed solo Dennis tracks, and a lot of adult contemporary schlop. Not terrible, but firmly rejected once more by critics and the public. The downward spiral truly began shortly afterwards, with Mike, Al, and former member Bruce Johnston now steering the ship. Brian would often be absent, and later under the control of a maniacal therapist. Dennis disappeared, and then drowned in 1983.
By 1988, it had all fizzled down to a ditty called ‘Kokomo.’ A rather tired little pseudo-Caribbean pop song, it was included in a smash hit Tom Cruise movie that happened to be… A Disney film! 1988’s Cocktail – obviously released through Disney’s adult-oriented Touchstone label – may have been no work of cinematic art, but it was a box office hit, and ‘Kokomo’ had shot to #1 on the charts.
From there on out, the Mike-Al-Bruce trio tried to milked this, yielding truly embarrassing results. A low point not dissimilar where Disney Animation had been in the post-Renaissance years, mainly the early-to-mid aughts, when the executives in control of the animation studio compromised each and every film. Disney Animation’s 2004 disaster Home on the Range is like the Summer in Paradise of Disney animated films, or if that’s too harsh of a comparison, it’s the Still Cruisin’. Pathetic, built on wrongheaded generalizations, and just not very good despite the minimal amount of effort.
Mike and Bruce also spearhead the current touring Beach Boys, but it’s really just Mike Love and Friends. Let’s face it. There was a reunion in 2012, I saw it, it was lovely. Brian, Al, and early 70s Beach Boy Blondie Chaplin recreated Pet Sounds in concert last year with a team of musicians. That too, was magical and heavenly…
Still, that rather contradictory image of “The Beach Boys” persists, something cemented as far back as the mid-1970s, if not the very day Capitol Records executives complained about The Beach Boys Today!‘s sales in mid-1965. That plastic recreation of the early 1960s energy and hits. Greatest hits compilations always have some kind of surf-y cover, whether it’s surfboards or a wave or some image of the beach. ‘Kokomo’ sums up the image as well, as the 1988 song was a rather fake and shallow attempt to recapture those glory days. Aruba! Jamaica! Oooh I wanna take ya to-
In Disney’s case… The 1970s and early 1980s features show a struggling studio, a team of talented folk repeatedly clashing with people who wanted to keep Disney in one place. Disney couldn’t be Snow White and Fantasia, films that broke ground and continued to capture the imaginations and hearts of audiences. While their animated films made from 1970 to 1981 were certainly box office successes, they didn’t perform much better than the re-issues of the older classics at the time. The success of Star Wars in 1977 should’ve been a wake-up call to the Disney executives, as Disney was one of the studios that rejected George Lucas’ space opera pitch in the mid-1970s. (Imagine that!) Audiences were ready for pure escapist fantasy spectacle, the kind that Disney used to specialize in.
Yet Disney’s problem was that they were trying to recreate what was already working without trying anything really new. The Aristocats and Robin Hood feel like retreads of the 1960s Disney features, particularly The Jungle Book. Much in the way M.I.U. Album feels like an attempt to revive the surf era, much in the way 15 Big Ones tried to be a nostalgia ride. The Rescuers and The Fox and the Hound at least tried to do something new, while The Black Cauldron felt like a watered down and sloppy version of the early Disney features. Admirably sporting spooky visuals and some dark moments, it did not resonate either way. There was a problem on U.S.S. Walt Disney Productions…
It took outside voices and strong collective will to hone everything in. There were good pieces in place by the mid-1980s, but management issues and creative differences blocked them from congealing into something greater. The Black Cauldron was finished and released after Ron Miller resigned under fire as CEO of the company (in addition to being a top executive there since Walt’s final years), to be replaced by Michael Eisner from Paramount. Eisner brought Frank Wells and Jeffrey Katzenberg in with him, and Katzenberg had a heavy presence in the animation division. Though Jeffrey’s decisions weren’t always right (and how!), I do feel that he saved The Great Mouse Detective and had the studio turn out a film with some energy and fun that wasn’t there in the previous two releases.
You can criticize his Oliver & Company for many things as well, but one thing you can’t say is that it feels like a stale recreation of something out of Disney’s past. Instead, it’s a straight up cartoony romp with some 80s pop spice and attitude. The overly modern setting was far removed from anything Disney had made to date, the antithesis to the timeless story, though talking pets stories were technically nothing new. I’d say out of all Disney animated features, the most similar feature to this 1988 film is The Jungle Book. A modern-tinged animated comedy with animals and musical numbers sung by pop artists. In Oliver‘s case, it was gimmicky as all hell, yes indeed. It translated to a box office hit, a necessary evil to get the studio back to the top, back to making great animated entertainment and scoring hits.
Ahead lies a contradiction. We all know the animated feature that truly got Disney Animation back on its game was… A fairy tale adaptation, with a leading lady who marries a prince at the end. This would be the fourth Disney animated feature to tread these waters, but it was also a necessary evil: Go to something familiar to win back the public. But what Disney did with The Little Mermaid was rather new. It took a genre that Walt already tackled thrice in his lifetime, and managed to make it fresh again.
The Little Mermaid was approached as a Broadway musical, something Disney had never done before. Broadway powerhouses Howard Ashman and Alan Menken were brought in to pen the songs, and soon they would have a real say over the story and the characters. Ashman reportedly had such sheer respect for Walt’s early features and animation in general, so his passion can certainly be felt all over The Little Mermaid. The Disney studio truly wasn’t making yet another fairy tale love story, they were actually doing something new with the genre, something that needed to be done a while back. Instead of recreating old-timey 50s Disney for decades, Ashman-Menken, directors Ron Clements and John Musker, and a very talented story team took the best of the Golden Age, married those elements to new ideas, and created something spectacular in the end. Jeffrey Katzenberg? He just wanted to remove ‘Part of Your World’ from the movie because 8-year-olds at a test screening got bored. Right there was the seed for future troubles…
Katzenberg actually had little faith in The Little Mermaid, going as far as warning the studio that the picture may not outgross Oliver & Company. Why? Because it was about a woman, and that male audiences would find it to be too girly. Does that sound familiar at all? Luckily he was wrong, The Little Mermaid rode the animation revival wave and was a smash hit, becoming a nationwide phenomenon. People couldn’t get enough of the characters, the songs, everything. Animation, especially Disney’s, became an all-ages thing again. Disney Feature Animation was now channeling Walt, making films that didn’t have a target audience. The previous executives kept Disney in a cozy corner. The new filmmakers and Ashman-Menken moved it out of the corner!
What The Little Mermaid began was an era that somewhat typified Disney, rather than the early, experimental Walt years. The Little Mermaid‘s success lead to Beauty and the Beast, Katzenberg was determined to recreate that lightning in a bottle: A musical fairy tale love story from the Ashman-Menken duo. Originally conceived as a rather serious take that was more akin to the 1946 Jean Cocteau film adaptation, Katzenberg shut it right down about a few years into development. While it felt like Little Mermaid Mark II, Beauty and the Beast was indeed bolstered by its characters, it wonderful songs, and tight story structure, though some of Katzenberg’s poisonous need for animation to be a children’s medium first-and-foremost does rear its ugly head in parts (oh no, someone saying the revered Beauty and the Beast is less than perfect?!): Chip and LeFou were apparently his contributions, and the comic relief added to the climax ultimately jars with the intensity of Gaston’s fight with the Beast on the castle rooftops. Still, it was a well-made film and was a critical darling, earning the first ever Best Picture nomination for an animated feature film.
Now between these two Ashman-Menken knockouts was a film that Jeffrey buried, an action-adventure sequel to The Rescuers titled The Rescuers Down Under. While not the gloomy and emotional film its 1977 predecessor was, The Rescuers Down Under used the animated medium to its advantage and created a blockbuster-like spectacle of high-flying action, all with a solid story to boot. Opening rather soft in the fall of 1990, Katzenberg pulled all the marketing for the feature, leaving it to die. Yet another seed planted… Disney Animation wouldn’t touch another film like this for a long while.
Aladdin followed Beauty and the Beast. Howard Ashman had died during the making of Beauty and the Beast, and most of his fingerprints on Aladdin had been wiped away by Jeffrey Katzenberg. Sometime in 1991, when Beauty and the Beast was being readied for release, Katzenberg shut down Aladdin and had it extensively retooled. Tim Rice came in to co-pen the songs with Menken, two writers were brought in to reimagine the script, little of Ashman’s ideas remained. Aladdin’s mother, friends of his, the 30s-style tone. All gone. Were Jeffrey’s changes for the better, though? Aladdin turned out to be a really fun, zany comedy, though some critics pointed out that it lacked Mermaid and Beast‘s compelling characters, today people remark that it has not aged well. That is true, but I do feel the feature is still very strong thanks to Ron Clements and John Musker’s direction, the Genie, and the writing.
These three features bearing Ashman and Menken’s stamps, or DNA, laid the groundwork for what Disney was going to “be.” Not dissimilar to how the late 70s/early 80s Beach Boys ushered in a retrograde nostalgia machine, Disney was going to become Broadway-style love story musicals that were mostly for kids. The focus on adult audiences with Little Mermaid and Aladdin slowly shifted away after Ashman’s death, and when Katzenberg’s amount of say increased. On display in the very entertaining yet rather tonally-inconsistent The Lion King, it would later become a major problem for the features.
Jeffrey Katzenberg strangely aimed for adult audiences in the animated features made outside of Walt Disney Feature Animation. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was geared almost entirely towards adults and big kids, it was a smash hit, bigger than any Disney feature till Aladdin came out four years later. Henry Selick and Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas was moved to the Touchstone label, as the executives let the duo make a spooky, often twisted stop-motion feature that could be too scary for young children, and perhaps too weird for the mainstream crowd. It did pretty successfully, but was nowhere near as big as the Disney animated hits. When Toy Story was beginning active development at Pixar, he pushed so hard for an edgy script littered with mean-spirit, a “cynical” adult tone, and edgy jokes… Toy Story was shut down because of this, only surviving because John Lasseter and Pixar’s crew begged the higher-ups to let them re-do the movie themselves… And look what happened. Toy Story started Pixar with a bang, and lead to a long streak of critical and commercial smashes. Pixar operated differently, not taking the Disney executives’ many notes and deliberately avoiding the kind of features Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg were molding.
As a result, Disney Feature Animation took a hit to the chin. The box office for the post-Lion King films really slipped, and when the studio was finally allowed to not recreate Beauty and the Beast which each and every feature, so much had changed by that point. President Frank Wells died in early 1994, creating a rift between Eisner and Katzenberg, leading to Katzenberg’s exit later that year. More executives had a say in what Disney Animation was making, and once the Broadway-style musical love story picture with the rock-solid formula was out, it was useless… The attempts to do sci-fi, adventure, spiritual journeys, and Westerns mostly went belly-up. Executives wanted these movies to be “Disney movies,” and even they didn’t know what that meant. Kiddie flicks? Movies for 10 year old boys? Movies for teenagers?
What are “Disney movies”? What are “Beach Boys songs”? Are Disney movies the 90s Renaissance movies that are more for kids than adults? Are Beach Boys songs just surf tunes and tired beachy songs for retirees?
Though The Beach Boys are no longer a unit producing studio albums on a consistent basis, Brian makes his solo albums from time to time. People of different eras and backgrounds keep the idea of Disney Animation alive through a studio named after its deceased founder. Other bands and artists have kept the Beach Boys’ magic alive through their own work. After everything had come to a head in the mid-aughts, Disney Animation was in dire need of help. Eisner stepped down as CEO in 2005, and out went all the executives that saw animation as a nothing more than a kiddie thing.
Once that was over, Disney animated movies became movies again, not just “Disney movies.” When the 90s is recreated through films like The Princess and the Frog, Tangled and Moana, it feels genuine, the way Disney recreated the Golden Age with The Little Mermaid. Though it’s important to keep moving forward, as Walt would say. These aren’t the only films being made at Walt Disney Animation Studios, as we now see works like Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6, and Zootopia. Films that successfully show audiences what a Disney animated film can be, and that Disney animation doesn’t have to be a kid-targeting thing, that it can be something for just about everyone – like it always has been.
The Beach Boys enterprise thankfully reissues its studio albums and even releases excellent archival sets, thorough collections that dissect the histories of different albums and time periods. The re-issue campaign even completely negated three albums that were made from the late 80s into the mid 90s, albums that rode the ‘Kokomo’ wave that don’t deserve the “Beach Boys” moniker in any way, shape, or form. The 50th Anniversary reunion tour gave us a setlist that highlighted all the eras, and the subsequent new studio album was a pleasant end to the studio discography. Brian Wilson and his crew – including Al Jardine, early 70s Beach Boy Blondie Chaplin, and Jardine’s son – recreated Pet Sounds live last autumn, and sandwiched it between two sets of Beach Boys songs covering – again – all the eras. I must’ve teared up at maybe 2-3 points during the show.
Certainly the reappraisal for Pet Sounds in the 1990s brought this on. In 1990, The Beach Boys re-released all of their classic albums on CD for the first time in twofer sets. Pet Sounds was its own CD release, and I think through there, that’s where the revival of sorts started. People started discovering albums they missed out on, or were completely unaware of. Pet Sounds had finally been designated a gold record by 2000, and its popularity continues to grow. People continue to seek out this “greatest album of all time.” It being #2 in Rolling Stone’s Top 500 Albums certainly helped too, it was beat out by The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which recently has been criticized by the unpopular opinion brigade… And for good reason, is it truly the greatest album ever made? Is Beauty and the Beast the greatest animated film ever made? I personally say no to both.
Notably, the Rolling Stone list also included Sunflower, often called the best of the post-Pet Sounds Beach Boys album, which it probably is. It too is probably getting more exposure than it ever did in 1970. The same goes for all the studio albums released from 1965 to 1973, and 1977’s Love You. Many musicians have revealed over their years that they have a fondness for Beach Boys albums. Paul McCartney has repeatedly praised Pet Sounds, Elvis Costello named Holland one of his favorite albums, Peter Buck of R.E.M. says Love You‘s a favorite of his, and so on, so forth… Sometimes, these things take time.
While the critical evaluation of Disney animated features continues to be a mess, given that most of the American population still can’t muster up the will to respect animation as an art form, there are open minds out there who discuss the early and the new Disney animated features with much-needed reverence. Once America gets past the idea that animation is a children’s medium (an image not quite helped by Disney), then we’ll see changes in critical evaluation. It’s never too late for something old to have some kind of serious influence in the modern age. Just like how 50s rock ‘n’ roll did in the mid 1970s, or classical music’s continuing endurance. Star Wars is 40 years old, and still has a major influence on the current generation. Maybe one day, it won’t be just a handful of critics praising Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs as a cinematic masterpiece, but perhaps large amounts of people.
Little by little, folks see that there is more than what they think behind certain works of art… Whether it’s studios making kiddie cartoon fare or a bunch of surfer dudes singing about paradise, sometimes you’d be surprised when you find out more…
