Sometimes, being the kind of Disney “fan” I am is full of contradictions…
Cliche as it is to say, the work of The Walt Disney Company has millions and millions of fans, and not everybody is going to view that massive, gargantuan body of work the same way. That is obvious, isn’t it? Even when you narrow it all down to one particular side of the company’s output, the opinions differ…
The Disney animated features “canon” is an excellent example of that.
For years, I’ve been very open about my admittedly critical view of the 57 or so Disney animated features. I say “or so,” because one fan may not even go by Disney’s “official” numbering of the animated classics!
According to The Walt Disney Company, there are 57 animated features made by them, Wreck-It Ralph sequel Ralph Breaks The Internet being the latest. Disney believes they have as many features as Heinz has of pickle varieties.
Now brace yourselves, here’s where things get nerdy, because I want to show you what kind of Disney fan I am… Someone like me feels that the Disney canon should very well count the rarely-seen, hardly available 1943 wartime propaganda feature Victory Through Air Power, but because that film is a product of its time and isn’t a cozy family-friendly picture, Disney conveniently doesn’t count it. It is more of a feature, in my opinion, than The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Disney tries – has always tried – their damnedest to convince the public, via special features on that 1977 anthology film’s home video bonus features, that Walt Disney always wanted to do a Winnie the Pooh feature-length film, but opted to make three shorts first and then string them together into a 74-minute movie somewhere down the line… Which is entirely untrue. Walt scrapped the Pooh feature, and made a featurette instead, knowing that A. A. Milne’s bedtime stories worked better as 25-minute miniature movies. Since Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree, released in February 1966 in front of the studio’s live-action comedy The Ugly Dachshund, was so successful, Walt greenlit another 25-minute featurette – Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day. Work was done on it during his final months among the living, and the film was completed two years after his death. The third featurette, Winnie the Pooh, and Tigger Too!, was conceived well after that, hence it opening 6 years after Blustery Day. Walt never had three short cartoons planned, nor did he ever plan on releasing them individually and stringing them together into a movie. For one, that’s an idea that makes little sense. Disney has always reasoned that Walt was afraid that Americans weren’t too familiar with the characters, and he thought that was the way to introduce them, but… Walt adapted several European stories into movies. What American knew of Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmatians before Walt optioned it in the late 1950s? Did any average American know about the many subjects Walt adapted into live-action period dramas throughout the 1950s? Did any American know Mary Poppins prior to the Disney film? Walt didn’t operate that way, and Disney only concocted this silly little tale because the truth is… Walt Disney Productions simply wanted to make some coin in the mid 1970s, and because there weren’t many new animated features coming down the pipeline during that period, they figured “Let’s put the three together, tack on a newly-animated ending, and say we made what Walt wanted!” More than anything, the post-Walt studio simply made a Pooh feature out of previously released pieces, not what Walt would’ve had in mind back when he was developing a Winnie the Pooh feature circa 1961. It’s also not like the package films of the 1940s, the segments in those were expressly meant to be combined with others. Fun & Fancy Free is a good example, its two segments – Bongo and Mickey and the Beanstalk – were planned as a separate animated feature-length films, but when the war compromised the studio, the plans changed. The filmmakers went into making those segments, knowing that they’d be combined into one feature. With Many Adventures, the shorts were simply made, they were combined well after the fact. How does this patched-together 1977 anthology count as a feature, but not Victory Through Air Power, which was conceived from the ground up by Walt Disney and his crew as a feature?
Did I lose you there? I probably did. That whole paragraph was very condescending. You can just simplify that entire discussion and say “Many Adventures is a feature. It’s 70 minutes long and it’s part of the canon, end of story!” That’s cool if you consider it part of the “canon”. I’m actually kind of mixed on that film. If I count it as part of the canon, then I count Victory Through Air Power, through and through. I have never even seen all of Victory Through Air Power, but I feel it counts! Something like Song of the South, a live-action movie at its very base with some all-animated story-time sequences, doesn’t count in my opinion, and that has nothing to do with the film’s baggage. The actual package features in the canon are animated movies at their core, some may include live-action segments (such as The Three Caballeros and Fun & Fancy Free), but at the end of the day, they are pretty much animated features. Song of the South is not. The same goes for Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Pete’s Dragon.
Already, you can tell what kind of Disney “fan” I am. I’m technical, I’m nerdy, I’m probably a touch condescending even. I don’t like my Disney filtered through mainstream, easy-to-digest revisionist history. It’s not just about magic and warm fuzzies, and it totally is not about nostalgia, I kind of hate nostalgia actually. No, I’m a person who loves and is fascinated by various different works made by the many iterations of the Disney enterprise. I also differentiate the 57-or-so Disney animated features in a critical way. I don’t simply say “All of them are great!” I don’t think everything Disney touches, whether it concerns films or TV shows or theme parks, turns to gold. By contrast, I don’t dislike a lot of what they make, either. Being a critical Disney fan, as I’ve learned over the years, is not easy. Sometimes when you say what you honestly feel about a certain element of the company, you may get scorn. You’re harsh, you hate good things, what kind of Disney fan are you?! I sometimes feel bad, I feel like I’m trampling over someone’s connection with a movie I’m more critical of. If you show any positivity towards a more controversial work put out by the company (like, say, Star Wars: The Last Jedi), you’re a “shill!” You eat any slop that comes out of their garbage chute. You’re a whore for the mouse! These days, I’m trying to just be honest… I have my views, but I feel that I only should talk about them in a suitable manner, at the right time too. Not the way I used to be on my old defunct blog, where I was fierce and furious and so obsessed with being “right” about animation history and Disney. Almost cultish in a way on my part, MY INTERPRETATION IS THE RIGHT ONE! It’s just movies, theme parks, and other fun things…
I did away with my full ranking of the Disney animated classics… Something about doing a full ranking of over 50 films made by different people over many decades just seems so unfulfilling. Why am I ranking films not made by Walt Disney alongside films made by Walt Disney? 70s Disney is so not 90s Disney, 2010s Disney is totally not early 2000s Disney, and so on and so forth. Sure, all the films combined make up a fascinating, messy body of work… But sometimes I feel I shouldn’t look at the Disney animated feature library as a whole… It just simply doesn’t add up! As such, I put the different films into five unique tiers…
Walt Disney has been dead for over 50 years, and in those 50 years, Disney Feature Animation/Walt Disney Animation Studios has gone through several management changes, and different people have overseen their output. Without Walt, I feel that even their best work is somehow affected by the corporate side of things, and the fact that there’s really no other like Walt… No one, I think, should try to be the next Walt Disney anyways. Various people have been called “the next Walt Disney”, but Walt was Walt. Someone who has a vision and ambition and guts, they’re not the next anybody, they’re them. I don’t think anyone who has assumed control of Disney Animation was quite like Walt, whether it was Jeffrey Katzenberg or David Stainton or even someone like John Lasseter. Somebody like Brad Bird or Hayao Miyazaki, to me, are modern Walt equivalents, not necessarily “modern day Walt Disneys”. They’re people with a vision, people who really know story and really know that animation isn’t this kiddie thing that lots of people like to call it.
Folks often put films like Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King in their Top 3, but to me, even those films kind of suffer in some way or another, as do modern features like Zootopia and Frozen. This leads me to my admittedly condescending viewpoint… Walt Disney often made films… After his death, Disney made “Disney films”. Films that kind of adhere to a mold, a set of limits even. I don’t see that with the earliest Disney animated films, though not every Walt-era feature is Top Tier-level greatness. Walt started out with two fairy tale adaptations, both of them unlike one another. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is about a young girl hiding from her heinous stepmother, Pinocchio is a sprawling adventure about a puppet boy becoming a human being. And then Fantasia followed those two, that film was wildly different! Fantasia is wordless segments set to classical music selections: Mickey Mouse abusing power he isn’t skilled in, prehistoric times, evil ghouls and a giant devil man coming out for the night, abstract ideas… Then what does the Walt Disney Studio follow that up with? Dumbo, a straightforward, loose, and often times surreal tale of an outcast elephant who is separated from his mother. Then this line-up culminates with Bambi, a quiet, impressionistic, and sometimes blunt depiction of life in the forest. I don’t think these films fit a particular mold. I feel these are all individual films, works of art, films not bound by some focus group demands or consumer products stipulations, they’re just great films made by people who were at their peak, artistically, with all the freedom they could’ve wished for back then.
Once we get past the remainder of the 1940s, which was the period of the anthology “package” features (a whole different beast altogether), we have a different kind of Disney animation at play here. I feel that Walt Disney is still overseeing films and not products by this point, not things that are influenced by corporate powers-that-be or anything like that. However, things get a little… Safer? This era of features begins with 1950’s Cinderella. Produced on a significantly smaller budget, Cinderella is like a Snow White 2.0, in that it’s a fairy tale about a young lady who is abused in some way by an awful stepmother, and at the end she gets her happily ever after. Other similarities include fun and helpful companions (the dwarfs, the mice), a castle setting, and a careful balance of comedy and drama. Cinderella is different from Snow White in that it doesn’t indulge in some of the more fearful elements of its predecessor, Cinderella is a relatively tame feature in comparison, in that nothing really scary or even intense happens in it. I think, more than anything, Cinderella‘s most upsetting scene isn’t a moment where a monster tries to attack her or anything, but rather a scene where her stepsisters destroy her dress and her chances of having a night out. Emotionally, it’s a great scene! But it isn’t Snow White’s first act run through the forest, nor is it Pleasure Island. Fine and well, not everything needs to have horror, but… 1950s Disney animation was a little short on scary and dark, if you ask me.
A chunk of the 1950s and 1960s Disney features tend to feel a little less grand to me, a little less ambitious (no doubt because of how World War II and the sheer expensiveness of the early features put the studio in debt), and a little lacking in bite. Peter Pan, for me, suffers the most out of all the 1950s Disney animated features. While I enjoy the more comic nature of the villainous Captain Hook and the action scenes, the film feels like it needed a little more danger, some more bite. It’s a little too lightweight and a little too family-friendly in a way, especially since a lot of the early developmental work put it more in line with the first five features. Lady and the Tramp and Sleeping Beauty I feel restore the bite, the former a story that didn’t really beg for it but still managed to seamlessly include some. Maybe, being a dog picture, it came naturally! (See what I did there?) Alice in Wonderland is an anomaly of this era altogether, that whole film has a unwelcoming tone to it, Wonderland is full of beings who go from friendly and inviting to mad and outright rude at the drop of a hat! Maybe not scary in any sense, but nonetheless unique and not all candy and rainbows. Alice in Wonderland may not have a great central character, as Alice is more of a cypher (almost a blank slate in which the audience can substitute themselves for), but it is a beast of its own, especially within the context of post-war Disney. See, live-action Disney in the ’50s gave us powerful, challenging, complex, and sometimes violent films like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Old Yeller, whereas the animation end of things seemed tame. No one other than villains or really minor characters (such as poor old Nutsy in Lady and the Tramp, whose offing is eerily implied during the dog pound scene) were allowed to die in Disney animated features anymore. For example, Peggy Lee coaxed Walt Disney into letting Trusty survive getting hit by the dogcatcher wagon in Lady and the Tramp. Perhaps the aversion to these kinds of deaths was spurred by the reaction to the death of Bambi’s mother nearly a decade earlier. Outside of deaths, there just seems to be a little less bite. That little extra punch that made the early Disney features shine.
From the 60s onward, the bite is even more subdued. One Hundred and One Dalmatians‘ villainous Cruella de Vil has a perfectly freaky design, and worse, she wants to have puppies skinned alive! But the feature doesn’t quite approach the horrors of Snow White and Pinocchio, the threat is a little more mild here. The climactic car chase is nonetheless thrilling though, as is a sequence where Pongo and Perdita narrowly save the puppies from the Bad’uns at Hell Hall. This all being said, Dalmatians more than makes up for that with some pretty tense moments. The film is actually one of the more suspenseful films of the Walt years, there are many scenes that are quite tense, such as the whole stretch where Pongo and Perdita help their disguised puppies into the moving van while Cruella and the Bad’uns loom. The lack of scary stuff isn’t what necessarily makes a Disney animated feature lesser, because One Hundred and One Dalmatians would be in Tier One of my Disney animated features list with or without any Pinocchio-level frights. No, I feel the film does have some pacing issues in Act I and a few other little tiny rips here and there. It sits comfortably in Tier Two, and Tier Two is no low honor, for I feel the films in Tier Two are genuinely great works…
So then there’s my whole view of the Disney Renaissance period. A lot of people, mostly folks who either grew up in the 80s/90s or folks who finally took interest in Disney animation during the era, think that the Renaissance period is the best period of Disney Animation’s lengthy history. Lots of people even go as far as saying that every Disney animated feature made before The Little Mermaid was some kiddie-kiddie movie, that’s just how successful and powerful the Renaissance line-up of features was. It convinced a lot of people to believe the wrong history of Disney. What’s more, Disney went along with it and rewrote their own history, basically saying “Oh Walt Disney was just some putz making little baby movies like Snow White and Bambi, but us? We’re making ADULT movies!” Except, Disney’s executives who pushed this very mindset contradicted themselves. Jeffrey Katzenberg, for example, was one of the very people in charge during this era. He initially had little love for animation when he first came to Disney in the mid-1980s, and sometimes said in interviews stated that it was just a children’s thing. That was, until Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Little Mermaid made serious coin at the box office… There was more of a drive to get an adult audience into Disney animated features, but Katzenberg and other executives at Disney still insisted that these had to be “kids’ movies.” The Little Mermaid had to have a ready-made-for-Happy-Meal-toys sidekick, Beauty and the Beast had to have bouncy out-of-place comic relief, The Lion King had to have farting warthogs, Pocahontas had to have funny forest animals doing goofy things, and so on and so forth. It is a misguided mixture that ranges from somewhat tolerable to straight up distracting. This insistence that it had still had to be kiddie-centric was a country mile from the way Walt Disney embraced animation, and for me, that hurts a lot of the output, and it’s a particular sore spot when animation as a whole was and is already a misunderstood art form to begin with. No Renaissance-era Disney animated feature is in my Top Tier mostly because of this, and I understand how that can shock many people who easily put Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King in their highest echelon. And get this… I went on and on about bite and darkness in Disney animated features and the lack of it in the 50s/60s… The 90s movies have a lot of it. Moments in films like The Lion King and The Hunchback of Notre Dame channel the harsher elements of the early features. So it goes to show that even that darkness and bite that I think is a great ingredient in great animated stories isn’t a guarantee of excellence. Like everything else, it’s a component.
Now you might ask, why aren’t any of the recent post-Michael Eisner Disney animated features up there? I feel they have their own issues.
For one thing, even the best Disney animated features of the modern era are too wordy and too talky for my tastes. Some of them often spell out their themes, which is a problem common in many animated features being made today. It’s either an assumption that the kids in the audience don’t get the idea (because, ya know, animation is for kiddies) or it’s an assumption that even the adults in the audience don’t get it. Zootopia is the best of the modern crop to me, and even that film suffers from these two particular things a bit. As for corporate influence? Well, you can kind of detect things that the consumer products division wanted. Sometimes the overall design of Disney’s current CG features is pre-programmed. You look at all the wondrous concept art for something like Moana or Big Hero 6, but the end result is a typical CG Disney look with minor deviation. Most of the newer films (and Pixar’s films, too) have prologues where the main characters are babies/toddlers, as if those openings are made just so Disney Consumer Products has an excuse to make baby dolls based on the protagonists. Minor little things like that, along with some self-consciousness regarding “strong” female characters, just little odds and ends that I think are a little much. Sometimes that Renaissance-esque kiddie stuff is still there, particularly in films like Frozen. Just… Not a fan of that. These are films, much like the Renaissance films, that have very strong elements in them and some that even match up to what we saw in Walt’s films. But still, they’re components…
You may be thinking now… So, you love those first few Walt films, and view everything else as second-best?
I feel the Renaissance era, the early 2000s “experimentation” period, and the current era gave us some truly *great* films. I wouldn’t want to do without The Little Mermaid, The Rescuers Down Under, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Emperor’s New Groove, The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, and Zootopia. All really great films with really well-told stories and engaging characters, with other great technical elements to spare. These films may not be Pinocchio and Fantasia, but at this point in my life, comparing the films in Tier Two to the films in Tier One is akin to comparing great popular movies to something like Citizen Kane. It’s very unfair, really. Would I love to see a modern Disney animated feature that just sticks the finger to all the corporate mandates and stuff? A modern-day Fantasia-like arty movie? You bet! But realistically, I don’t think Walt Disney Animation Studios is ever going to give us a movie like that. They couldn’t with Fantasia 2000, what makes one think they can do it in the times we’re currently living in? Disney’s far beyond being a corporation at this point, they’re a MONSTROUS EMPIRE. The output from here on out will be safe enough for Disney to use in merchandising and theme park stuff. Even cousin studio Pixar’s loftiest films, like WALL-E and Inside Out, are still safe enough to be these mass entertainment commercial products.
Sometimes it depends, at this point, on which ones actually take the risks and which ones don’t… Of course, execution has a whole lot to do with that, too! Putting the corporate stuff aside, I look at a film like Zootopia with admiration. Ambitious it is, it also really. works as a story. Something like The Little Mermaid doesn’t shoot for the stars, but it’s similarly so well-told and so well-made, as well as the other films in Tier Two. I love their honesty, their heart, their sense of character, their art, their animation quality, and their aesthetics. Again, these are still really great films, and their little imperfections don’t bother me so much as they used to… In my younger, angrier days. If anything, I just view them as little ouchies now. Not like it’s a thorn in the side or anything, or like a really bad cut.
Tier Three is when the flaws begin to become a little more noticeable, and this doesn’t just apply to the post-Walt line-up of movies either, a few of the Walt ones are down here, too! (I guess I can be full of surprises.) A few films down here are even ambitious, tried to do cool things and all. Even films untainted by corporate mush can have their sets of flaws, not like one class is inherently better than the other. It’s as futile as suggesting that every quirky independent movie is by default better than any well-made blockbuster extravaganza. Anyways, in Tier Three, we have films that still have a good sense of story and character, but are marred by various little issues. The Lion King, often in people’s Top 10, is down here. I love the story of The Lion King and find all the characters to be relatable and well-realized, and the resonance of that movie… Just, wow. It should be in Tier Two for that alone! But the fart jokes feel very tacked on (is there really any good reason Pumbaa has a flatulence problem?), and there’s a tonal imbalance throughout. The comedy feels like it’s trying to be Aladdin, all irreverent and goofball and anachronistic. Outside of fart humor, there’s slapstick and stuff as well, and I feel it’s at odds with the more serious, almost Biblical tone of the rest of the movie. Some of the songs, while catchy and enjoyable, aren’t exactly the finest hour either. But Walt Disney’s Peter Pan is down here too, mostly for the aforementioned lack of bite, but also because of its relatively so-so characters and noisier-than-usual tone. Films like Big Hero 6 are flawed in ways the Renaissance movies aren’t. Sometimes storytelling choices impact the films that are down here, or because some of the films lack in certain areas.
Tier Four even has a Walt-era film in it that is not a package feature, and that would happen to be the 1963 film The Sword in the Stone, a feature made when Walt was rather absent. The Nine Old Men were bound by the limitations imposed on them by Roy O. Disney and his business cronies (or as Jim Hill once called them, “Roy’s Boys”), which was well after the expensive Sleeping Beauty flopped at the box office and completely brought the studio down a peg. Tier Four is also home to a chunk of the films made after Walt’s death and before the Renaissance period, films like The Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Fox and the Hound, and The Black Cauldron. Films that are definitely products of a troubled and transitional time for the company, but also have their respective strengths. Some of the post-Renaissance/pre-revival films ended up down here, along with one revival film. Tier Five is when we get to a select few films where there are very few redeemable qualities on display. Dinosaur and Home on the Range, I feel, are fine examples of this. Films that not only aren’t what their respective filmmakers tried to make, but also films that just don’t have good character work or riveting stories. Films that even kind of spit in the face of Walt Disney and his work, as hyperbolic as that is to say.
Yet, despite my tiered system of “ranking” Disney animated classics, this is quite the body of work. Someone else’s list is fascinating because of their unique outlook, whether it’s colored by Disney’s corporate machine or not. I tend to gravitate towards lists and rankings that look at these features as features, not through the lens of “Disney magic” and nostalgia. I have a friend who feels the “Silver Age” Disney animated features of the 1950s and 1960s are his pick for best, which I think is very cool. I have pals who have the Renaissance features in the high ranks, I know people who write the oldest films off as “boring” and lacking in great storytelling (which I VEHEMENTLY disagree with, but that’s all cool), I bet there’s probably someone out there with a compelling case for Home on the Range being the ultimate Disney animated feature. No really, if you do, tell me! I’m curious to hear why!
I criticize Disney films because I feel that it helps me with my own work, but also because I do it out of genuine love for the stuff that they make. Walt Disney Animation Studios is going to be making features till the end of life on Earth, they’ll certainly be making features for the next 100 years, so with each and every new film, I always hope for something special. Something I’ll want to see again and again after leaving the theater. As I leave that auditorium, I want to be left with a couple things that mean a lot. I’ve given up the hope of seeing a Tier One-level film from them again, or most of the studios, because in this climate… Why expect it? Turn to an independent animation studio or group for that. If WDAS just makes strings upon strings of really great Tier Two-level animated features, I’m content. I just want them to stay fresh and innovative in some way or another, because I feel in the CG age they’ve been kind of behind on that. Moana and Ralph Breaks The Internet are handsome-looking productions, technically tight in just about every way, but knowing animation’s limitlessness, I’m more moved by films like Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, 2D works being made independently, and more distinctive CG films coming out of the various houses. Walt Disney Animation Studios, outside of a few experimental shorts like Paperman, are a little behind in that department. I’d like to see them experiment with CG now that they have a string of post-Eisner blockbusters behind them.
As they near Feature #60, whatever that may be (Frozen II is #58, the still-unannounced Dragon Empire looks to be #59, and maybe Byron Howard’s new Lin-Manuel Miranda musical could be the big six-oh), I expect WDAS to keep making great stories, but I’d also love to see them take the training wheels off once more and comfortably move into bringing flourish and flair back into their feature animation. Be ahead of the curve once more. The era of the previous leader, John Lasseter, is slowly ending. The remaining features he oversaw development on before his ouster are coming out, with new leader Jennifer Lee – writer/director of the two Frozen films – running the show. What is her vision of Disney Animation? What will she push for? Does Disney keep making great stories that entertain all ages? Do they skew just the kids again like they did in the early aughts? Or have some guts and skew more adult? What will they be like, visually? We shall see…
So far, 57 films made over eight decades and only a small handful in the bottom tier? All of which I gladly own on physical media? That’s pretty damn impressive!