This decade was a period of all-around success for Walt Disney Animation Studios. Much has been written about how the studio had entered a new revival, a Renaissance perhaps.
I wouldn’t say that the entirety of the 2010s encapsulates the revival of Walt Disney Animation Studios, for it was going on before this decade came in. Actually, it depends on who you ask… Some folks mark the beginning of the revival at Tangled, which was released in the autumn of 2010 as feature #50. Disney themselves officially mark the beginning of the revival with the 2008 road trip comedy Bolt. For me, it begins with the preceding feature, 2007’s futuristic adventure Meet The Robinsons…
The start of the revival is rooted in the departure of the controversial former CEO of The Walt Disney Company, one Michael Eisner. Eisner’s final years were marked by many company low points, one of the most notable was the poisoning of the once-roaring Walt Disney Feature Animation. In less than a decade, that studio had gone from being on top of the world with The Lion King, to eating dirt, churning out films like Home on the Range. In the late 1990s, it was decided that multiple executives – many of whom didn’t see much value in animation as an art form – should run the animation studio, and as expected, the features were heavily compromised from story to script to tone. Audiences began to back away from most of these films. Even investing in all-CG features, their first of which being 2005’s poorly-received Chicken Little, didn’t bring Disney’s box office to Pixar and DreamWorks levels.
Roy E. Disney ran a Save Disney campaign, not dissimilar to the one he used to boot previous CEO Ron Miller out in 1984, to get Eisner out of the mix. Robert Iger was named CEO, and he sought to repair the damage, namely the strained relations with flagship animation house Pixar, whom were producing all of Disney’s hit animated releases during the early aughts. Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles were the kind of hits Disney Animation desperately needed at this point in time. However, getting Pixar back wasn’t the only important thing to do… Reviving their own animation studio was also crucial going forward. An unexpected decision was made, two Pixar stalwarts – John Lasseter and Ed Catmull – were put in charge of Walt Disney Animation Studios. Together, they would run both Pixar and Disney Animation…
Now, both of them are gone. John Lasseter, as we all know now, had a long history of sexual harassment and misogyny. During the Me Too movement, all of this was exposed to the public and after a lengthy sabbatical, he was fired from The Walt Disney Company. Taking his Chief Creative Officer position at Disney Animation was Frozen director Jennifer Lee. Ed Catmull later left, but Ed was no angel, for he had enabled John all those years and also had a major hand in an industry-wide wage-fixing conspiracy. Perhaps we are entering a new era right now, as we close the book on this decade…
So, what were John and Ed’s objectives in turning Walt Disney Animation Studios around? For starters, ridding the building of the executives who stifled the artists. Now, the artists and filmmakers reported directly to John and Ed, no getting through hordes of suits who didn’t give two damns about animation or Disney’s own legacy. Looking back on this, anyone could’ve cleared that building, because that’s really what Disney Animation needed… Not necessarily “those Pixar guys”. Naturally, over the years, the narrative became “Disney was faltering and they needed Pixar to save the day.” Disney ran with that, and it appears that John and Ed really ran with that, too. Of course, the truth is far more interesting than that…
Really, John Lasseter and Ed Catmull did what anyone in that position needed to do. The silver lining is that those executives were gone and now a much more filmmaker-friendly model was instilled at the studio. Well, we’ll see just how filmmaker-friendly their model was… Much like the Disney Renaissance, what followed was a period of artistic highs, but also a period of many compromises. In many ways, it was the Disney Renaissance. Some highs, some lows…
As the two settled in, a feature was already halfway through production, the aforementioned Meet The Robinsons. A comedic and zany adaptation of a William Joyce book that involved time travel and the future and all sorts of strange things, Meet The Robinsons had what were a few lasts for Disney Animation, and it was treated by Lasseter and Catmull as a band-aid that needed to be ripped. A sort-of Black Cauldron situation, if you will. Lasseter had the halfway-complete film retooled to suit his demands, the notable changes were made to the antagonistic Bowler Hat Guy. Released with very little fanfare, Meet The Robinsons may have gotten decent critical reception at best (better than the response that the previous three films were met with), but it failed to recoup its $150 million budget. Swept under the rug, it was…
The film’s sincerity and constant references to Walt Disney’s futurism did, however, signal that Disney Feature Animation was finally ridding itself of the problems that plagued their output in the early aughts. We were already moving beyond the likes of Home on the Range and Chicken Little.
Concept art for American Dog by Paul Felix.
Bolt was a different story altogether. A much different iteration of the film had entered development around 2004, a year before Michael Eisner’s ouster. To be Lilo & Stitch director Chris Sanders’ sophomore film, Lasseter put a stop to it, immediately suggesting that Disney Animation wasn’t going to be that much of a “filmmaker-friendly” studio after all. For a long while, it had been rumored that Lasseter despised Lilo & Stitch for its “quirkiness”, and had similar reservations with Sanders’ new film, which was going to be titled American Dog. While some of us – myself included, guilty as charged – were lead to believe that he fired Sanders over story issues, it becomes more clear to me that Lasseter just didn’t get Sanders’ sensibilities. I mean, how can one dislike Lilo & Stitch? Sanders left American Dog, left Disney Animation, and went to DreamWorks. Lasseter gave the film to budding directors Chris Williams and Byron Howard, who essentially retooled the film to Lasseter’s liking, keeping a few core elements of Sanders’ original version but stripping all of the director’s trademarks and aesthetics. Since Lasseter had the entire project revised and rebuilt from the ground up, he and Disney PR set it in stone that Bolt was what turned RMS Disney Animation away from the typhoon…
Night and day difference.
Even though it would’ve been nice to have gotten American Dog, which was shaping up to be another wonderfully weird and wacky Sanders outing, I still very much like Bolt as a film. No, it does not reinvent the wheel whatsoever, and it’s probably the tamest of the post-Eisner Disney animated features, yet it boasts very likable characters and a very heartfelt albeit old-fashioned story. Some of the humor really lands, and some of it doesn’t, but the script is pretty solid for the most part. It feels like it lifts elements from the films Lasseter had a hand in at Pixar, particularly the Toy Story films, with an explosive opening sequence containing action beats that channel the velocipod chase from The Incredibles, and a humor bit or two inspired by various gags in Finding Nemo. (For example, a bunch of dogs in a pet shop mindlessly and repeatedly saying “Ball” at the sight of a ball.)
Some have remarked that Bolt played more like a Pixar film than a Disney animated feature, but if anything, it’s a film that uses tricks from films John Lasseter worked on at another studio. I feel it is still a Walt Disney Animation Studios film, because Pixar does not own the buddy comedy, or the deluded lead character, or animal behavior-based jokes. Bolt is actually quite similar to The Truman Show, not just a handful of Pixar films. Perhaps injecting these kinds of storytelling tricks into the film was done to help it connect, to make it digestible, after a series of films that left a bad taste. In the end, being a heartfelt adventure rooted in an unlikely friendship (a deluded dog and a cat who is just not having it) is something very Disney-like to begin with. In the eyes of many critics, it was more than a comeback for Disney Animation. Many Disney fans found it to be a return to form as well, while others balked at the perceived Pixar-isms and the disappearance of American Dog. What I think really hit and surprised some folks was the substance. Bolt was kind of… About something. It wasn’t a mindless adventure with halfhearted themes thrown in to make the film seem like it was more than a kids’ matinee movie. Bolt did touch on some ideas beyond the titular character’s wake-up call. Sure, there was his journey to reunite with his owner, and how his journey shows him a more fulfilling life, but most of Bolt‘s heart is actually within his cat companion Mittens. In a pivotal moment where she dissuades Bolt from leaving her and going back with owner Penny, she reveals that she was declawed and abandoned by her owners, and thus has a more cynical outlook on humans than our protagonist does.
Yet some of us weren’t surprised that the film took such a turn towards the end, and that it had some real emotional weight to it. Meet The Robinsons, for many a Disney Animation follower and admirer, was not dissimilar. The Bowler Hat Guy’s whole arc? Lewis being abandoned by his mother? That told me that the studio had bounced back from Home on the Range and Chicken Little, to some, not so much. Bolt was the bounce back according to them. Then there are a few who think neither were comebacks, but that’s another story…
Bolt also ushered in many elements that define Disney Animation’s revival. First, it introduced the house style that we’ve seen in the other computer animated movies the studio has made as of late. Those “painterly” backgrounds were used in later features like Tangled and Frozen. The character design set the template as well, as the future films seem to be patterned after it and Tangled. Meet The Robinsons would be the last Disney animated feature based on a book that A) wasn’t a fairy tale, and B) wasn’t a Marvel comic adaptation. Meet The Robinsons was also the last Disney animated feature to have a very distinctive style, that film’s look was heavily based on the illustrations of its source material, and said source material’s author William Joyce’s art style. Bolt introduced the CG Disney house style that the studio has yet to really deviate from. At the time, its painterly backgrounds gave the film a neat look amongst the other CG flicks that were playing at the time.
Strong reviews and a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination, Disney Animation’s first since Brother Bear, further solidified the “fact” that this was the start of the revival. The only thing it was not was a blockbuster. Bolt was saddled with weak marketing and consequently it had a so-so start, but strong word-of-mouth and legs helped it run past the $100 million mark domestically and it pocketed an additional $200 million or so overseas. Not a flop, not the smash hit it could’ve been. Not something on the level of the competition, for sure. That same year, Pixar’s WALL-E – a far riskier and far more ambitious picture – orbited past $220 million stateside alone.
Next came two staples of the past… Princesses, and hand-drawn animation…
The Princess and the Frog brought back directors Ron Clements and John Musker, who were alienated from the enterprise during the final Eisner years. The film was also an ill-fated attempt at reviving hand-drawn animated features at Disney, a film that’s visually gorgeous and sumptuous, but didn’t quite push the medium forward. Surprisingly, the film lacked the innovation of works like Tarzan and Treasure Planet, older Disney animated films that tried to combine hand-drawn animation with immersive computer animation and effects. Princess and the Frog took on a decidedly more old-fashioned look, with multiplane camera-esque effects and old school staging. You would’ve thought The Princess and the Frog was plucked out of the 1950s, not the Disney Renaissance. There’s nothing wrong with embracing such a retro look, but perhaps hand-drawn animation needed something that was like an enhanced version of Tarzan, a great spectacle that could more than hold its own against Bolt and Tangled in the public’s eyes. Ten years later, Sergio Pablos answered Princess and the Frog with his immersive, beautifully-crafted and innovative Klaus. Winnie the Pooh, a similarly ill-fated film in the failed 2D revival, was crafted similarly, but perhaps that was justified because the filmmakers wanted it to resemble a classic Disney-made Winnie the Pooh movie and not something completely different. After all, Disney has been making animated adaptations of Winnie the Pooh for over 50 years, and none of them ever deviated from the look of Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree.
Yet all of this technical and artistic talk aside, The Princess and the Frog soars for the same reasons Bolt worked. The characters are very likable and fun while also having their faults and having their relatable qualities, the adventure is a mix of the magical, the scary, and even the wacky. The villainous voodoo-toting Dr. Facilier yields some truly creepy imagery, some of the darkest in a modern Disney animated feature, with thrills that would do the likes of Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty proud. Yet some voodoo and magical elements bring out some delightfully silly stuff too, like just about anything involving the jazz-loving alligator Louis and anything going on with the boisterously fun Mama Odie. The film also takes a chance and outright kills off the funny sidekick, adding a real wallop to the ending. Tiana and Naveen being two polar opposites, both very steeped in their lifestyles (Tiana’s hyper-dedication to hard work vs. Naveen’s sheer leechy laziness), make for a good pair and a good conflict that moves the story along nicely. Much like Bolt, it just feels like the filmmakers just telling their story within some specific guidelines (don’t get too weird!), no one butting in to say “more fart jokes!” or “more unnecessary gags here!” If anything, the film channels Walt-era Disney animated features as much as it channels the Renaissance films. Even though we shouldn’t quite praise Lasseter in any capacity these days, it appears that he wanted to bring a Walt-like sensibility back to Disney Animation, which had been missing from the studio’s works for a long while. The tone, the retro setting, the even script, and consistent mix of the various elements definitely felt very Walt Disney to these eyes and ears.
Disney Animation had been waiting for a bonafide hit, especially one made after the departure of Eisner and all the executives that nearly sunk the studio. Bolt and The Princess and the Frog may have been met with enthusiastic response, but this didn’t translate to stellar box office. Enter Tangled, the studio’s first all-CG fairy tale adaptation. Channeling the ’90s Renaissance musical comedy adventures, and having a bit of a modern coating to it, Tangled was the right combo for audiences. Tangled grossed $200 million domestically, the first Disney animated feature to do so since The Lion King some 16 1/2 years earlier. Worldwide, it was also the first since The Lion King to top $500 million. Money-wise, it rivaled some of the Pixars and the DreamWorks and the Blue Skys. Like Bolt, Tangled set many templates for the studio’s output, in both the storytelling and visuals departments.
Tangled‘s success lead to the development of more films like it, films that combined the ingredients of the beloved Renaissance films with the modern stuff. I’d say that Tangled also channels the Walt era the same way Princess and the Frog does. Tangled doesn’t pander as much as the Renaissance-era films did, despite its contemporary quippy dialogue, it doesn’t insert random unnecessary humor bits into more serious scenes for the sake of keeping bored 8-year-olds from walking around the theater. Lasseter’s Disney may not have been filmmaker-friendly as purported, but Tangled once again still feels like the work of the filmmakers, keeping the influence of the studio system in check. (Well, the system still had its way with the film’s title, which I still *really* dislike.) Interestingly, it too went through a director change halfway through its road to completion. The film was set to be master animator Glen Keane’s directorial debut, and joining him on the project was a promising Dean Wellins, but Keane left the project sometime in 2008 over a “health issue”. He remained onboard and was very instrumental in its development and look. Wellins left and began working on something else, along with a short film. Two in a row, first Bolt goes through a director change, and then this film… Major changes to the overall film, of course, were implemented. Keane and Wellins were replaced by Byron Howard, fresh off of Bolt, and newbie director Nathan Greno. It appears that the filmmakers get free reign, but within a specific guideline: It has to be to Lasseter’s particular liking…
Tangled‘s sincerity, and eschewing of Shrek-like gimmicks (trailers for the film heavily implied it would be “Disney’s Shrek“) made it worthy of the Walt films in my eyes. Like Bolt and Princess and the Frog, it also has some substance and isn’t just some matinee babysitter. Such stories that could appeal to all while having something to give defined great Disney animation, and it was back, four features in. Tangled pits Rapunzel against a manipulative, abusive villainess in the form of Mother Gothel. She isn’t Dr. Facilier, she is more similar to Judge Claude Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame, in how she treats a child that she uses for her own gain. For a lot of people in abusive situations like that where they are manipulated by gifts and other temporary “nice things”, Rapunzel’s situation is probably a terrifyingly accurate portrayal of what they go through. See beyond the boy meets girl adventure and the cute animal sidekicks, and yes, there was something there once more.
And yet, you can still make a sillier, more straightforward animated feature and still succeed at delighting an audience. There is always room in the field for all kinds of animated features, the next Disney Animation venture was no exception…
Winnie the Pooh attempts to honor the early featurettes made by the studio in the ’60s and ’70s (compiled into the 1977 anthology feature The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh), yet tried to spice things up a bit. Some fans of the earlier Pooh works objected to how they wrote certain characters here, but I found the film to be a nice trip back into the Hundred Acre Woods, a revisiting of old friends. This was made in an era where old and “nostalgic” things were reimagined as hip and kind of cynical, and mainly in live-action too. Things like those Alvin and the Chipmunks movies, the hybrid Smurfs movie, etc. Winnie the Pooh dared to be more classical in its approach. If anything, the film is an hour-long hangout with the Hundred Acre Wood gang. No major journey or anything, just a little misunderstanding that leads to a series of misadventures. I mean, the movie only runs 63 minutes long… Met with strong reviews from American critics (folks across the Atlantic were a little less thrilled), Winnie the Pooh was the victim of various inner-studio squabbles (which I won’t, and can’t get into here, but let’s just say that what I know suggests that Disney Animation and their leaders didn’t have as much as freedom as we may have thought) and it died a quick death at the box office in the summer of 2011. It still counts as part of the revival, and it’s also worth noting that this was the first Disney animated film that songwriters Robert and Kristen-Anderson Lopez of The Book of Mormon fame were involved with.
To keep on track, one thing was clear… Tangled couldn’t be one last hit. Sure, a couple of critical hits and one big box office success were good results for a studio that was getting up after hitting rock bottom, but this was Disney Animation. One hit wasn’t going to cut it, the rearrangement of the studio needed to yield more hits, it couldn’t be all for nothing. Disney Animation had been behind the pack for way too long, now it was time to strike back… And not with a familiar story, either. If you notice, the early revival-era films are merely baby steps: Two princess fairy tales, Winnie the Pooh, and a talking dog picture. Next comes a movie about… Video games.
When Wreck-It Ralph was in the works, I was optimistic. For one, it would dip into subject matter that put it more in line with Atlantis and Treasure Planet. I was happy to see Disney Animation looking to not fall back on the ’90s formulas after the success of Tangled, and I was very happy to see them willing to take the swing again like they had done in the late ’90s/early aughts. Video games were risky for any movie, period. Many video game adaptations faltered critically and commercially, none really reached true blockbuster levels. Disney’s own stab at a video game-centric movie, TRON, was infamously a financial disappointment when released in 1982, though it had built up a cult following over the years. The sequel TRON: Legacy happened in 2010, which made money, but not enough to convince Disney to make it a mega-franchise. Now they had an animated movie about video games, from their own studio and not the guaranteed Pixar. Could Wreck-It Ralph show that a Disney animated feature in the post-Walt age could be anything other than a fairy tale or some Broadway-style musical epic?
All of my expectations were met. Wreck-It Ralph was not only a critical and box office success, but it definitely put Disney Animation into forward motion. Two hits, it was now clear that they knew what they were doing. For this film, the Disney wizards use CG in exciting ways. Three distinct game worlds with their own aesthetics and styles were created, in addition to very neat fx work and the usual great Disney character animation. Visually, it could rival any summer blockbuster, and I feel it is visually the best of this decade’s Disney animated features.
Directed by Rich Moore, fresh blood to the studio who had cut his teeth on The Simpsons and Futurama, Wreck-It Ralph is one of the highlights of the revival era. It did some new things, and delivered a thrilling, action-packed, funny, and warmhearted story. That moment, for me, was when Disney feature animation roared itself back to the forefront. Bolt was good, The Princess and the Frog and Tangled were great, but Wreck-It Ralph truly was it for me. Wreck-It Ralph made a bigger splash than other animated pictures from the heavies that debuted in 2012, like Pixar’s Brave and DreamWorks’ Rise of the Guardians, it even stood nicely next to Laika’s sophomore outing, ParaNorman. When the Oscar for Best Animated Feature was given to Brave, a lot of animation fans were none too pleased. The film was a watershed moment for Walt Disney Animation Studios, they truly were back…
What else was a watershed moment? The short film that preceded Wreck-It Ralph in theaters. Actually, let’s talk about shorts for a second.
Of course, Walt Disney Animation Studios was never a stranger to shorts. Like every studio that got off the ground during the Golden Age of Animation, the Disney studios made cartoon shorts that ran under 10 minutes. Tons of them. We know very well that Disney quickly rose to the top of the water, with their comedic and popular Mickey Mouse cartoons, their experimental Silly Symphonies, and all the other cartoons that laid the groundwork for their animated features. Disney ceased making short films in 1961, capping things off with the Goofy sports cartoon Aquamania. This was during a time when all of the big studios, from Warner Bros. to MGM to Walter Lantz Productions, were packing it up. Short-form cartoons were now deemed better suited to Saturday mornings on small screens, not material for attaching to live-action features.
The animation wing of Walt Disney Productions, low on resources due to money being funneled into theme park projects (namely Walt Disney World and EPCOT Center), occasionally made a featurette in the ensuing decades. Their first short films since the early 1960s were completed in 1982, two offbeat films that were given limited exhibition: Tim Burton’s Vincent (now widely available, on home video releases of The Nightmare Before Christmas) and Darrell Van Citters’ intended-for-EPCOT piece Fun With Mr. Future (not available, but it is on YouTube). Now flash forward to 1989, in the midst of the feature animation wing’s grand return to form, they make a short film based on the hit hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The short, Tummy Trouble, leads to two more in the early 1990s: Rollercoaster Rabbit (1990) and Trail Mix-Up (1993). Then there was the 2D/CG hybrid Off His Rockers in 1992, which has faded into obscurity. Then, the first ever Mickey Mouse short since 1953’s The Simple Things came about… Runaway Brain. That too was left to fade away, and outright buried by John Lasseter after he took over Disney Animation. More on that later, maybe?
While many may associate modern theatrical shorts with Pixar, since just about all of their movies had a short playing before them, Disney Feature Animation had always been doing this sort of thing, but were on and off during a time when Pixar made sure that a short being before the movie remained a tradition. Even when Pixar didn’t have a short ready for a new movie release, they’d dip into the past and use an old one. (Luxo, Jr. was attached to Toy Story 2 theatrically, Knick Knack preceded Finding Nemo.) Disney Animation didn’t do this. They made a handful of shorts in the early 2000s, many of which either played at film festivals (John Henry), were attached to random out-of-the-way live-action movies (Lorenzo played before the Touchstone drama Raising Helen), or ended up as bonus features on DVDs. (One by One, The Little Matchgirl)
After Disney Animation’s management shake-up, it seemed like shorts would become a regular occurrence… Sort of… It was a staggered rollout at best. A new, hilarious, and on-point modern Goofy How-To short, How To Hook Up Your Home Theater, appeared before National Treasure: Book of Secrets in winter 2007. I was certainly shocked when the Goofy title card popped up on the screen before the movie. Prints of Meet The Robinsons had a classic short attached, if you saw it in 3D, you got Working For Peanuts, if you saw it in 2D you got Boat Builders. It was a real trip to see that unravel on the big screen before the movie, let me tell ya.
This was followed up by Chris Williams’ Glago’s Guest in 2008, which I haven’t seen because for whatever reason, Disney never showed this short anywhere except a film festival or two. How come it wasn’t attached to Bolt theatrically? Why did the Pixar-made Cars short Tokyo Mater air before Bolt instead? I guess the answer to that one is rather obvious, but its absence from the 2015 Disney Animation short films collection Blu-ray is baffling. No short appeared in 2009, nor in 2010. The cute but ultimately unspectacular Tick Tock Tale (directed by Dean Wellins) was produced and shown at film festivals in 2010, but didn’t appear before Tangled.
Finally, in 2011, we got a new short… An all-2D short, The Ballad of Nessie. Taking inspiration from the Disney animated works of the 1950s, channeling Mary Blair more so than anything else, the charmer appeared before Winnie the Pooh. A cute Tangled short called Tangled Ever After aired before the 3D re-release of Beauty and the Beast in early 2012, the first modern Disney animated feature to get a theatrical short follow-up (Bolt‘s short Super Rhino was a home video exclusive) … Then…
There was Paperman…
Paperman was a first attempt at really meshing hand-drawn and CGI, in ways hitherto unseen. The technology, Meander, allowed for a look that coated the 3D environments and models with 2D beauty, almost seamlessly. Directed by John Kahrs, this seemed like the future of Disney’s CG animation. A revolutionary technique that would more than differentiate their output from their cousin’s works, and the work of all the competing studios. Was it to be?
This is where things will get… Muddled…
In the next part, I will look at the films released from Frozen to now… Stay tooned…
Kyle Loves Animation and More... 