This Decade in Disney Animation: My Retrospective, Part 2

A recap…

Instead of looking at the last ten years’ worth of Walt Disney Animation Studios output, I decided to start off at where I thought their “revival” period began, and why it began in the first place.

This entire decade is very much part of and a byproduct of the studio’s resurgence as a major player in modern mainstream feature animation. Here in part two, I’ll look at everything released after the film I stopped at, 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph…

Often times, we divide Disney Animation’s extensive body of work into various “eras”. For starters, you have the “Disney Renaissance”, which to most people covers the final weeks of 1989 and almost the entirety of the 1990s. While some could look at all the films Walt Disney oversaw from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 to The Jungle Book thirty years later as one whole era, some of us split the Walt years even. I put the early five features and the pre-war shorts into a “Golden Age” category, and the rest in a “Silver Age”. Most folks actually do that, so that isn’t a unique viewpoint on classic Disney animation.

Then we get to this era, often simply called the “Disney Revival”. Not necessarily a new “Renaissance”, even though it fits almost all of the qualifications. A Renaissance is a rebirth and revival after all. In the previous part, I briefly went over the different ways you can time the revival. Some may say it started at the very beginning of this decade with Tangled, others say a year earlier with The Princess and the Frog, or maybe even two years earlier with Bolt. Disney themselves mark Bolt as the start of the resurgence, but I… Well, I’m me… I said 2007’s Meet The Robinsons was pretty much the beginning, functioning as a bridge between the later Michael Eisner years and the current era…

In the span of 12 years, from 2007 to the final weeks of this decade, Walt Disney Animation Studios produced twelve feature films, a number of short films, and other additional works. Much like the Disney Renaissance, we have a period of films that stretches the entire decade, and the reason I stopped at Wreck-It Ralph (and its accompanying short Paperman) in part one of my retrospective is this… Much like the Disney Renaissance, I see it as a successful streak of films that you can break into two halves…

Disney’s success was to continue after the release of Wreck-It Ralph, as they had unleashed a streak of six films that were met with good critical reception, and a couple of them did very well at the box office. You would think that with the storytelling experimenting in Wreck-It Ralph and the visual experimenting in Paperman, that Disney would now soar above and beyond and really show audiences what they’re made of. Right? All those years of low morale and poorly-received product were behind them, and with new films made under a purportedly filmmaker-friendly environment instilled by new heads John Lasseter and Ed Catmull… were they going to reach new heights and remain a force to the public eye?

Well, in some ways, they did. In other ways, the output got too familiar and comfortable again. Perhaps the success of the next feature is the midpoint here, like in the Disney Renaissance when it became clear that there were going to be some bumps on the road ahead…

The next feature was Frozen, which was very similar to Tangled in both looks and feel. Like Tangled, it was a very loose adaptation of a classic fairy tale (Hans Christian-Andersen’s The Snow Queen), it had princesses, and it had hummable tunes. Helmed by veteran Chris Buck (Tarzan, Surf’s Up) and Wreck-It Ralph co-writer Jennifer Lee (new to the feature animation game), Frozen does attempt to be its own beast, but I feel it isn’t brave enough to pounce on the elements it scratches at. At first, it appears to be a family drama about a girl and her super-powered, potentially dangerous older sister. A nice break from the “hero has to escape/stop a bad guy” format of the Renaissance princess musicals. The parents’ questionable decisions in raising the two sisters is also ripe with potential. A central idea in the film is that true love doesn’t have to mean a kiss from a significant other (read: a dashing prince), which is a great core, but the problem is… The writers use it to weave some kind of halfhearted “meta-commentary” of sorts, and the script is constantly reminding us that the film is not like those *other* Disney films, that these heroines are better than those unsavory, anti-feminist, outdated likes of Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora. As if the writers hadn’t seen those movies since they were five, and were working off of assumptions or what some thinkpiece – also written by someone who hadn’t watched a Disney movie since they were five – told them. “You can’t marry a man you just met”… Feeling very Shrek-like and disingenuous, this kind of execution robs the story and true love theme of the sincerity that they needed. But I thought John Lasseter wanted to move away from the cynical Shrek-like fairy tale that was popular for some time, and to return to the more sincere, classical fairy tale. This approach undercuts the film’s powerful drama, in addition to being disrespectful of earlier Disney films. The story being different from other fairy tales and their respective adaptations (not just Disney’s adaptations) is enough, we didn’t need a self-conscious script blaring that at us and implying that those other Disney fairy tales are wrong. Why can’t these stories co-exist and be equally valid? Are we trying too hard to appeal to “cool” people who can’t stomach the old, “outdated” likes of Snow White and Cinderella?

The film doesn’t commit to its lofty ideas in other ways. Instead of revolving the entire film around Elsa’s isolation and the threat of her hurting others by accident or on purpose, the writers have Anna’s suitor Hans turn out to be a scheming bad guy, and now the movie is about saving the kingdom from some bad guy. Like all the ’90s Disney Renaissance films. Hans is just out to take over Arendelle because he can’t have his own region, nothing beyond that, and he’s kind of a dull villain anyways. Elsa piercing Anna’s heart in the heat of the moment with a spell that will kill her was a perfect conflict, following up the incident that got them separated during childhood… and a third act where Elsa realizes her mistake and against all odds saves the day is far more interesting than a fake lover-twist villain needing to be apprehended. Hans seems to exist just for that, and for the script to remind us “Hey! Our princess movie isn’t about true love’s kiss coming from a dashing strong man! We’re not like those OTHER movies!” The film’s script also tends to suffer from characters over-explaining these ideas and themes, which is a problem a lot of animated movies and television shows suffer from these days. See? See?! It’s about this! We’re so deep! Did your kid get the message? It’s just a cartoon, but take us seriously! That Renaissance-era rule that there has to be intrusive humor during several key moments is brought back, and there’s plenty of juvenile humor to spare, from yellow snow jokes to lyrics about being gassy. We even get a bouncy, out-of-place song sung by a bunch of silly trolls that stalls the story to a *screeching* halt when the stakes are very high. Visually, the film is competent, technically proficient. There is some strong fx work, and there are some pretty imaginative ideas here and there, but the look of the film is typical for a CG picture with a slight Disney glaze. Nothing displayed in Paperman was really utilized here.

I was never really a big fan of Frozen. Currently Disney Animation’s highest-earning movie, it was a critical darling and a worldwide phenomenon to boot. ‘Let It Go’, the iconic midpoint anthem sung by Elsa, was everywhere. Almost to the point where it lost its impact and meaning. Some people, who seemingly haven’t seen a Disney movie since 1999, raved about how it was the greatest Disney animated film, the most progressive, the most groundbreaking, the most complex, the greatest in this world, in the next world, and in ANY WORLD. The first one about sisters! You know, when a little movie called Lilo & Stitch exists. Naturally, such hype was met with lots of backlash. Now it was “Frozen is overrated,” “Frozen is horrible,” Frozen is that, Frozen is that. I always had a middle-ground stance on it, and it’s still my stance to this day. I feel that a great story was in there, and could’ve been cracked had it had more time to stew. The film was fast-tracked into development in 2011 in response to Tangled‘s success, and was always on track for a 2013 release. Prior to Tangled, Disney overlords ordered Disney Animation to cease making fairy tale movies after The Princess and the Frog underperformed, but the success of Tangled (a film too deep in production to cancel at the time) reversed that. Now, Disney needed more fairy tales, and because work on a Snow Queen adaptation was underway before The Princess and the Frog was released, the icy tale was revived and rushed to fill a then-vacant release slot. The decision to change the story from “Anna has to fight an evil Elsa, the Snow Queen” to “Anna and Elsa are sisters with a complicated relationship” was very last minute, changes were made to the story and script reportedly within a year before its release… It shows…

But because the film was so massively successful, future WDAS efforts were modeled after it, for better or for worse… Disney officially confirmed a theatrical, made in-house-at-Disney Animation Frozen sequel in early 2015. This was a big development, and a hard announcement for many to digest because of Disney Animation’s weird history with sequels.

It was clear that Frozen, more so than Bolt, Tangled, and Wreck-It Ralph combined, really set the template. After all, its final worldwide gross is greater than those three films’ respective takes combined. It was more or less modern Disney Animation’s Lion King… Though safe in its visuals and execution, it kept Disney Animation on a predictable track going forward.

Frozen‘s accompanying short was a hybrid 2D/CG Mickey Mouse short, Get A Horse! A very fun new spin on the classic Mickey Mouse short, not to mention a spot-on recreation of the look and feel of the late 1920s Mickey Mouse cartoons, it’s a cavalcade of great slapstick and fun sight gags. It reminds us that at one time, Mickey Mouse cartoons actually were funny, before Mickey had become subdued in the early 1940s following his ascension to mascot status. The release of it, however, did follow Disney’s shuttering of its traditional animation unit and most of the staff that had been a part of it. A bittersweet, quiet, further reduction of a medium that was on life-support at the studio.

Between the release of Winnie the Pooh and Frozen, Disney had also lost Glen Keane, who walked away in early 2012. Later, Keane formed his own production company and has gotten various projects realized, from Duet to the award-winning Dear Basketball. In the pieces detailing John Lasseter’s behavior and prolonged ouster, it was revealed that John alienated him among other great talents, such as Don Hahn. When you’ve alienated Glen Keane, from the very studio where he grew as an artist and delivered some of the greatest entertainments known the world over, you’ve messed up badly. Chris Sanders, as we all know, left after being fired from American Dog. Paperman director John Kahrs fled the scene shortly after his short won the Oscar. Projects were cancelled or reworked extensively.

Around this time, it was very clear which direction John Lasseter was taking Walt Disney Animation Studios… Perhaps “story” was a little too important, overshadowing other great elements that make animated movies work so well, even the visual components. After all, Lasseter is perhaps the king of the whole “Story Is King” movement in animation. 2013 was a year of lots of change for Disney Animation, and perhaps Frozen solidified all of that…

Next in line was another relatively rushed production, the studio’s first ever adaptation of a Marvel Comics property, Big Hero 6. The Walt Disney Company acquired the comics giant in August 2009, and Disney Animation immediately pounced on the company’s wide library shortly thereafter. Big Hero 6 was a rather off-the-beaten-path series, a very manga-inspired story with mechs, a futuristic San Francisco/Tokyo mashup setting, and… Stereotypes. Obviously, some changes had to be made there, such as the alter egos of the individual superheroes. Many other elements were changed or dialed to down to make it more Disney-esque. Most of the Marvel-ness of the story was gutted, to the point where the film could pass as an original Disney animated movie about robots and science-based superheroes. Don Hall, director of Winnie the Pooh, was set to handle this one on his own, but about a year before its release, Lasseter paired him with Chris Williams, who had recently had a project of his own (a long-gestating adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s King of the Elves, which already went through a pair of directors) shut down. Producer Roy Conli replaced Paperman producer Kristina Reed, too. It appeared that Lasseter was implementing his controversial Pixar leadership techniques at the then 90-year-old studio.

I actually quite like the core of Big Hero 6, not only is it a film that champions science and beneficial use of technology, it is also a rather subversive superhero film that differentiates itself from the Marvel Cinematic Universe chapters and the DC films of the period. Hiro puts together a team of superheroes – consisting of him, his late brother’s nursing robot Baymax, and his late brother’s four colleagues – because he wants to find and stop his brother’s killer. He repurposes Baymax into a killing machine, and the film – like many a good Disney animated feature – has a very pivotal and intense moment where Hiro tries to get what he wants, nearly killing the person who is responsible. After such a climactic set of events, Hiro realizes that Tadashi would’ve never wanted for his younger brother to use violence to achieve justice. In most superhero films, the villain absolutely has to be killed, and many of the villains ultimately meet a violent demise. Iron Man’s solo films have all of his nemeses blow up or get maimed in some way, two of Thor’s villains get creamed, Superman snaps General Zod’s neck in Man of Steel, Bane is shot dead in The Dark Knight Rises. Pixar’s own superhero film The Incredibles ends with Syndrome being sucked into a jet turbine. Not that this is a wrong approach (one can mount an entire essay on why villains shouldn’t be killed), but Big Hero 6 instead ends where our heroes never kill the villainous Professor Callaghan, but rather stop him so that he can be properly apprehended by the law. The whole story revolves around how Hiro goes about avenging his brother’s death, and takes a stance. Without the stolen microbots and technology, Callaghan is just a middle-aged professor, does his crime really warrant death? Is Big Hero 6 a stealth critique on… The death penalty? Maybe not, but it does that one thing very differently from most other superhero films… And really, that’s a departure in some ways, a superhero story about not using violence despite your awesome powers and technology. All of this is just a byproduct of the real meat of the story, it’s basically about grief, how Hiro copes with the untimely and out-of-nowhere death of his brother.

Big Hero 6 says something, and its characters are once again well-defined and likable. Since the film had more time to come together, it doesn’t feel uneven like Frozen, and it commits to its themes and ideas. However, a lot of the movie is wonkily paced, the script tends to overdo it (the Fred character in particular gets kind of grating, spouting some very obvious lines), there’s too much of a rush to make it a typical superhero film, and visually I feel it is like a bit of a step down from Wreck-It Ralph. Again, like Frozen, there’s nothing *wrong* with the visuals. It looks as professionally-made as can be, and I can’t say that anything looks below par. Wreck-It Ralph took Disney’s CG to all these imaginative worlds, and the directing and staging helped make these worlds and that story immersive, Big Hero 6 merely looks like a variation on Bolt and Tangled, with very light flavorings of anime and techy video games, aesthetics that I wished they really pushed. Much in the same way Chinese folk art differentiated Mulan from The Lion King, and how Gerald Scarfe’s design differentiated Hercules from Tarzan… Just using some Renaissance-era examples, there are plenty more to make across all the eras. The glimpses we get of San Fransokyo are very neat, but the lighting feels too flat in many stretches. Where it does succeed, visually, is in the fx animation (those microbots!) and the direction of the action sequences. Very kinetic and effortless, much like the thrills in Wreck-It Ralph. The whole “First Flight” sequence rivals How To Train Your Dragon‘s rollercoaster thrills. Again, it is well-made, with some beautiful shots and cinematography, but I guess I like my CG animation the way I like my steak. One could imagine what this would’ve looked like had Disney pushed Paperman and Feast techniques forward, it would probably be akin to Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. In fact, this film’s lead character designer Shiyoon Kim, later became the lead designer for Sony’s game-changing film. The accompanying short was Patrick Osborne’s Feast, the next step from what we saw in Paperman, a fully painterly short that – again – suggested what a full computer animated feature could look like.

Perhaps this was the next step… Maybe… Maybe Disney needed some time to perfect this kind of tech for a feature…

Big Hero 6 thankfully looks to be Disney Animation’s only Marvel adaptation, and probably a way to get something out while work was underway on bigger projects, like the next two films we’ll be looking at.

Zootopia, the third picture from director Byron Howard with help from one Rich Moore, was the first of two 2016 releases from the studio, and the most successful of the two. Zootopia really took a bite… Here we have a Disney animated feature set in a fully-realized world based on the ages-old concept of a world of just anthropomorphic animals, a kind of setting which Disney themselves used for Robin Hood. Few animated works set in these kinds of worlds (see also, DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda trilogy) dive into the nuts and bolts, how these worlds work, what the characters being animals has to do with their lives and world around them, etc. Zootopia establishes that this world (whether it’s an alternate Earth or a completely made-up, inhabitable planet) was once full of wild animals that did what wild animals naturally do, but then they became civilized, human-like creatures. They live together as a whole. Predator animals, like lions and bears and wolves, now eat some kind of insect and protein-based foods. (Never outright stated in the movie, but confirmed by Howard in a Q&A) However, many prey animals still harbor prejudices towards predator animals, and there are little species-based biases within the predator and prey groups. Dumb bunny, untrustworthy sly fox, insignificant sheep, etc. While praised by most critics and observers, few really questioned Zootopia‘s predator-prey dichotomy and how its attempted connections to real-world race relations could be very dangerous. On the one hand, I can see why. The prey animals were once hunted by predators, because that’s nature, so the prey animals do have a somewhat solid reason for still being afraid of former-predators. That fear is certainly not the basis of real-life racism, which – to my estimation – is based on totally unfounded fears, prejudices, power, and several systemic problems, as race relations concerns only human beings. It is not “lion vs. gazelle”. Yet if we place ourselves in the world that the filmmakers have established, we see that Zootopia functions more as an Aesopian fable on some serious enhancers. No, prey animals fearing totally-evolved once-predatory animals is not equal to white people fearing people of other ethnicities, but it makes for a story that’s very much about biases and prejudice, and why that’s all wrong. The animals of Zootopia’s world need to realize that the hunted/hunter days are long gone, and that there’s no good reason to be afraid. It’s a story that can mirror what we go through today, without being exactly just that, and if you take Zootopia on those terms, it really works on a storytelling level. If anything, Zootopia is more about the war on drugs than it is race relations, and that’s a really interesting conversation to be had. I’ve heard interesting conversations relating the story and world to the Balkans, more so than American race relations.

Still, a modern mainstream animated feature film aimed at the whole family attempted to integrate this kind of idea into its story. Not even Pixar had the guts… Themes like loss, grief, trauma, jealously, core human emotions and problems, no this movie’s about prejudice, harsh truths, politicians abusing power, and then some. This wasn’t your typical mainstream animated feature, and the texture was wrapped in what was ostensibly a fun little movie about an all-animal world. Zootopia itself is a glorious-looking metropolis with so many little details, it’s a film that actually takes advantage of CGI and uses it to create one hell of a setting, a setting that sturdily enhances the story it’s trying to tell… Oh a story that happens to be a police procedural, a detective story, a near-political conspiracy thriller, an action-adventure, oh and a comedy too. Combined with the usual heart and pathos that a great Disney animated feature make, and you have it… I firmly believe Zootopia is the peak of current Disney Animation, and a high point in post-Walt feature animation from Disney, period. It’s so sharply-written, too, easing up on the usual cliches like “character over-explains theme of the story” or “look at how subversive this is” humor, it definitely plays more adult than the usual PG-rated animated film, and I like that the film respects the audience, no matter the age. The unique qualities of every animal in the film are milked, lots of great story beats and humor bits are derived from what these animals do and what their abilities are. It’s just so well thought out from top to bottom, and it’s all there to support such a riveting, ever-changing story with an entirely-likable cast. While assistant mayor Bellwether is the third “twist” villain in a row now (after Hans and Callaghan, King Candy is not “twist villain” because he’s a bad guy from the start – him turning out to be somebody else is the twist), she’s effectively nasty because of her deep-seated resentment of predator animals and her methods of oppressing them. She’s like a real person, and sometimes normal, real people can be as scary as any evil fairy or towering monster. Zootopia, despite keeping its villain a mystery to its leads until its final third, is another example of why I quite like this revival era’s take on the “Disney villain”. Eschewing the bigger than life, one-note, power-hungry bad guys that dominated the ’90s films, and harkening back to the variety of the Walt films. It isn’t absolute power or riches that Bellwether wants, she hates predators and wants to keep them oppressed. She’s more Frollo-like in that regard than Jafar or Scar or Hades.

Zootopia just about had it all, and the visuals were a step up from Big Hero 6‘s rather competent look. Howard and Moore’s directing complements the solid cinematography, beautiful color grading, and more immersive lighting and staging, feeling less like a blocky CG flick and more like a believable world. The character design thankfully retained as much of artist Cory Loftis’ style as it could, more than bolstered by the great animation work. On the visual front, it succeeds on just about all counts and is one of the better-looking CG flicks of the typical style that dominates American feature animation. No short played before it, oddly enough. The studio didn’t have a short for 2015, the year they took a break. The next feature would have a short attached…

Arriving later that year was a dip back into familiar waters, the Oceanic adventure Moana. Another ’90s-styled Broadway musical, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker themselves, this one kind of bucked a few trends itself. Instead of Alan Menken, or the Lopez duo, Disney finally got someone else to handle the music. Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton fame wrote the songs, off of a score by Mark Mancina (Tarzan, Brother Bear) with additional contributions from Opetaia Foa’i (who is from an Oceanic band called Te Vaka). The result was a fresher set of musical numbers, some of which dabbled in genres like rap (Maui’s very fun ‘You’re Welcome’) and glam rock (the infectiously-catchy ‘Shiny’), while the more typical ones (‘How Far I’ll Go’) still worked fine and helped advance the straightforward and thankfully uncomplicated story well. I mean, not every animated movie has to have hundreds of intertwined plot threads and stuff, ya know. Lasster-isms. Also of note, Moana really doesn’t have a typical villain. A bad guy, shall I say. Moana‘s real villain, perhaps, is deuteragonist Maui. Why? Well, he created the whole mess in the first place. He stole the heart of Te Fiti because he was so power-hungry, and the islands are slowly going to die off if the heart isn’t restored. The formidable lava goddess Te Ka, in a brilliant twist, turns out to be a rightfully angry Te Fiti. No villain to be defeated here, but rather… The right thing being done, with some perilous obstacles. Tamatoa is interesting because he appears in the middle of the movie, gets his comeuppance, and is never seen again until a silly post-credits stinger. Not really a full-fledged villain, but rather a mid-movie boss level encounter. He’s got Maui’s hook, and that’s all there is to that, he doesn’t have to be defeated during the climax. They just get it, and go. The rest of the tale is quite familiar, but it’s told very well and it just feels like a really good comfort food Disney movie. Not new, nothing groundbreaking, but populated with great characters and a solid storyline.

Visually, however, Moana feels very been-there done-that. Real-world environments are mainly the setting of this film, so that literal CGI look gets boring to these eyes. We’re just looking at really well-rendered islands full of palm trees, mountains, and such. You could’ve just filmed in the South Pacific and stuck the CG characters in them. The visuals are more interesting when the film tries on some surrealism, reminiscent of a time when Disney animated films took advantage of the fact that they were… Animated. Interestingly, this is the first Ron and John film since The Great Mouse Detective – their first film, back in 1986 no less – to have other directors on it. Being Ron and John’s first all-CG film, maybe they needed assistance since they’ve directed traditionally animated films up unto that point. In fact, Moana was pitched and even *announced* as a hand-drawn film. That was before Disney quietly shuffled classical animation away. Aiding the directing were Don Hall and Chris Williams, right off of Big Hero 6, billed as “co-directors”. Some of the staging and execution is very solid and imaginative even, but in other scenes, it’s just… There. It’s another CG film. The lighting alternates between really good, and just flat, making the film look more plastic and toy-like. No Paperman or Feast-esque look, maybe all that development on shorts was just for… Shorts only…

Speaking of shorts, the short that proceeded Moana was far more imaginative, visually. The very boxy, cubical-looking Inner Workings was like the Disney animated shorts of the 1950s, the ones that wholeheartedly embraced the style of competitor studio UPA. The likes of Toot, Whistle, Plunk & Boom and Paul Bunyan. While the main attraction was a variation on Tangled, this was cool and neat and a little next-level. Could we get a CG feature from the studio that *at least* looked like this?

We somewhat did, with a sequel.

Yes, that’s right, a sequel made in-house at Walt Disney Animation Studios and not a direct-to-video affair made somewheres else. Now of course, Frozen II had been announced at a shareholder meeting in early 2015, a breakaway from the usual. Disney Animation hadn’t made a single direct sequel until 1990, with their 29th feature The Rescuers Down Under. Walt Disney briefly entertained the idea of Snow White and Bambi sequels, but decided against them. He always wanted to tell new stories in feature animation, rather than retread old ground, so he instead let some of the live-action films get sequels. Son of Flubber, Savage Sam, etc. The studio honored his resistance to make animated sequels well after his passing, but that all changed after Michael Eisner and crew came to the studio in the mid-1980s, thus we got The Rescuers Down Under.

… But that film underperformed, so Disney had all future animated movie sequels be direct-to-video products made by different studios, different writers, crews, etc. This practice was shut down by Lasseter upon his arrival, the last of the “DTV” films coming and going in 2008. If any Disney animated feature made under John’s watch were to be super-successful, its sequel would be made in-house at Walt Disney Animation Studios and released theatrically. Frozen II, despite being announced first, was preceded by Ralph Breaks The Internet, the sequel to the 2012 video game adventure Wreck-It Ralph.

Now, this was exciting for me. I found Wreck-It Ralph to be the best of the revival crop up until the release of Zootopia, and a damn great film to boot. Disney tackling a setting and aesthetics that were out of their contemporary comfort zone, and now following up on that… Instead of more video games, we get their take on the world wide web. The design of the film honored the original, the artists and crew created all kinds of different-styled worlds. An online game known as Slaughter Race is a central part of the story, and much like the differing game worlds of the first film, this environment was aesthetically different from what we saw in the first film and the settings of this film. The Internet world has a cool and colorful look, with some interesting design choices littered throughout. The avatars of Internet users have a real Inner Workings vibe to them, great! Now, while it was in the works, something big had happened… The film had entered production before John Lasseter’s highly publicized and documented exit from The Walt Disney Company, following accusations of sexual harassment and general misogyny. Instead of outright firing him like they should’ve done in the first place, The Walt Disney Company heads sent Lasseter on a 6-month sabbatical leave in late November 2017 (a full year before the release of this film), in hopes that he would come back a changed man. 6 months went by. In that waiting period, Walt Disney Animation Studios didn’t really have a boss, no one to fill that vacant position. It appears that a few people, including current Disney Animation CCO Jennifer Lee, filled in as best as they could until Disney decided who was fit to run the joint… Ultimately, Disney made the right decision and fired him in June 2018, leaving him in a very minor consulting role (likely a rosy way of saying “he’s gone but there are some legal complications we have to iron out first”) until New Year’s Eve.

While praised by critics, I think Ralph Breaks the Internet shows signs that the company needed a leader in that span of six months. Lee was named CCO of Disney Animation just five months before the film came out. I can only imagine what kinds of last minute changes occurred, because there certainly were some. In fact, the most talked about scene in the very first teaser for the movie (the infamous Pancake Bunny bit) was… Cut. But it wasn’t, it appeared as a mid-credits scene detached from the story! Anyways, that scene aside, I felt that Ralph Breaks the Internet was certainly ambitious and had some things on its mind, but was ultimately a messy and at times contrived sequel to a great modern Disney animated adventure. I like the premise, though. A lot of the Internet settings and rules, however, were fuzzy. eBay plays a big role in the plot and is strangely very inaccurately portrayed, for the sake of convenience, for the sake of creating a subplot where Ralph has to get Internet famous in such a short span of time. What is it with contemporary animated movies and ticking time-bomb plots? Slow down. All of that sidetracks Vanellope’s complete awe of the explosive racing game Slaughter Race, a game she decides she wants to live in for the rest of her life. Thus leaving her best friend alone in his home game in the arcade… Wait, what?

Wreck-It Ralph, cleverly working off of how video game programming works, very clearly established a few key rules in its worldbuilding when it comes to game characters. “Going Turbo” is part of the stakes of the first film. A video game character can’t die in a video game that isn’t their own, they can’t regenerate ever if that happens, permanent death… unlike in their own game where they are programmed to die and come back to life. Ralph Breaks the Internet concludes with Vanellope just leaving Sugar Rush for Slaughter Race. Shank – the star racer in the game – coded Vanellope into the game so that she can’t die a permanent death. But Vanellope, a character from a cute ’90s arcade kart racer whose rights are likely owned by some company, was *never* intended for Slaughter Race, a game made *well after* her game was released. What’s going to happen when the developers see that this ’90s kid racer is just randomly in their game? What if they program her out of existence because she’s not meant to be in that game? What if they get sued by the company that owns the rights to Sugar Rush? The story is all willy-nilly, contradicting the worldbuilding in an attempt to tell a powerful tale about a clingy, naive person who can’t stomach the fact that his friend wants to live her life. Truly, that stuff is great on the surface and Ralph trying to understand the new world of the Internet and how he dealt with change was something that reminded me of how I processed change as a preteen and teenager. That truly is great stuff and it really did resonate with me, plus you have no bad guy antagonist for once, instead it’s Ralph needing to change himself that drives the story. The script is actually very sharp, too, with its satire of the Internet and various techy jokes… but it’s backed by sloppy rule-breaking and so many plot contrivances that it fell apart the more I thought about it. Supporting characters, like Fix-It Felix Jr. and Sgt. Calhoun, are surprisingly near-absent in this. I surmise that so much of the story was locked down before Lasseter’s ouster, and any changes the team wanted to make that Lasseter wouldn’t allow in the first place (given his micromanaging and his clearly filmmaker-unfriendly model) were implemented very late in the game. Very rarely can you do such a thing like that and everything works out in the end… The “meta” Disney sequences – chock full of references and cameos – feel tacked on, for they make Ralph Breaks The Internet literally feel like a commercial for The Walt Disney Company and its various assets… Certainly uncomfortable given that they were working on acquiring 21st Century Fox during that time.

… And yet… The effort is really there. The visuals tend to be very inspired, the script is rapid-fire clever, there are damn cool things that are onscreen here and the story does have some very interesting bits. The initial Slaughter Race chase sequence, a total adrenaline rush, is a highlight for modern Disney animation and shows that they can make a high-octane film that sits nicely next to any blockbuster. I do like the overall theme, but it’s just in the wrong movie and the wrong setting. Perhaps this theme could’ve worked if the worldbuilding wasn’t screwed around with, or maybe it was just incongruous with the world of Wreck-It Ralph altogether. I chalk these issues up to the film being a transitional film, made during Lasseter’s needlessly-prolonged ouster. Lasseter should’ve been fired on the spot, thus a new leader could take over a FULL YEAR before the film’s release and make sure that any and all revisions could be implemented smoothly. The film credits Lasseter, along with Jennifer Lee and Chris Williams, as executive producers. However, the overplotting of the movie and the contrivances are merely the worst of Lasseter’s storytelling sensibilities on full display. Director Rich Moore left Disney Animation for Sony Animation earlier this year, which is also kind of telling.

So does Ralph Breaks the Internet, largely produced under Lasseter’s watch while he was still there, end the “revival era”? Is it both the end and the beginning, given that Jennifer Lee was leading the studio during its final months of production? I would say, from the perspective of someone who isn’t within that studio, it’s the end of the Lasseter era, certainly, and partially the bridge to the next era… Maybe the very beginning of the bridge. The next feature, also a sequel, is truly the bridge itself… The revival, to me, is far from over, but do we call it a revival from here on out?

Frozen II has been out for about a month now, and I have only seen it once as of this writing. No matter what I may have thought of Frozen II as a film, I think it is truly the bridge. No pun intended. Entering full production after Lasseter entered his sabbatical, I still think it’s not quite the other side of the bridge because the film was likely laid down when Lasseter was still there. He is thankfully not credited as an executive producer, which makes one wonder how much of the film was trashed after his exit. Are there any elements from his “vision” in the finished film? Probably, though there’s likely tons of new stuff too. Voices were recorded before Lasseter’s ouster, too, so… Bridge, for now.

So far, we only know details about one Disney animated feature that’s coming out in the future, and that’s Raya and the Last Dragon, which opens Thanksgiving week of 2020. Director Paul Briggs stated on a blog post in early 2015 that he was starting a project with Dean Wellins, the film’s other director. Presumably, Raya was in some form of development well before Lasseter was outed for his behavior. But since he was out in late 2017, which is three years before the intended release date of the movie, a lot could’ve changed. Perhaps the finished Raya and the Last Dragon won’t have much of anything from its earliest iterations, maybe it’ll keep some, so whether it’s the latter half of the bridge or the start of the new era is up in the air at the moment. The same goes for an untitled musical that Byron Howard is directing, which was talked about as early as November 2016. Still, assuming that it opens in 2021 after Raya releases, it could have barely any traces of its of Lasseter-era iterations.

Interestingly enough, when John Lasseter was named Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios, he acquired a lot of films that were in deep development. One was immediately orphaned the minute he got there, that was the Elton John musical Gnomeo & Juliet, which was ultimately produced and animated elsewhere and then released through Disney’s dead Touchstone label. Just about everything released from Meet The Robinsons to Frozen is a late Eisner-era leftover. Of course, Lasseter had Meet The Robinsons dramatically retooled, he fired Chris Sanders from American Dog and cooked it into Bolt, a Frog Prince story was purportedly in the works before Michael Eisner stepped down, Tangled was nearing production as a completely different movie called Rapunzel Unbraided, Wreck-It Ralph evolved out of Joe Jump, and an adaptation of The Snow Queen was in the works in early aughts. Winnie the Pooh and Big Hero 6 are the first all-new projects of Disney Animation’s to be conceived after Eisner’s departure. Everything from Zootopia onward was conceived this decade.

Jennifer Lee is now shepherding projects that were well in the works under the previous boss. Perhaps she will be much more filmmaker-friendly than her predecessor purported himself to be, and maybe she will merely guide the filmmakers to make their films the best that they can be, but we don’t know. We can’t use Frozen II as a guide because she directed and wrote it, since she directed and wrote the first Frozen. Byron Howard, who was once thought to be future Disney Animation CCO, filled in the executive producer position so that Lee could focus on her film. Raya and the Last Dragon will see her executive producing something from start to finish, so that might give us an idea of how her managing style is in comparison with previous leaders. The same goes Howard’s musical, and everything else to come. However, the quality of her previous work may determine that to some extent.

The only thing I wouldn’t take away from Lasseter is this. I don’t want to praise his efforts much because of what he had done for decades, and I certainly don’t want to praise the man himself, but one thing I did like about Lasseter’s run was the fact that he didn’t see animation as a kiddie thing, being an animator and enthusiast himself. Lots of executives who have run Disney Animation after Walt’s passing were not just that. The administration of the ’70s and early ’80s didn’t really let the studio tell darker stories akin to the early Disney classics, in addition to funneling the majority of the company’s money into theme park projects. Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg knew little about animation when they first came to Disney in the mid 1980s, and continued to see animation as a “kids first” medium, which became a problem when the Renaissance era reached the midpoint with messy films like Pocahontas.

Similarly, Lasseter’s era began to fall apart after ballooning in the early years. The Disney Renaissance, for many and myself included, was at its high in its first six years. Everything from The Little Mermaid to The Lion King is a consistent batch of films with some worthy shorts and experiments in-between, but after Pocahontas came out in 1995, the quality goes up and down, and the feature films become too formulaic. I feel that the revival under Lasseter similarly lost steam beginning with the 2013 release of Frozen. The quality of the films themselves remained pretty high, but you started to see outside influences grab ahold once again. Consumer products concerns, concerns over kids in the audience, that sort of thing. The films sometimes have writing that panders to kids, formulaic elements (twist villains, the buddy film template, opening scenes where the main protagonists are under the age of 5), and less visual variety. During the latter half of the Renaissance and afterwards, at least the filmmakers were allowed to make their films look unique to one another. Post-Frozen, the CG Disney animated features begin to look very samey. Why didn’t the experiments of Paperman and them toying with painterly-looking sets in Bolt and Tangled lead to bigger swings? (A swing which Sony took, with far less resources at their side, with Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse.) Why the need to please a decidedly mommy blogger-type demographic when they were doing so well? Why all of the attempts at being “meta” and irreverent?

Given that Jennifer Lee herself wrote and directed two animated blockbusters, and contributed to a couple other greats, such as Wreck-It Ralph‘s script and Zootopia‘s story, I would assume she has basic respect for animation as a cinematic storytelling medium. Her recent comments in the Hollywood Reporter’s Animation Roundtable suggests this, too, along with a desire to take CG down other avenues for once for the features. Frozen II, unlike its predecessor, was not rushed through production. Jennifer Lee joined the first Frozen as writer and co-director very late in the game, whereas she and Chris Buck had six years to make the sequel. While I understand that Frozen II is quite divisive amongst Disney fans and has the weakest critical reception for a Disney animated feature made in the last 12 years, I myself found the film to be pretty solid, and a significant improvement over the original. The elements that bothered me in Frozen were either gone or really dialed down. Olaf gets one out-of-place moment, and while the script sometimes overexplains the themes and ideas the movie has on its mind, it handles other stuff greatly. There’s some intimacy in the directing, there are much-needed quiet moments, the tone veers towards epic and even a little melancholic, no villain is shoehorned into the story, instead the story hinges on a much better and much more timely and nuanced conflict concerning the sins of Arendelle’s past. Perhaps Lee *ahem* showed herself with this film, more so than in her other works…

Wherever Walt Disney Animation Studios heads into the next decade, I will be watching as a long-time enthusiast and lover of Disney’s animation. While Walt Disney hasn’t been with us for over five decades, the films being made at his studio continue to fascinate me and very much remain a passion of mine. It isn’t easy to tell where everything will be going just yet, but I will definitely be keeping a look out as the enterprise nears its 100th year of existence…