Disney Canon Conundrum

A year ago, I took a look at my own view of Disney animated feature films and explained my particular views on what is known as the Disney animated features “canon”.

What is the “canon”? An official line-up of sorts determined by The Walt Disney Company themselves, a line-up that says what counts as a Disney animated feature and what does not.

The canon, as we know it, says that we’re at 58 films so far, Frozen II being the latest. Feature #59 will be the forthcoming Raya and the Last Dragon, which opens in March of next year. The current canon was established in 2008, and to my knowledge, this is Disney’s third-ever animated feature canon line-up.

I already went into how I found fault with the canon, specifically the current one and the previous one (established in 1985), for excluding 1943’s Victory Through Air Power. Victory Through Air Power is not a typical Disney animated feature, it isn’t even like the package features of the 1940s or the grand experiment that was Fantasia. Victory Through Air Power is a wartime propaganda film that was released in 1943, and because it doesn’t fit Disney’s cozy family-friendly image and is indeed a product of its time, it is thus not counted as part of the line-up. It has only been released on home media once, via a limited Walt Disney Treasures set in the aughts; the Walt Disney Treasures set were meant for adult collectors and Disney aficionados.

Meanwhile, the 42-minute film Saludos Amigos is part of the canon. To be fair, in the early 1940s, a 40-minute or longer runtime meant “feature film”. Later on, that time limit was bumped up to a full hour. Saludos Amigos is feature #6, and happened to have its world premiere mere days after the release of Bambi. Such close proximity. Saludos Amigos is a “goodwill” feature, a film made by Disney to help Hollywood and the American government woo Central and South America into joining our side in World War II, when it seemed like the Axis powers were going to win them over. This wasn’t just Disney’s mission, several Hollywood studios were in on this plan too. The Three Caballeros was the second and final goodwill feature, which went into general release the year World War II came to an end. While not out-and-out propaganda films, Disney has felt since the mid-1980s that they counted as part of their “canon”.

What else counts in this canon? The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. That film, released in 1977, is composed of three 25-minute featurettes: Those were released separately, from 1966 to 1974. According to supplemental features and various accounts on the film, Walt Disney wanted to make three Winnie the Pooh short subjects first, and then string them together to make a movie later on down the line… But that’s actually untrue. Walt felt that A. A. Milne’s bedtime stories couldn’t be padded out to make a feature-length film, so he opted to make a featurette instead. It had nothing to do with Americans being unfamiliar with the characters. (Did this unfamiliarity stop Walt from making full-length movies based on European stories like Pinocchio? British novels like The Hundred and One Dalmatians and Mary Poppins? To say nothing of all his European live-action period dramas.) Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree debuted theatrically with the studio’s live-action comedy The Ugly Dachshund in February 1966, ten months before Walt’s passing. Before he died, Walt okayed production on a second featurette, which ended up being the Oscar-winning Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day. It was released nearly two years after his death. Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too was conceived much later, and released in 1974. In the 1970s, the wait times between Disney animated features were pretty lengthy. Today, we get to enjoy at least one new Disney animated film every calendar year. A few years have been missed since 1988… But in the 1960s and 1970s? You had to wait. Because Walt had originally wanted to make a Pooh feature-length film when he had first gotten rights to the stories in 1961, Walt Disney Productions saw it necessary to edit the shorts together, add about five additional minutes (reportedly planned for Blustery Day but dropped) to give it all a bittersweet ending, and claim that this was Walt had wanted to do with the source material… Six years later, Walt Disney Productions made a fourth short: Winnie the Pooh and a Day for Eeyore. Either it’s not “Pooh canon”, or it is, and that the bittersweet ending was no big deal. Then five years after A Day for Eeyore, Winnie the Pooh became one of Disney’s biggest franchises after Disney TV Animation’s The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh took off. There’s also the 2011 Winnie the Pooh, a Walt Disney Animation Studios film that’s ostensibly the sequel to the 1977 film/the featurettes. And that’s leaving out swaths of direct-to-video Winnie the Pooh films and specials, that’s a whole other honey clustercuss of its own.

When Disney first introduced the notion of an official animated feature line-up, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh didn’t count as part of it… Neither did Saludos Amigos *and* The Three Caballeros.

When was this? In the summer of 1981… The release of The Fox and the Hound officially introduced an official Disney animated feature list…

The above poster for The Fox and the Hound tells you exactly what Disney counted at the time of its release. Strangely, Melody Time is not present, though its brother picture Make Mine Music is. What made Make Mine Music count and not Melody Time? Was it because they were dead-set on The Fox and the Hound being feature #20? Or was there a legitimate reason? I can’t think of any… But it appears that Disney didn’t want to count the wartime goodwill features or the sole propaganda film, and also didn’t want to count the Winnie the Pooh film that was made up of three previously-released shorts. (Unlike the package features, which were designed from the ground up to be anthology films.)

The theatrical trailer for the film also emphasizes that it is #20:

My guess is that Walt Disney Productions heads had a newfound sense of confidence with The Fox and the Hound. The Rescuers, four years prior, had been both a critical and commercial success. Some observers felt that The Rescuers was the best film Disney’s animation wing had to offer since the early 1960s, and its box office gross was the highest for an animated feature on its initial release. However, by the time Disney got around to assembling the trailer you see above, The Fox and the Hound was set back by the infamous animator exodus spearheaded by Don Bluth in September 1979 and a subsequent delay from Christmas 1980 to a summer 1981 release. According to historian/animation producer John Cawley, there was even a robbery that occurred during production that complicated matters further. That said, Disney had many new animators onboard to make up for the loss, and there were more projects in some form of development. Indeed, The Rescuers and The Fox and the Hound are a marked step up from the safe, economic family fun of The Aristocats and Robin Hood before it. They are films that attempted, whether successfully or not, to rekindle what made Walt’s best films captivate audiences. Perhaps Walt Disney Productions felt that they were on the cusp of a “renaissance”, and that The Fox and the Hound would continue what The Rescuers had started. That trailer has a real haughtiness to it, too…

While The Fox and the Hound‘s domestic box office total was higher than what The Rescuers pulled in, critical reception was a lot more mixed. Disney’s feature animation by this point seemed sleepy and uneventful. Many of the young animators who worked on the film, many of whom would later make a major mark in the animation industry, were rather bored and frustrated working on what was perceived to be a diet version of Bambi, Lady and the Tramp, and other classic Disney treasures. The Fox and the Hound is strangely resonant today and has enjoyed a new life; it is now a film that is seen as an overlooked gem. In 1981, it must’ve been seen as old hat next to Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark. A mere upgrade of a Saturday morning cartoon. At least one of the reviews of the era did give off a real “it’s another Disney cartoon, who gives a damn” vibe. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg now dominated the escapist adventure movie that Disney once ruled, and that their best then was not enough.

Still, Disney seemed to stick with this line-up for a little while. Despite withholding most of the animated features from coming to home video in the early 1980s, a few titles were exceptions. Dumbo and Alice in Wonderland hit video in 1981, because they had both been shown on television since the 1950s. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh also came to video in 1981. The Three Caballeros and Fun & Fancy Free were later released on video in fall 1982.

With the next feature, dedicated fans following the studio closely must have been confused… For 1985’s The Black Cauldron was billed as feature #25…

With this move, Saludos Amigos, The Three Caballeros, and Melody Time now counted, as did The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. I guess saying “this is our 21st feature!” wasn’t enough of a grab, they had to add four more films to the canon to make The Black Cauldron #25. Either that, or someone noticed that a reference to Melody Time wasn’t on that Fox and the Hound poster and thus changes were made?

From The Black Cauldron onward, things stayed consistent. Marketing materials and promos made sure to remind audiences what number the newest feature was, The Great Mouse Detective was #26, Oliver & Company #27, The Little Mermaid #28, etc. etc. This was now the official line-up, no changes or anything. Was this suggested by the new regime that had taken over in 1984? Did Roy E. Disney, now back at the studio, determine the line-up? Or was it all by accident?

Where things didn’t stay consistent, in terms of packaging, was in home video. In late 1984, Walt Disney Home Video created “The Classics”, the line meant for the first-ever releases of several Disney animated films that were withheld from being shown on television. As many fans and people my age know, these editions were distinctive for their shiny black rhombus diamond logo that would normally be seen on the spine artwork of the videotape jackets, on the back (for all releases made from 1984 to 1987), or in the form of an animated intro graphic that would appear before the start of the film.

The first Classics releases were, in order, Robin Hood (December 1984), Pinocchio (July 1985), Dumbo (November 1985), The Sword in the Stone (March 1986), Alice in Wonderland (May 1986), Sleeping Beauty (October 1986), and Lady and the Tramp (1987). Mostly older films, everything in the Classics line was over a decade old. Contemporary films weren’t to be released, for the company felt that they could theatrically re-release them years down the line, so no Great Mouse Detective or Fox and the Hound video releases anytime soon. In fall 1988, Disney made Cinderella the seventh title in the Classics line, that same season, Disney also re-released The Three Caballeros to home video. Sporting a jacket with full artwork, and Donald Duck in a diamond frame on the spine artwork, it was not a Classics release. The diamond is nowhere on the packaging, the videotape label, or even the start of the tape itself; just the standard Walt Disney Home Video logo. Even though The Three Caballeros counted as part of the canon by 1988, Walt Disney Home Video didn’t count it as part of the “Classics”… Actually, none of the package features were in the Classics line. In fact, no other package feature was released on videocassette in North America between 1984 and 1994. The Adventures of Ichabod & Mr. Toad unusually got a LaserDisc-only release in fall 1992. (Classics line was mostly videotape only.) I guess for the “Classics” line, only single-story animated films counted.

There were small inconsistencies within the Classics line, too. Fantasia‘s first release doesn’t bare the diamond anywhere on the packaging or the printed videotape label, but the animated Classics logo (with the still image of Sorcerer’s Apprentice Mickey) appears before the start of the film. The release is presented as its own standalone edition, but I think it was going to be a full-on Classics title hence the tape opening with that logo. Disney had their standard WDHV ident to use, but it doesn’t show up. The 1993 release of Pinocchio is the exact same situation. That release, too, has no diamond anywhere on the packaging or tape label, but the animated intro graphic appears before the start of the movie. I have the “demo tape” for this release of Pinocchio, the diamond is on the packaging.

Both releases bare the heading “Walt Disney’s Masterpiece”… Disney ended the Classics line and began the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection in fall 1994.

The line was launched with the home video debut of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, alongside *nine* other titles. Then-available Classics titles Dumbo, Alice in Wonderland, The Sword in the Stone, and Robin Hood were now Masterpiece titles, the majority of them retaining the artwork used for their Classics releases. The Fox and the Hound was also still available at the time, but did not get a Masterpiece packaging update, despite the film being featured in the original advertisements for the line’s launch. That film went out of print in spring 1995. The Three Caballeros, using the same artwork as the 1988 release, was now a Masterpiece title.

What were the other titles, then?

So Dear to My Heart, Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Pete’s Dragon. All live-action films with animation in them. Mary Poppins even got a second Masterpiece Collection release in 1997.

The Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection didn’t seem to focus solely on fully-animated films, but also on these particular hybrids. No other film was part of the collection, and of course Song of the South was never going to be part of it. Other Disney films were either part of the Studio Film Collection (a line launched in 1991) or the Family Film Collection, with random standalone releases in-between. (i.e. The Brave Little Toaster, The Return of Jafar, etc.) All new animated films going forward, of course, were Masterpiece titles: The Lion King, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, and Mulan. The line ended in May 1999, just a month before the theatrical release of Tarzan.

In October 1999, Disney brought Pinocchio back from the vault, and released it on VHS for the third time. The cover simply said “Walt Disney’s”, and the spine had a graphic of the castle that strongly resembled the Masterpiece Collection logo. It simply said “Walt Disney” below. Early pressings of this Pinocchio release contain the animated Masterpiece Collection introduction before the start of the film, later copies omit it. The same day, Pinocchio debuted on DVD. The first Disney animated feature to do so. This DVD release began a short-lived collection called “Limited Issue”, which also included Lady and the Tramp, Peter Pan, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, The Little Mermaid, Hercules, and Mulan. Only one non-canon animated feature was included, and that was the direct-to-video sequel The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride.

In 2000, Disney created the Walt Disney Gold Classic Collection. This line was truly weird because it counted all kinds of animated films: Not just the “canon” films and hybrids, but also two Pixar films: Toy Story and A Bug’s Life. It also included Disney MovieToon’s A Goofy Movie, the Pocahontas direct-to-video sequel, and the 1999 direct-to-video special Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas. What a mix! The line ended in early 2001… What the line did not include was Tarzan, or Fantasia 2000. Tarzan came to video in February 2000, the spine artwork contained the same graphic as the 1999 Pinocchio release. Fantasia 2000‘s packaging simply had “Walt Disney Pictures Presents” on the front cover and spine, whereas the 60th Anniversary release of Fantasia was a DVD-only release, it had no graphic… Simply “Walt Disney’s”. Fantasia and Fantasia 2000 were also packaged in a box set called The Fantasia Anthology.

Then Disney created the Platinum collection in 2001, perhaps inspired by that Fantasia box… A line meant for the most beloved and requested Disney animated features, a line of lavish jam-packed DVD sets that launched with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Only 13-14 films were part of this hall of fame, so the other animated features got standard editions, they weren’t part of any line. Often times, you’d see a “Special Edition” or “xx Anniversary Edition” banner. For example, Dumbo made its debut on DVD in fall 2001 as a 60th Anniversary Edition. Oliver & Company debuted on DVD in 2002, as a “Special Edition”. Any new animated features were standalone releases. In the case of films like Tarzan, The Emperor’s New Groove, and Atlantis: The Lost Empire, there was either a regular DVD edition or a “Collector’s Edition” with exclusive artwork and much more bonus features. But those few Disney animated features enjoyed a special line of their own. Each year, there would be at least one Platinum Edition release. In fact, the Platinum line’s successors, the Diamond collection (2009-2015) and the Signature collection (2016-present?) hadn’t inducted any films made after The Lion King. The mega-successful animated features of the studio’s late 2000s revival weren’t inducted. No Tangled, no Wreck-It Ralph, no Frozen even. With Disney+ being a thing and the vault officially dead, I wonder if those movies will ever be inducted, or if that line in all its iterations is gone for good…

So looking past the studio’s inconsistent handling of the “canon” when it comes to home video, the company revised the official canon in 2008. They added the live-action/CG animation hybrid Dinosaur to the line, and many believe this was done for the sole purpose of making Tangled the 50th Disney animated feature. Tangled even opens with a custom Walt Disney Animation Studios logo that mentions it’s their 50th film, plus there was a count up promo made for that film’s release:

Dinosaur… Is currently, officially considered a Disney animated feature. Some say that it shouldn’t be…

I wonder why, though? The film *is* a co-production between Walt Disney Feature Animation’s computer graphics division and the ill-fated The Secret Lab. The Secret Lab, which was formerly Dream Quest Images and acquired by Disney in the mid-1990s, was set to make more cutting edge CG Disney pictures like Dinosaur, such as an adult feature called Wild Life. Disney later wiped their hands of The Secret Lab, because they felt that Dinosaur didn’t do well enough to warrant a sequel, and because Roy E. Disney halted Wild Life dead in its tracks in September of 2000. Dinosaur remains the only film that came from this very collaboration… But I guess some Disney fans out there don’t count it because it only involved WDFA’s CG arm?

I’m actually quite indifferent to Dinosaur and whether it counts or not, but at the same time, I think this whole “canon” is kind of silly in concept and only exists for marketing purposes… To put the majority of Disney’s animated features into a grouping, as if all 58 films form up some kind of franchise… Except none of the movies – sans the few sequels – are connected to one another. To me, movie franchise means a series of movies that follow a storyline or are all set in the same universe: The Lord of the Rings, Fast and the Furious, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, etc. You can argue that this is the “Disney Multiverse”, and that the Disney animated feature “franchise” is this multiverse of stories all occurring in their own timelines. I for one don’t think that a cluster of Disney animated films all factually take place within a single universe. Easter eggs are just easter eggs, ya know? Walt Disney didn’t seem to think that way with his animated features, either. The closest Walt ever got to doing a “shared universe” was Fun & Fancy Free, which features Jiminy Cricket in a modern setting along with a goldfish that looks an awful lot like Geppetto’s goldfish Cleo. Either Jiminy Cricket is immortal (presuming Pinocchio takes place around the time the original Carlo Collodi tale was written) or Disney just wanted him to host this anthology feature that had to be made because World War II pulled the rug out from under the studio and that they couldn’t make a single-story animated film for a long while. Fun & Fancy Free features a segment called Bongo, which was originally planned as a feature-length film in the early 1940s, and some early plans for that iteration of the film had it taking place in the world of Dumbo and would feature characters like the gossiping elephants. That eventually did not happen, neither did briefly-considered sequels to Snow White and Bambi. The Seven Dwarfs appear in a wartime propaganda film called 7 Wise Dwarfs. Speaking of Dumbo, Mr. Stork appears in the 1952 featurette Lambert the Sheepish Lion… Is THAT set in the same universe as Dumbo? I say “who cares?” Does the show TaleSpin take place years after The Jungle Book, where everything has become a Robin Hood/Zootopia-esque anthropomorphic animal world? Probably not.

However we view it, each one of us – I’d like to think – has a unique view on the Disney animated features library. I’ve moved away from a “studio/franchise”-determined outlook, so I see the Disney animated feature library as just… Well… A library. Same place, different books, all by different writers. The first 19 films are all Walt films, since he was the glue that brought the strengths of his great talents – artists, writers, directors – together. The rest that were made after his death? Well, films directed and written by multiple people, overseen by different leaders over time. The Rescuers and The Fox and the Hound may try to live up to certain aspects of the Walt films, but I see them as films made by the likes of Ron Miller, Art Stevens, Don Bluth, etc. Even if the majority of the Renaissance era films followed a pretty strict formula, different directors and writing teams still executed those movies. You can tell a Ron Clements/John Musker effort from a Kirk Wise/Gary Trousdale endeavor, I feel. Post-Renaissance, it gets even more varied. Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois’ Lilo & Stitch is almost totally its own movie, as is Mark Dindal’s The Emperor’s New Groove. The revival era features might’ve followed John Lasseter’s strict vision, but I’d say there’s still some small differences between, say, a Byron Howard picture and a Don Hall picture. Ron and John stayed onboard for two more features during this era, and I’d say theirs still stood out enough. I look at the other animation studios the same way, I feel it should be about the filmmaker more so than a singular vision. Sony Pictures Animation, for example, seems to want to live up to that. DreamWorks has had a good-sized variety of films, and so on.

For something even more confusing, one look at international Disney animated feature canons can be a headscratcher. In several territories, the 2006 movie The Wild is counted as a Disney animated feature! Walt Disney Feature Animation wasn’t even involved with that movie! That was a production largely made at a bunch of CG studios in Canada, but it was backed by Walt Disney Pictures. This was at a time when it seemed like Pixar would split from The Walt Disney Company, so the company sought to beef up its animation slate without the hopping lamp, so they didn’t have to rely on WDFA to make CG movies. The Wild is as much of a “Disney animated feature” as Valiant is (a British film that Disney released in the states for pretty much the reason for making The Wild), or Roadside Romeo (an Indian film that Disney helped produce and gave a limited release in the states), or any Pixar film for that matter. These same canons don’t count Dinosaur, and they shockingly don’t count Winnie the Pooh (2011) either. How’s that for a line-up?

I love making lists, but with Disney, I have my own “canon”. I guess you could call it a “headcanon”, but my list is composed of features (including Victory Through Air Power) made by all the iterations of what is known as Walt Disney Animation Studios…