Breaking Down Disney’s “Dark Age”: Aftermath and Conclusion

  In the previous part, I looked at The Black Cauldron, the film that is seemingly the poster child of everything wrong with the company before the esteemed Renaissance. It's also often looked at as a low point for theatrical animation, but was it really, truly that bad? In my review I gave the verdict, …

Cake Icing: Custom Logos

Logos... Custom variants of well-known logos... The Walt Disney studio has a long history of doing this. Disney had signed with RKO Radio Pictures in 1937, who would distribute all of their features and shorts for roughly fifteen years. Before each film (with the exception of the first, Snow White), the RKO logo would precede …

Breaking Down Disney’s “Dark Age”: Part 2

In the last part, I took a look at the first films that entered production after Walt Disney's passing in 1966, The Aristocats and Robin Hood. These were two very compromised films, the filmmakers behind them had to be very budget-conscious all the while delivering fun films that would get The Jungle Book's success, and …

Breaking Down Disney’s “Dark Age”: Part 1

It is often stated that Walt Disney Animation Studios went through a prolonged "Dark Age" after the death of Walt Disney and the posthumous release of The Jungle Book. A dark age that would end with The Little Mermaid in 1989, often called the start of Disney's Renaissance... What is true is that the studio …

Mainstream American Animation Today and Tomorrow…

2016 is arguably a watershed year right now for the mainstream feature-length animated film... Zootopia, Walt Disney Animation Studios' wonderful new animated original, not only exceeded expectations, but also became one of the highest-grossing animated films and one of the few original, not-based-on-any-source-material films to cross $1 billion at the worldwide box office. It is …