It’s hard to rank the Disney animated films, and not just because there are so many of them. These are films that mean so much to so many people, that are inherently linked to powerful memories of childhood and have informed what we so many adults considermagical. Ranking their respective strengths and weaknesses becomes as much an investigation ofwhyyou loved something as it is to their relative worth as a creative endeavor. (Divorcing yourself of those emotions is mightily challenging.) Still, I tried to do just that, and wanted to share stories from the making of the movies as well, so you know just what went into that film’s success (or lack thereof). So, yes, this is a history lesson as much as it’s a critical appraisal. (My primary sources wereDisney WarbyJames B. Stewart,Creativity Inc.byEd CatmullandAmy Wallace, and “Walt Disney” byNeal Gabler, plus the fantastic documentary filmsWaking Sleeping BeautyandWalt andEl Grupo. I heartily recommend them all.)
With today marking the 100th anniversary ofWaltandRoy Disneystarting the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, let’s take a look at the company’s 61 Disney animated classics released so far. And if you feel inspired to check some of these out onDisney+, here’sa list of everything currently available to streamon that streaming service.
61. Chicken Little (2005)
The mid-2000’s were an interesting time for Walt Disney Animation Studios; they had all but completely abandoned the traditional hand-drawn animation, with the satellite studios in Paris and Orlando quietly closing their doors as well (in 2002 and 2004 respectively). There was even an attempt to produce sequels to Pixar films without their involvement, thanks to a loophole in their original arrangement thatMichael Eisnerwanted to exploit (there was even anadditionalanimation studio – Circle 7 – set up in Glendale to handle the sequels). And in this chaotic time, WDAS was trying to reinvent itself as the fresh, edgy, computer-generated studio of tomorrow. It was as messy and aimless as the animation studio had been since Walt died, and was marked with the same kind of creative and financial uncertainty. And into thisChicken Littlewas born. This is a movie that madeno impact. You don’t see plushes of the characters in Disney Stores and you don’t see them walking around Disneyland or Walt Disney World shaking peoples' hands. It has all but evaporated from the public consciousness and for good reason: it’s really pretty bad. Originally envisioned as a more unconventional story about a female Chicken Little and her relationship with her father, it transformed over the years into a kind of sci-fi comedy, with the “sky is falling” referring to an alien invasion. (Okay.)Mark Dindal, who had previously directed the deeply brilliantThe Emperor’s New Groove, feels lost with the extra dimensionality and the animators, learning an entirely new methodology, aren’t exactly on their game. This is probably the ugliest-looking Disney movie ever.
60. The Fox and the Hound (1981)
Dear lord this movie isboring. It’s somewhat historically important because it was the last movie to be worked on by some of Walt’s legendary Nine Old Men, who then handed the animation duties off to a new generation of talented artists, many of whom would be responsible for shaping the next few generations of Disney animated features (among them:John Lasseter,Tim Burton,Ron Clements,John Musker,Mark DindalandBrad Bird). Also of note was the fact that during productionDon Bluth, one of the company’s star animators and someone who many saw as the heir apparent to Walt Disney, staged a major defection with several other animators and left the studio, something that effectively waylaid the production (with 17% of the staff gone the release date was pushed from Christmas 1980 to summer 1981). Clearly, the creative tension between the old guard and the new crop of animators left its mark. you may feel a better movie trying to get out from under the cutesy, cloying façade ofThe Fox and the Hound, butsadly it never happens. (And just imagine if they had gone through with a sequence involving game show staple Charo as a crane singing a song called “Scoobie-Doobie Doobie Doo, Let Your Body Turn Goo.” Actually, maybe that would have been incredible.) Sure, it’s cute, but can you really remember anything besides the bear attack sequence and Pearl Bailey singing “Best of Friends?” Didn’t think so.
59. Home on the Range (2004)
For a while it looked likeHome on the Rangewould be the last traditionally animated movie Disney would ever release. And if that had been true it would have been a truly inglorious demise.Home on the Range, originally envisioned as an ambitious supernatural western calledSweating Bullets(it went into production shortly afterHercules), soon mutated into a dinky musical comedy featuring three female cows (Rosanne Barr,Judi Dench, andJennifer Tilly) who attempt to stop a cattle rustler (played, in his waning days of sanity, byRandy Quaid). It is, no joke, a huge waste of time – humorless, slack, and featuring unimaginative character designs and backgrounds. The only highlight (and a relatively dim one at that) is the villain’s big musical number, “Yodel-Adle-Eedle-Idle-Oo,” which at least sees them channeling some early Disney weirdness. Thankfully there would be more traditionally animated movies released by Disney, so even its place in the historic Disney canon has been diluted.
58. Dinosaur (2000)
If it turns outJon Favreau’sTheLionKingremake uses live action plates that the animators will then superimpose hyper-realistic characters upon (and I can’t get confirmation that this has been completely ruled out), just know that there’s a precedent for this kind of thing. And that it’sawful. That was the conceit behindDinosaur, a bold, ambitious, and utterly boring experiment that was a production handled by both Walt Disney Animation Studios and The Secret Lab, a hybrid effects and animation house that Disney had set up in a state-of-the-art facility near the Burbank airport. What began in 1988 as a stop-motion project, to be directed byPaul Verhoevenwith animation overseen by the legendaryPhil Tippett, soon became a rather cookie-cutter tale of family and survival rendered in thoroughly unconvincing and instantly dated computer animation. The first ten minutes of the movie, a wordless odyssey that followed an egg as it was about to be hatched, is magnificent but the rest … not so much. Everything about it is both absurd (so manylemurs) and banal; it’s a movie that has the highest possible stakes (the end of the world) but can’t muster much energy or emotional investment. The film, released a few weeks after the BBC specialWalking with Dinosaurs(which employed literally the same live action plates and animated characters approach), felt like yesterday’s news before it even came out. Extinction couldn’t come soon enough.
57. Bolt (2008)
Walt Disney Animation at its most inoffensive,Boltfeatures a talented team behind the camera, including futureBig Hero 6directorChris Williams, theTangledcreative team ofByron HowardandNathan Greno, and a script co-written byThis Is UscreatorDan Fogelman, but lacks anything remotely interesting, either technically or storytelling-wise. The fact that it is coherent at all is something of a miracle, given that its production aligned closely with the contentious “Save Disney” campaign that would end with Michael Eisner being ousted andBob Igerpaying a hefty sum for Pixar and its creative principles to run all of Disney’s animated output. Originally the film was calledAmerican Dogand was being written and directed byChris Sanders, the prickly genius behindLilo & Stitchand a longtime Disney story artist (his storyboards forThe Lion Kingwill make your jaw drop – and those were only storyboards). That film, had it seen the light of day, would have been heralded as an offbeat masterpiece, mark my words. But new bossJohn Lasseter, now finding himself in charge of Disney animation as well as Pixar, dislikedLilo & Stitchand thoughtAmerican Dog’s story was too problematic (he couldn’t get over the idea that humans could understand animals when they were talking to them). Sanders was relieved, the new (extremely talented) team was installed, and the narrative became much simpler and less fussy.Boltis workmanlike, for sure, and it’s probably a good thing, for the overall health of the studio, that it went a more conventional route. ButAmerican Dog(along with a few others) remains a damnably tangible what-if that makesBoltlook like less of a film than it already is, for better or worse.
56. Oliver & Company (1988)
If you’ve ever wondered where the painfully “hip” DreamWorks Animation movies began, well, here’s a good place to start. Originally pitched by animatorPete Youngin one ofJeffrey Katzenberg’s infamous “Gong Show” pitch meetings where animators would throw out ideas and bad ideas would be “gonged” out of the room (the pitch was simply “Oliver Twistwith dogs”), it sparked to Katzenberg’s desire to make a big budget movie out of Broadway standardOliver! while at Paramount Pictures. Now he could do it! With dogs! While a modest hit at the box office, the movie is a creative disappointment (and many at Disney shared this opinion at the time). The grab bag of pop musicians and musical personalities wedged into the movie (among them:Billy Joel,Huey LewisandBette Midler, who was something of a Disney stalwart at the time) in a desperate bid for contemporary relevance made for a less cohesive vibe. It is worth noting that this is the first Disney animated feature to showcase the lyrical abilities of the legendaryHoward Ashman, who along withAlan Menkenwould go on to become a key component of Disney’s renewed popularity in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was also the first film to ditch actual paint; the movie was largely colored instead by the CAPS system that was developed with the help of a struggling computer firm in Northern California named Pixar. (The Rescuers Down Underwould be the first film to utilize the process completely.) While these are interesting asides they add nothing to the actual enjoyment of the film, which feels lame and disjointed.
55. The Black Cauldron (1985)
This movie is terrible but the stories that came out of it arebeyonddelicious. More than ten years in the making (the rights were first optioned in 1971 and Disney reacquired the rights last year),The Black Cauldronwas the first Walt Disney animated film to feature computer-generated imagery, the first to have a Dolby Digital soundtrack, the first to be rated PG and the first to extensively use 70mm sinceSleeping Beautyin 1979. It was the nadir of the post-Walt period; the production was wasteful, exorbitant, and creatively unfocused. And that was beforeRoy Disney, Walt’s nephew and a key board member, saw a rough cut of the film and was horrified by what he saw as excessive violence. He suggested trimming bloody sequences but according toJames Stewart’sDisney War, confessed to producer Joe Hale, “I just don’t understand the story.” But that was nothing compared with the reaction it elicited in Jeffrey Katzenberg, the newly installed head of animation who had followed Michael Eisner from Paramount. “This has to be edited,” he proclaimed. “Animated films can’t be edited,” Hale informed him. Katzenberg stormed into the editing room and had to be talked out by Eisner, who informed him that Roy could handle the situation. The movie was postponed a year, with more of the objectionable material taken out and additional dialogue recorded. When Roy appeared onThe Today Showand was asked what the movie was, he couldn’t say. When the film finally opened, it lost at the box office toThe Care Bears Movie. The reign of Disney was officially over. They had hit bottom. And watching the movie now, it doesn’t hold up any better. It’s still ugly and muddled, with simplistic designs (and this is after they had coaxed Milt Kahl out of retirement to do additional conceptualization).John Hurtas The Horned King, though, is the stuff of nightmares and is easily one of the scariest (and most underutilized) Disney villains ever (there used to be a very creepy Audio Animatronic version of the character in Tokyo Disneyland –YouTube it).The Black Cauldronis a noble failure but that doesn’t make it any more interesting or watchable.
54. Saludos Amigos (1942)
53. Three Caballeros (1944)
The follow-up toSaludos Amigosand the second of Disney’s World War II-era “package films” to be inspired by Walt’s ambassadorship to South America. (Briefly: the State Department, desperate to drum up support in South America, sent Walt on a goodwill tour of the region. Walt, who brought along a small team of artists, saw it as a way to creatively recharge his batteries.)Three Caballerosis the more fun, energetic version ofSaludos Amigos, and has another all-new character to join Jose and Donald: Panchito Pistoles (Joaquin Garay), who was meant to represent Mexican culture. It also introduced Aracuan Bird, a weird South American bird of indeterminate origin who would go on to make several more appearances alongside the more popular characters. Although considered one of Walt Disney Animation Studios' animated classics, the film features liberal use of live action footage, most of it featuring popular cultural figures from the time (Aurora Miranda,Dora Luz, etc.) This is a movie that is lively and weird, especially during the kaleidoscopic “Donald’s Surreal Reverie” sequence which is trippier than anything the studio had done outside the “Pink Elephants on Parade” sequence fromDumboand all ofFantasia. Three Caballeros has had a surprisingly long shadow, as well, thanks largely to their appearance (complete with the magic carpet from the “Mexico: Pátzcuaro, Veracruz and Acapulco” section of the movie) in Gran Fiesta Tour Starring the Three Caballeros, the attraction at the heart of the Mexico Pavilion in Epcot Center’s World Showcase at Walt Disney World.Ole!
52. Meet the Robinsons (2007)
This is an odd transitional feature in the company’s history. During production, Disney had announced that it was acquiring Pixar and that John Lasseter, visionary filmmaker and Pixar bigwig, would be leading the charge onallanimated features. When he sawMeet the Robinsons, he cornered directorStephen Andersonand told him how the movie could be improved. (The New York Timesclaimsthe meeting lastedsix hours.) The movie ended up being pushed back, and the film heavily reworked (something like 60% of what had previously been done was thrown out). It’s unclear if the earlier version of the film would have been much better, but the version ofMeet the Robinsonsthat was released was fairly undercooked. There are some great things about this family comedy-cum-time travel tale, in particularDanny Elfman’sscore and some nifty shout-outs to the Tomorrowland section of the Disney Parks, but overall this feels like the pilot to a series we never get to watch. There are so many characters, each one of them thinly sketched, with very little in the way of resolution (or even a clear emotional throughline). It was the work of a studio on the precipice of renewed greatness but this one is … not great.
