Wish, the 62nd animated feature produced by Walt Disney Animation studios, was very consciously, one might even say laboriously conceived to be the big capstone to the Disney 100 celebrations, in which the Walt Disney Company celebrates the anniversary of its incorporation, as Disney Brothers Studio, on 16 October 1923. Given that 2023 turned out […]
One of the very first lines of dialogue spoken in the 1989 animated feature The Little Mermaid is “A fine strong wind and a following sea. King Triton must be in a friendly-type mood.” The approximately equivalent line of dialogue in the 2023 remake of that same film is “This is a dangerous time. Tonight’s […]
The best film of Disney’s ongoing, increasingly worn-out cycle of live-action (and/or photorealistic CGI that the studio stubbornly declares to be “live-action” as a marketing hook) remakes of its classic animated features is 2016’s Pete’s Dragon, which isn’t even a remake of an animated feature anyways, and that probably helped. It also helped that Pete’s […]
When the Walt Disney Company dabbles in family-friendly science fiction, catastrophe follows. Around the turn of the 1980s, they tried to get in on that Star Wars action, with The Black Hole and TRON in 1979 and 1982. Soon after both flopped, the company was taken over in a hostile coup, as the animation division […]
I’ll say this for Hocus Pocus 2: it isn’t simply Hocus Pocus a second time, despite appearances. Are there similarities? Of course. For one, the setup is near-identical: the Sanderson sisters, an infamous trio of witches from Salem, Massachusetts, return to the world of the living on a Halloween night, thanks to the lighting of […]
The 1940 feature-length animated adaptation of Pinocchio is one of the crown jewels of American cinema. It is perhaps the most lustrous, richly-colored and -textured of all hand-drawn and hand-painted animated films, as much an example of fine art given the illusion of life through 24 frames-per-second movement as it is just another cartoon – […]
Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: in addition to having the most soullessly branded title of any superhero movie this year, DC League of Super-Pets […]
First, the positivity: the direct-to-Disney+ film Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, a sort of update-reboot-remake of the 1989 cartoon TV show of the same name, is so much better than I expected it to be. It’s still bad in many ways and good in virtually none, but the standard of comparison here is 2021’s Space […]
There’s no reason other than arbitrary numerology to compare the 2010 animated feature Tangled with the 2021 animated feature Encanto: the first is Official Disney Animated Feature #50 (a number arrived at with some corporate fudging, since it includes 2000’s Dinosaur, which really shouldn’t count; on the other hand, 1943’s Victory Through Air Power really […]
Of all the rides or other attractions in any of the theme parks operated by the Walt Disney Company, if you were going to make a motion picture based on any of them – in this case, “you” are presumably either Chairman & CEO Michael Eisner or President & COO Bob Iger, and in either […]
My younger readers may not recall a curious media phenomenon, a relic of the ’90s and the period when the Walt Disney Company was expanding its theme parks at a rate unmatched before or since. To promote these new attractions – Disneyland Paris, Animal Kingdom in Florida, various new rides and facelifts to existing attractions […]
If there is one thing that I was not prepared for with Disney’s much-delayed Jungle Cruise, an action-adventure based on the Disneyland theme park ride that has been ready to go since late 2019, it’s that I would negatively compare it to the 1972 Werner Herzog film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Which is not […]
