“There’s this guy who’s utterly a banker, and he doesn’t have time for his family, or for living, or anything. And Mary Poppins, she comes down from the clouds and shows him what’s important. Fun. Flying kites. All that stuff… It’s a cute movie. Maybe not everybody’s thing, but, y’know… Dick Van Dyke’s British accent […]
In the dark days of the early Aughts, when Disney animation was at its lowest ebb since the 1970s with critical and commercial washouts like Atlantis: The Lost Empire dragging the brand name down into the muck, everybody had an idea to save the company. Throw out Michael Eisner; re-commit to the most beautiful possible […]
An earlier review of this film can be found here. By the end of 2005, Walt Disney Feature Animation was undeniably playing the obnoxious kid brother to Pixar Animation Studios, the company whose films had out-grossed WDFA every single year that they both released a film. Notwithstanding the reasonable success of Chicken Little, which grossed […]
The next several decades of undying controversy notwithstanding, the 1946 release Song of the South was a game-changing project for Walt Disney Productions: it was not just a more than fair box-office hit, it was one of the few films that company released between 1942 and 1950 for which that can honestly be said. While […]
My deepest thanks to reader Andre Virul for providing me with a copy of this film. Writing about Song of the South is incredibly tricky, because every fiber in my being wants to treat it as one thing, a technologically innovative film and one of the key steps in the development of the Walt Disney […]
14 November, 2003: a dark day in the history of American animation. For it was on that date the the animators at the Florida wing of Walt Disney Feature Animation were given their death sentence by WDFA President David Stainton: they were told to immediately halt production on A Few Good Ghosts, the only project […]
There are more than a few bastard stepchildren in the history of Walt Disney Feature Animation; setting aside the projects like Victory Through Air Power and Pete’s Dragon, movies with significant content produced by the Disney animators, that for this reason or that didn’t get tallied up in the official WDFA canon (e.g. the first […]
America’s entry into World War II, depending on which economist you listened to, finally lifted the country out of the last draggy bits of the Great Depression; yet it was not all good news for everybody*. Walt Disney, was among that small population of folks who’d done just fine for himself during the worst of […]
In 1940, Walt Disney was struck with the biggest setback in his career in over a decade: having raked in piles of cash never before seen in the history of Hollywood with his instant-classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he proceeded to roll the dice on two ambitious, costly animated features, two works which […]
Around these parts, the history of the Disney Animation Renaissance – the studio’s slide into irrelevance following its founder’s death in 1966, bottoming out in the tremendous box office implosion of The Black Cauldron in 1985, rebounding after the critical and commercial success of The Little Mermaid in 1989, and culminating in the immense popularity […]
Dedicated to the memory of Roy Edward Disney, 1930-2009. Thank you for all that you did for your uncle’s company, and how grateful I am that you lived to see the rebirth of traditional Disney animation. That there are a great many feature-length cinematic versions of A Christmas Carol is entirely true (and who can […]
Following the ice-cold release of Home on the Range in the spring of 2004, Walt Disney Feature Animation set itself to the important task of becoming a clone of the far more financially successful DreamWorks Animation; 2005’s Chicken Little was a CGI feature with all the appeal of slamming your hand in a car door, […]
