And now we come to a weird one: the first direct-to-video Disney sequel that was released to theaters. Which, the quick-witted (or, in fact, the merely literate) will note is a contradiction; but Return to Never Land was in fact aiming for the same distribution fate as all the other Disney sequels produced by the […]

And now we go right over the edge. Initially, the Disney direct-to-video sequels were horrible, mercenary, awful things that despite being horrible and mercenary, made sense: they were all based on recent hit films (no accident that the first two of the things were follow-ups to Aladdin, the first animated feature to ever crack $200 […]

One of the things that gets thrown at the Disney sequels frequently, and admitted to even by those who’ve managed to find some way of defending them as a concept, is that they frequently serve as very little other than retreads of the original with a new batch of semi-marketable characters. What has surprised me, […]

We have arrived at a weird place in this voyage through Disney’s animated sequels: a film that isn’t a sequel, the original project that it’s not a sequel to wasn’t made by Walt Disney Feature animation, and the non-Disney non-sequel was not, itself, made entirely or even primarily by one of Disney’s own animation studios, […]

The regular readers in the crowd know that I ordinarily spend a disastrously large number of words reviewing films in the Disney animated features canon, of which the new Wreck-It Ralph is the 52nd; and I will perhaps do that some day for this movie, after I have a chance to live with it for […]

It’s awfully special to be an animation buff who gets to be aware that the film you’re watching right now is, no big deal, just one of the most technologically advanced cartoons ever made. And the staggering thing is that it’s happened twice in 2012: first with ParaNorman, which raised the bar on stop-motion animation […]

According to the original plan, at this point in our study of the dubious and uncertain matter of the Disney animated sequel, we were to have arrived at Hercules: Zero to Hero, a direct-to-video compilation of episodes of the television series spun off of the 1997 feature Hercules. Sadly, all of my powers, including those […]

In reviewing the direct-to-video Disney sequel, the critic would be well-advised not to spend too much time wallowing about in the question of, “how does this sit alongside the original film?” for that is a question with no happy answer. Better to do one’s best to consider the sequel on its on terms, and if […]

Here’s a thing that I was absolutely not expecting to happen during this tour of Disney’s direct-to-video sequels: that I’d end up seeing a sequel that I preferred to the original. Also not expected: that the film to cross that threshold would be the widely-derided Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World, a film that […]

First, the petty, niggling point: by the strictest definition, Belle’s Magical World and Beauty and the Beast: Belle’s Magical World are two different features. Initially, the second sequel – if that’s even the right word – to the luminous Disney classic Beauty and the Beast was released under the shorter of its two titles on […]

The considerable success of Aladdin and the King of Thieves, I suspect, is the proximate cause that transformed the direct-to-video sequel from curiosity to major revenue stream for Disney in the late ’90s; the real glut of DTV projects started coming out at just about the perfect time to have been greenlit right around the […]

We are gathered here in consideration of the notorious matter of the Disney animated sequel; and yet it is difficult to say exact what the nature of Pooh’s Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin is, as far as sequeldom goes. For our purposes, it makes the most sense to consider it the continuation of […]