I’m going to lead off with something that’s kind of small and petty, but it bothers me too much to wait: Aladdin and the King of Thieves, the second direct-to-video Disney sequel ever, and the second sequel to the 1992 blockbuster Aladdin, was released in 1996 on home video, in a 4:3 aspect ratio. This […]
Let us begin our long, strange tour of the run of direct-to-video sequels to its legitimate, theatrical motion pictures that the Walt Disney Company released over a decade and a half in the ’90s and ’00s, with a straightforward observation: The Return of Jafar is 69 minutes long. A significant number for all sorts of […]
Strictly speaking, the title of 1995’s A Goofy Movie is accurate. It is a movie; the iconic Disney character Goofy is in it. But it is an incomplete title: A Goof Troop Movie would be far more precise and cause fewer broken hearts: for while it is A Goofy movie, it is surely not The […]
In the wake of the management crisis at the Walt Disney Company in the early and mid 1980s – a story of some detail and great interest to those with a love of Hollywood dealmaking and animated entertainment alike, that has been told fully elsewhere – one of the many new ventures the company’s new […]
Every Sunday 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: after this many entries in their surprisingly durable franchise, the zoo animals of Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted are […]
In the late 1990s, noted English music artist Sting was hired by Walt Disney Feature Animation to write the songs for a new film the studio was developing, titled Kingdom of the Sun. He agreed, including the small proviso that his wife, movie producer Trudie Styler, be allowed to tag along to make a documentary […]
Author’s note: This is all clearly over the top and much, much too enthusiastic about a nice film that is certainly not capital-G Great. What can I say, in the summer of 2011 I though that with sufficient cheerleading, we might still be able to get the occasional 2-D feature out of Disney. When John […]
I think this is a telling anecdote: the night after I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, I found myself at a party with some other gentlemen who’d already seen it as well. “Wasn’t it the worst thing ever?” one of them asked (no, but that’s a forgivable response), and then the important […]
When the Walt Disney Company fell under the control of Michael Eisner and company in the 1980s, one of the biggest changes they made to corporate culture – and this is, in hindsight, so utterly self-evident that it hardly bears me saying it – was a new emphasis on movies that would make lots of […]
In the mid-1950s, an unpublished short story by S.S. Field and much-heralded screenwriter Seton I. Miller was picked up as a possible episode of the Disneyland television series. It told of a young boy and his imaginary friend, a powerful dragon who could protect the boy from the joyless world all around him: a fairly […]
An earlier version of this review can be found here. Having been given just about the freest reigns ever given to a filmmaker in the history of Walt Disney Feature Animation, directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois responded with Lilo & Stitch, a dream project for Sanders, who had been noodling with the main character […]
When Walt Disney died of lung cancer in 1966, he left behind a company that had no idea how to function without him. Right down to the corporate name, Walt Disney Productions had largely been a cult of personality, and once that gargantuan figure was out of the picture, nobody behind the scenes or in […]
