A review requested by a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. And now we come to a question of some real urgency: what the living hell happened to Don Bluth at the start of the 1990s? There’s a simple answer to that, of course. After Bluth spent the ’80s routinely handing his former employers at Disney their […]

A review requested by James Miller, with thanks for donating to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. There’s nothing at all weird about a 1990s animated fairy tale/Disney knock-off with weak musical numbers and hardly any budget. In fact, this is one of the least-weird things imaginable: attempting to copy what works, cutting corners, and doing a poor job of it all is the very heart and soul […]

A review requested by Rebecca S, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser. Toys is one of the best examples I can think of why “kill your babies” is held to be important artistic advice. It is also one of the best examples of why I’m always privately happy when artists leave their babies alive, even if – especially if – they’re malformed and […]

Princess musicals. That’s the ticket: Walt Disney Animation Studios just needs to keep on making princess musicals. You can set the starting point of Disney’s second renaissance under the guidance of John Lasseter wherever you want – with 2008’s Bolt, which was the first film for which Lasseter was chiefly responsible for overseeing its production; with 2009’s The Princess and the Frog, which was the studio’s first fairy tale musical […]

It’s officially that most exciting time of the movie year: all of the most exciting stuff isn’t actually opening unless you are among the anointed within an easy trip of downtown New York or Los Angeles. And may I say that for all I would grouse and kvell about this (not always on this blog) when I lived in Chicago, my experience of last fall in Madison really brought how […]

The unifying characteristic of the vast majority of feature-length films made by Walt Disney Animation Studios has been an unflagging, self-conscious classicism. These films, by and large, exist out of time, adopting folklore from across the world and treating it with a careful remove, with only an isolated gag here or there reminding us that they were made at any given point in time. Thus even if two things are […]

Really, how is anybody supposed to cope with something titled Disney Princess Enchanted Tales: Follow Your Dreams? It sounds like the direct translation from the Japanese of an anime series that finds the Disney Princesses joining forces to fight their robot doppelgangers on a floating island in outer space. Or at least like Disney’s long-forgotten attempt to break into East German children’s entertainment. What is actually is, is the first […]

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 million at the U.S. box office alone), and could reasonably expect to capture a decent-sized […]

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 typically puts in an appearance somewhere on “Worst Disney Sequels” lists, and has been attacked […]

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 release of that picture. We now arrive at the project with which that glut began […]

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 The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, released in feature form in the spring of […]

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 reasons, but I’ll give you all a moment to figure out what, specifically, is important, […]