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 overseers started pursuing was television animation. This was a far more radical proposition at the […]
I got to thinking a few days ago: it’s been three years now since the great Disneython of 2009, which I still humbly think to be this blog’s crowning achievement. And I was filled with a great longing to so something of equal scale and equal Disney-ness. The good news for me is that there is an obvious direction to take this urge, juicy and ripe for the picking. The […]
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 Lasseter, artistic godfather of Pixar Animation Studios, was put in charge of pretty much the […]
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 traditional animation; get the hell away from traditional animation; copy DreamWorks and Pixar; stake out […]
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 Company in the post-World War II years, while my conscience and brain won’t let me […]
It is generally desirable that a film’s protagonist should be an engaging, gripping figure, but we all can name, I am sure, several dozen examples of a film where the sidekick, or the comic relief, or you name the disposable side character, is more memorable and generally beloved – this is particularly noticeable in the case of the Disney animated films, which so often had a hugely appealing secondary character […]
Time enough, I thought, to bring back my exceedingly intermittent “Monday Top Ten” series, and since my head is still very Disney’d, at least the next couple will be thus themed to various ways of ranking one Disney picture against another. Or in this case, one Disney song against another. If there’s one thing that I was glad to be reminded of despite needing no reminder, it’s that Howard Ashman […]
UPDATED, NOVEMBER 2021: The release of Disney’s 60th animated feature, Encanto, gave me the nudge I needed to go through this list (and the master list of every Disney feature) and revise and update my rankings. One last quick little list, a totally disposable one: since we all know that the villains are the best part of any given Disney movie, I thought I’d go ahead and present my ranking […]
UPDATED, NOVEMBER 2021: The release of Disney’s 60th animated feature, Encanto, gave me the nudge I needed to go through this list and revise and update my rankings. The listmaker in me couldn’t help it: I’ve ranked the animated Disney features from best to worst, including a score out of ten. This list is subject to change without notice. Masterpieces (10/10) 1. Pinocchio (1940) 2. Bambi (1942) 3. Fantasia (1940) […]
It was pretty obvious, I think, that this project found me slightly too ready to run off at the keyboard. Just so we all know exactly what that entails, here’s the final tally for the Disneython at Antagony & Ecstasy: 166,509 words. That translates to 665 manuscript pages, assuming an average of 250 words per page, and no illustrations. Think on that before you encourage me to turn these into […]
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, but it sure did have the right blend of zany pop culture references and famous […]
Here’s a man who doesn’t, I think, get nearly the respect he deserves, even among Disney animation buffs: Will Finn. Maybe because his career took him all over the place, and Disneyphilia tends to reward the lifers, like Glen Keane, Mark Henn, or Andreas Deja; Finn started out as one of Don Bluth’s kids, doing some story work and animation on The Secret of NIMH; he drifted over to Filmation […]
