WHAT'S WRONG WITH DISNEY ANIMATION

So, SO many things...

A lot of people have been annoyed with Disney-Pixar’s monumental drop in quality in the late 2010s and ESPECIALLY the 2020s. Most recently, we’ve seen Disney’s Wish drop, and serve as the centennial celebration of the Walt Disney Company. Wish ended up doing worse in the box office than Haunted Mansion: a Halloween-themed movie that premiered in July. July!! 

Disney ended the 2010s with incredibly well-performing movies: Frozen II, Incredibles 2, and the Lion King (2019). Notice something about these three? It’s not just that they’re sequels to some of the best-regarded films the companies had ever produced, it’s that they’re sequels that Disney KNEW would make money. And they made bank!!! But Frozen II didn’t have as good of songs as Frozen I (but still turned out alright!), Incredibles 2 was a method of putting two marketable characters with no chemistry together to sell more toys, and the Lion King live action was both not live action and was just boring to watch!! 

And now we’re seeing the problems with just wanting to sell toys and flail when the idea of making a good movie is pitched. COVID definitely didn’t help, but even then, when their movies came out when cinemas were back, they haven’t made a movie that’s gotten onto the highest grossing list of all time, when The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023), Minions: Rise of Gru (2022), Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) have all come out and overperformed all of Disney/Pixar’s outings in both ratings and capital. Heck, Sing 2 even did better than their offerings in 2021! 

Onward and Soul both came out in 2020, and Onward felt like a company obligation… I can hardly remember the plot or the characters, I just remember the dad’s a pair of legs. Good for him. But Soul? They did it dirty. So, so dirty. I remember watching it and thinking “wow”. It was fun, it was new, it was a story that made me feel a lot of things! If you haven’t yet, please watch it… it’s so good. But they hardly marketed it! I think it’s on WALL-E quality, but they just didn’t do anything with it. And because it was during COVID, they lost money on it.  

2021 had a lot more animated films come out: Raya and the Last Dragon, Luca, Encanto, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Raya wasn’t great, Luca was cute and didn’t deserve less money than Sing 2, Encanto had great songs and a cool cast but they do so little with the idea, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid is strange because the kids have regular skin colors instead of the colors of the page and I don’t like that!!! 

2022 felt like Disney was coming back to a regular stream of content: Turning Red, Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers, Lightyear, Pinocchio, Strange World, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules. Turning Red was cute and I liked it more than most guys would, Rescue Rangers infuriated me because it was all reference humor that wouldn’t age very well in the slightest (in 2032, do you think people would know who Ugly Sonic is?), Lightyear was incredibly uninspired and sold so few toys, I can still find LEGOs of them on the shelves of any retailer and it’s been almost two years since the movie released, Pinocchio got rid of all of its original edge, Strange World was so incredibly forgettable, and Rodrick Rules was made within a year because it was cheap to make and they’re just trying to get through all of the books every year. None of these performed as well as Minions: Rise of Gru or Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. 

And most recently, 2023 was a rough year for Disney. Elemental, Wish, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid Christmas: Cabin Fever. Talk about dry! I’ve written a foul Letterboxd review of Elemental, Wish was very uninspired and felt like if Moana was more soulless (and the villain started as sympathetic and then just SUDDENLY wanted more power??), and Diary of a Wimpy Kid just keeps giving me less to say. These have gotten beaten in the box office badly by both Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and the Super Mario Bros. Movie. 

So what went wrong? Easily, I think their number one problem is their lack of “Imagineering”. At some point, it just felt like they stopped caring about making movies they really wanted to make. And there is just one movie I can show as a perfect example of this. 

Incredibles 2 had so much running for it, as a sequel to one of the (consistently-ranked) best animated films of all time. Some expected the movie to be a time-skip in the universe to show a teenage Dash and a child Jack-Jack… but no! Jack-Jack is too marketable as a baby to get rid of, and we’ve just GOTTA pair him with Edna!!! It really felt like they were just trying to make a story to put the two together. The best part of the first movie was how much like a real family they felt like, and how they interweaved it with the action… which the Incredibles 2 doesn’t have. At all. The action is cool, but no characters end in a different place from where they began. Twist villain (a staple for every modern Disney/Pixar movie) was really lame, and it’s a stylistic nightmare. The environments are too realistic for characters that are built like the Parrs, and the hair looks too defined on these characters. 

But Disney isn’t always like this. Soul is the real stand-out film in this time, as it’s incredibly different from anything else made by Disney/Pixar, ESPECIALLY in the 2000s. It’s not sickeningly sweet, it’s incredibly innovative and it talks in all sincerity about death and appreciating life for what it’s worth. The characters are incredibly multi-faceted, and on one hand, it’s a goofy body swap movie with some slapstick comedy, but it uses lighting beautifully to show how characters are feeling… it’s a masterpiece of storytelling and I always implore anybody I can to watch this movie. 

Disney and Pixar have shown that they are more than capable of making good movies that people care about, it just comes with taking a lot of risks and trying a lot of new things instead of just sticking to what they think works. Because as it’s been shown, it hasn’t been working as well as they would have liked it to. I may get into this topic further later, but a change is needed, and if they want to succeed and thrive, they need to make it.