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Last year, I was watching the Disney film Wish, and it was only about five minutes in when I realized I was in hell.
The film had already spent an awkward amount of time filling us in on the tedious backstory of how wishes were going to work for the next 90 plus minutes. That on the fictional island of Rosas, there's a self-appointed king who wants to control the power of wishes. He studied the magic of the world tirelessly and became a mighty sorcerer, able to protect from harm or ill will any wish given to him.
It's a little complicated, so the movie immediately followed that up with a song. A bad song, describing some rather convoluted rules about wishes. This was also our introduction to the movie's heroine, who seemed a little too into this whole dodgy "give your king your wishes and maybe he'll grant them someday" thing.
Five minutes in, I'm exhausted just watching her, running around the town center trying to eke out an emotional ballad that I'm pretty sure was inspired by Robert's Rules of Order. By the end of the first song, I realized I no longer understood what a wish was. And it didn't get much better from there.
This was supposed to be Walt Disney Animation Studios' celebration of itself for making 100 years of Disney movies. And it was supposed to honor this tradition by weaving together 100 years of storytelling to make a new, worthy story. Instead, we ended up with something that felt like it was spit out by a Disney-informed AI machine, a computer that had studied the hallmarks of a Disney movie.
A storybook introduction, a main character propelled by, you guessed it, a wish, and a cast of cute supporting characters to help out our heroine. Actually, seven of them.
But there was no sign of the human touch, no sign that at any point anyone involved in the movie cared enough about this story or this world to give it specificity, or dimension, or heart, or to even write a good song for it. And so, despite all of these somewhat desperate attempts to declare itself a Disney movie, I left thinking that it just didn't feel like a Disney movie. But then a more nagging question started to get to me: What even is a Disney movie today?
In the modern era of corporate studios, Disney stood out because for decades and decades, it was identified with the same movies it came into the world making, animated family films. Back in the day, a lot of old Hollywood studios had a thing. Warner made gangster flicks. I didn't ask you for any lip. I asked you if you had a drink. Universal made horror films. She's alive! Alive! MGM made musicals. Over the rainbow
Disney focused on animated family movies, while all those other studios broadened the scope of their content until they became generic. Disney did eventually start making other kinds of movies. It created Touchstone Pictures in the 1980s to release live-action comedies and dramas for grown-ups, partnered with Miramax in the 1990s to make prestige films. But no one saw Three Men and a Baby or Pulp Fiction and thought, "Ah, yes, a Disney movie."
A Disney movie was an animated movie, and it was produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios with a distinctive kind of storytelling, beautiful animation, and songs that you didn't mind being lodged in your head. But now, Disney has shifted focus to Marvel and Star Wars as being its premier brands. And at the same time, the films from the Disney Animation Studios have been slipping.
Last November, Disney CEO Bob Iger joined the New York Times Dealbook Summit to answer some tough questions about Disney's challenges. People question the creative magic at Disney. You can look at the Marvels. You could look at Wish.
Wishes returns were embarrassing.
Even more so when you compared them to the Super Mario Bros. movie, which also came out in 2023. Mario and Luigi made five times what Wish did. Animation wasn't the problem. Disney's animation was. This is Land of the Giants, and I'm Bilge Ebiri, a film critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.
I write about all kinds of films, but over the years I've been fascinated by the history of Disney animation and the creative boom and bust cycles it's gone through over the course of its existence.
The last few decades, the world of animation has exploded. There's Pixar, and Dreamworks, and Illumination, and Sony, and Universal, and yeah. But Disney is the company that started it all. And lately, it's gotten harder and harder for me to see the Disney in Disney's animated films. Even harder to enjoy it. So what does it mean that Disney seems to have lost track of the thing that made it great in the first place?
Especially in a world where Minions and Luigi and Shrek are all coming for Disney's bag. Today, how Disney made animation into high art. How Disney made Disney movies. And whether or not they're still making them. The first time I walked into the animation building, I will never forget it.
In 1974, Glenn Keane was a young graduate of the prestigious California Institute of the Arts, and he just landed his first job. I was 20 years old and I'm dropping off some sketchbooks. Stepping into the building, you immediately sensed...
Peter Pan, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio. You sensed everything that had been made there. Walt Disney built the studio in Burbank right after the enormous success of his first feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Every movie after that was drawn within the walls of this studio. What I remember was the smell, the linoleum floors, and this kind of like artistic incense of...
pencil shavings, cigarettes, and scotch. Some of the old-timers still worked there. I took a baton from the nine old men who had created Pinocchio, Snow White, Bambi, all these films, and I had the amazing gift of learning under these great artists. The way he talks about this time, it kind of feels like a Disney movie itself.
Walt built this really wonderful, not just the building itself, but the environment was surrounded by beautiful trees and filled with squirrels running everywhere. It's like Disneyland. I mean, park benches everywhere, places to play volleyball. It was a little ideal kind of a world that we loved.
But by the mid-1980s, after Keene's first decade with Disney, he sensed that the blending of the generations wasn't going quite as seamlessly as he hoped. We all knew that we had something great to share, something to do, just like the ones who had passed on the baton to us had that opportunity. And it just seemed that management couldn't really...
Get the plane off the ground. Despite their bucolic surroundings and a team bursting with new and old talent, Disney's animation studio had wandered into irrelevance. In 1985, the poster child for this was the movie The Black Cauldron. Maybe you've seen it. I did. But a lot of people didn't. It was one of the most expensive animated films ever made, and its box office barely made a dent in the damage. Compare that to another movie released just the year before. Alan?
Yeah. It's time for me to tell you. Splash, produced by Disney's new live-action production studio, Touchstone Pictures, starred Daryl Hannah and Tom Hanks and cost just $11 million to make. In sharp contrast to The Black Cauldron, its return on investment was close to 500%. That contrast didn't do any favors for the animation studio, the story Division, which was becoming a shadow of its former self.
It was around that time that Peter Schneider was hired to be the vice president of Disney's animation studio. Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner and Frank Wells had just taken over the company in 1984, had sort of done the situation of saving Disney, and they didn't feel as though animation was of value anymore.
Jeffrey Katzenberg was the chair of Disney Studios, all of them. But he had no animation experience. And when he and Eisner's crew first arrived at Disney, they had a clear mission. Get spending under control and make more money. There was just no recent evidence that animation was the way to make that happen. Michael and Jeffrey felt that, you know, live action was the future of Disney. And animation was not that important.
Even so, Schneider had a lot going for him. He came from the theater world, had produced stage actors and directors, and knew how to whip productions into shape, keep them on schedule, cut unnecessary spending, and assemble dynamic teams of inspired artists. When I was interviewed for the job, they didn't really care who they hired. I have no animation background. I had no film background. I was hired because they didn't care. How'd he know? They told him.
When I interviewed with both Jeffrey and Michael, they both explained to me that they'd looked around. They, you know, they're going to hire some idiot. The message that animation was now irrelevant was delivered in a different way to the rest of the studio. First thing that happened is we all moved out of our animation building, the one that had animation on the door, and we were put into warehouses.
In Glendale, away from Burbank. Away from the squirrels chasing each other and park benches where the artists could sit and let their imaginations take over. To a warehouse just a few miles away, but a totally different world. The difference was remarkable. These warehouses that, as we moved into the building, they are drilling, putting conduit in. It's all drywall. There was nothing there.
permanent about it. Everything said to you, this may be the last place that Disney Animation is going to exist, and it'll be quick, and you'll be gone. So there, in the nethers of Glendale, Peter Schneider, Glenn Keane, and the rest of the animation studio faced a hard truth. There was a sense that something new had to happen. Was there a sense that you had to prove yourselves to...
upper management or, you know, the people in charge? Yes. Michael came from Paramount, and the success that they were having was astronomical. And they came in specifically to lift Disney back up. And if animation wasn't doing it, it wasn't going to keep going.
Then suddenly, in an amazing way, Little Mermaid turned all of that around for us. The animation studio had been sitting on the concept of The Little Mermaid for years without moving it into production. First, it was delayed because the underwater setting and the ornate scenes were too painstaking for the studio to tackle. And then, when Michael Eisner came on board, he was not excited to follow up Splash with yet another Mermaid movie. He wanted to kill it.
But then, the animation team, presided over by an unflinching Peter Schneider, began to prove that animation could perform. First, modestly, with The Great Mouse Detective, which made a nice profit, around $24 million. Even nicer when compared to the disastrous Black Cauldron, which, by some accounts, lost around $20 million. And then it did even better with Oliver and Company. This kind of performance intrigued the execs.
Katzenberg, despite the company-wide side-eye at animation, even got a little inspired and told the team to go for it. I had read the script of The Little Mermaid, and this was like, oh, this is so wonderful. Keen immediately asked to change his role on the film. I was supposed to work on Ursula, because I had been doing big villains and everything before that. But when I heard Jodie Benson sing Part of Your World...
And I was reading the script. I just felt like I know this girl. I feel like I'm her. Because for me, I've always been somebody that believes the impossible is possible. I just don't see things the way he does. I don't see how a world that makes such wonderful things could be bad. And Keene already knew she's got to be a redhead. What Ariel should look like.
Meanwhile, Katzenberg got a tip to hire Alan Menken and Howard Ashman to compose the songs. The duo wrote the music for The Little Shop of Horrors, a huge off-Broadway hit, and they brought a sensibility for fun musical storytelling that had been missing from Disney's recent movies. We had a piano at the end of the hallway, and you could hear Alan Menken singing.
and Howard Ashman working out the song. And so you'd hear... The human world, it's a mess. Life under the sea is better than anything they got up there. And they're bringing reggae into it, and you felt that this is really fresh. Under the sea, under the sea.
The great music, the character of Ariel who believes the impossible is possible, and the fantastical story inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's tale of the same name. These were the elements that Tocqueen made a Disney movie, Disney.
The Little Mermaid brought back a fairy tale. It was like the Coke in the can. The formula was there. So the fairy tale reminded me of those deep roots. This is who we are. And I started to think about animation studios. What is the essence of Disney? And I would have to say it's Once Upon a Time. It's the beginning of a tale
That once upon a time means we're going to tell you something that is so fantastic and wonderful, you're going to need your imagination to believe it. But the true judge of whether this mix of the old and new was working would be the moviegoers' response. We knew that we were doing something that was...
finally hitting the audience's heart. I was getting so many letters from young men that were in love with Ariel.
Oh, and the movie did something else important, too. Here's Peter Schneider again. Little Mermaid was, oh, look, $150 million movie, as opposed to a $50 million movie at the time was enormous. Actually, The Little Mermaid ended up making over $200 million worldwide. And that was just at the box office. That doesn't include the Ariel Halloween costumes and Ariel and Sebastian dolls and lunch pails. And once again, animation became sort of relevant.
Schneider and Keen couldn't know it at the time, but The Little Mermaid would eventually mark the beginning of what is known as the Disney Renaissance, a period of Disney films that to this day is considered one of the best streaks of moviemaking in the company's history. But this era was about more than just fabulous films. It was an era of crystalline brand clarity, when everyone knew exactly what a Disney movie was.
This was no accident. Well, the world was changing. And part of what Gary Kalkin thought about was how to take and make these movies not just for kids. Because clearly Little Mermaid had started to cross over. Gary Kalkin was a marketing executive for the animation studio. He passed away in the 90s. Schneider and others credit Kalkin and his press team with a vision to see that Disney's animated movies were good enough to be cultural forces for everyone. You
You know, it's funny. Animation has always been at the kids' table in the kitchen. This is Don Hahn, a longtime Disney producer and current Disney legend. You know, there's always been this amazing banquet going on in the film industry. And it's like, oh, yeah, animation. Yeah. I mean, it's animation grows out of the cartoon medium. And it's a bunch of silly guys and girls sitting in a room making cartoons. But that's never what Disney was. Disney was always about artists making fantasies come to life.
Far off places, daring sword fights, magic spells, a prince in disguise. No, really. Artists filling notebooks with sketches that captured subtle expressions and graceful movements, transforming paintings into actors. These artists were so committed that they brought in live animals, everything from full-sized horses to Dalmatian puppies, so that they could faithfully draw their anatomies.
Still, even Walt Disney was never really accepted to any sort of critical praise in New York or by any sort of sophisticated New York intelligentsia. Hahn says Gary Kalkin didn't think this was a problem inherent to the medium. He saw it as a marketing problem. I think we all thought it was a radical problem.
which it was, approach, which was let's educate our audience a little bit as to what goes into animation. We did tours. We did an exhibit at the Whitney Museum. The success of The Little Mermaid gave Kalkin an idea. He wanted to pull back the curtain on the Disney studio to reveal that it was full of Rembrandts, like Glen Keane, and Gershwins, like Howard Ashman and Alan Menken.
And he knew the perfect place to do so. The New York Film Festival. Something I had to ask Don Hahn about. Obviously, the New York Film Festival at that time, especially, was seen as very sort of Tony intellectual. It was where you saw films by Jean-Luc Godard and Bernardo Bertolucci. And suddenly, here's Disney's Beauty and the Beast. And it's not even finished. Woo!
There's certain scenes, it's just pencil sketches, certain scenes, the color's not quite there. And the New York Film Festival decides to show this, a momentous occasion for the festival and a momentous occasion, I would say, for Disney. And it was terrifying. You know, I remember getting out of my hotel room, going to the theater room,
Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center covered with flop sweat going, what are we doing? We were going to show an unfinished work and talk about the art of making movies. Peter Schneider again. Thinking about the movie for a second, but we're talking about art and New York Film Festival is all about celebrating that artistic singular vision. The movie was almost finished by the time New York Film Festival. So we had to go back and pull out some of the color to make it more artistic.
It was a little bit of a manipulation, but it was truthful because that's the way it was a month ago. It turned out that they probably didn't need that gimmick to win the audience's approval because everything else about the movie was gripping. People were applauding after every number of the Gaston song. And every last inch of me's covered with hair. And be our guest. Beeswagoo, cheese souffle, pie and pudding on flambé. And it was like they were at a live Broadway show.
And towards the end of the movie, when Belle and the Beast are dancing in the library, she's in her yellow gown, and... The camera swirls around them, the opening shot of pushing in, it became cinematic. As the film was finishing up, I went up to one of the side opera boxes. Roy Disney was sitting there, and I went with the directors, and we sat with Roy and watched it finish, and people stood up and started clapping. This does not happen in the movies to begin with, much less in animation.
And then the spotlight comes over onto Roy and to us kids. And, you know, suddenly we feel like Eva Peron or something in the balcony of this theater with people clapping. I wasn't at the screening, but I kind of feel like I was part of this moment. I was 18 when Beauty and the Beast came out. And I, a young man, took the train with a friend from New Haven to Manhattan to see it opening weekend.
I was not alone. There wasn't a kid inside in the theater. It was all other adults, like me, and just like the audience at the New York Film Festival, we burst into applause a few minutes into the movie. A few months later, Beauty and the Beast reached a new height for animated film. Well, we come now to the final award of the evening, the one for Best Picture. In 1992, Beauty and the Beast became the first animated feature to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.
And last but not least, a beauty and a beast. It did not win. But really, just to be nominated was enough. Animated Movies had made it. They'd graduated from the kids' table. All of a sudden, Animated Movies became the central point of the Walt Disney Company. And for that period of time, for those 10 years, we had the monopoly on every single major artist, animation artist in the world. Everybody worked for this company.
for this particular group because it was so exciting and so amazing and so revolutionary, and no one was in the animation business. It was just Disney. In other words, animation was Disney, and Disney was animation. Here's Michael Eisner in 1994, who by then had been thoroughly converted. With all the many varied businesses this company is in, it is incredible.
It becomes clearer every day that animation is its soul, heart, and most of its body parts. So that was then, 30 years ago. But what about today? I think that the animated movies no longer are animated movies. They are part of the Hollywood culture, and the moniker of Disney is less powerful. And I don't know if the world cares that this is a Disney movie anymore.
When we come back, how did we get to a place where Disney movies don't really register as Disney movies anymore? And does it matter?
On September 28th, the Global Citizen Festival will gather thousands of people who took action to end extreme poverty. Watch Post Malone, Doja Cat, Lisa, Jelly Roll, and Raul Alejandro as they take the stage with world leaders and activists to defeat poverty, defend the planet, and demand equity. Download the Global Citizen app to watch live. Learn more at globalcitizen.org.com.
This is the sound of the first few seconds of The Lion King. It's also the sound of Disney solidifying its place as one of the heaviest hitters in the film industry. In July of 1994, everything changed. Producer Don Hahn again. Lion King came out. It was a huge year. And everybody realized that animation was not just a cute little art form on the side, but it was a cash cow animation.
The success of this movie, a movie based on Hamlet, was stratospheric. The Lion King made twice as much on opening weekend than the studio predicted. It went on to become one of the highest-grossing films of all time, made by any studio. Over the previous five years, Disney had transformed the animation business from an afterthought into a cultural and now financial powerhouse. And so, by 1994, other studios wanted in.
That year, the New York Times declared it a golden age of film animation. It reported that every major studio was putting together their own animation teams to contend with Disney. Warner Brothers, Fox, MGM. There were new boutique animation houses popping up too, like DreamWorks, which Jeffrey Katzenberg left Disney to create with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen.
At first, these studios were making what I would say were Disney copycat movies. You have Anastasia, Ferngully, The Last Rainforest, The Prince of Egypt. But not everyone was making Disney knockoffs. In 1995, Pixar debuted its first feature film. And Pixar was different. It was based in Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs helped found it, and it was making films entirely with computers.
no more pencil shavings and stacks of paper. This was a tech company, and its movies looked and sounded like it. These were digitally created characters that seemed to exist in three dimensions, with the kinds of lighting effects that could previously have only been created with real cameras and real lights.
Woody and Buzz Lightyear didn't look like animated figures. They looked like actual toys, only they were talking and moving and going on adventures. To those of us who witnessed it firsthand, it was incredible. Part of their kind of artistic bravery, as it were, was saying, let's break those molds, not just visually, technically, with our look and our technology.
but with our ambition to tell different kinds of stories that maybe are more contemporary, not more relevant because fairy tales are relevant enough, but more of the moment and more in the moment as opposed to once upon a time long, long ago. Glenn Keane. I think like Pixar is, wouldn't it be cool if? Disney's is once upon a time.
Take Monsters, Inc. Wouldn't it be cool if all the scary monsters under your bed were actually trained employees working for an elaborate industry that fed off kids' screams? You see, we've hired some new scare recruits, and frankly, they're, they're, um... Inexperienced? They stink!
And then The Incredibles. Wouldn't it be cool if being a superhero was hereditary? Right now, honey, the world just wants us to fit in. And to fit in, we just gotta be like everybody else. But Dad always said our powers were nothing to be ashamed of. Pixar had a totally new approach to what made for a gripping, emotional story. Almost overnight, Disney went from feeling like THE tastemaker to feeling a bit stuffy, a bit passé.
Pixar was the new It Girl. You know, it's very hard to sustain a winning streak in any human activity for more than 10 years. Everything works in cycles in life, hence the term circle of life. And so as Disney was fading a tiny bit with some of its films, Pixar was taking off. And again, the audience was smitten by computer graphics and fell in love with it and couldn't get enough of Finding Nemo and the films of Pixar's golden age that early few years.
Pixar made nearly $3 billion during its first decade of releasing feature films. Disney's hits, on the other hand, began to peter out. The same year of Toy Story's phenomenal success, financial and critical, Disney came out with Pocahontas, which did okay, but it wasn't The Lion King and it certainly wasn't Toy Story.
Then there was The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which I happen to think is a great movie. And that did a little less well than Pocahontas. And then came Hercules, which did a little worse than that. You're probably sensing the trend here.
Why the decline? One reason, all that competition started poaching talent from Disney's studio. Another, Disney was releasing a feature movie almost every year. They couldn't all be winners at that pace. To be fair, Disney did have some genuine successes during the late 90s, like Mulan and Tarzan. But they started to seem like outliers.
And when Pixar released Toy Story 2 and it brought in even more than the first one did, that's when it seemed clear that Disney's animation strategy wasn't working anymore. Peter Schneider. The business needed to be pushed forward once again. You had this group up at Pixar that said, we can reinvent the world again. In the same way in 1984 and 85, the animators at Disney said, we can reinvent the world.
So Disney took the whole can't-beat-em, join-em approach to Pixar. It manifested as a kind of slow mission creep. First, Disney distributed Pixar films, then deepened the relationship into a strategic partnership where the two studios would split the costs and profits of films. And then, in 2006, Disney's new CEO, Bob Iger, took the next step. During the periods of time that we have been at the top of our game in feature animation, the company has really flourished.
And it's incredibly important for us to return to those days. Speaking to ABC, Iger delivered this message while sitting next to Steve Jobs upon the announcement that Disney had just purchased Pixar for $7 billion. If the audience wanted Pixar animation, then Disney was going to give it to them.
Here's what Steve Jobs had to say: "We think we understand how to keep Pixar being Pixar and how to spread some of that culture around and maybe, you know, a few other parts of Disney as well, because we think we got something pretty good going here." Disney animation spawned a slew of copycats at the height of its cultural supremacy in the 90s. But those days were over. Moving forward, it looked like Disney would be taking its cues from Pixar.
Nowadays, Pixar and Disney movies often seem indistinguishable to me. So I called up Josh Spiegel to get his take on what happened. He's a Disney historian and the former host of a podcast called Masterpiece Cinema. I think now the concept of a Disney movie is a Pixar movie. I was watching Elemental, finally, and thinking to myself...
wait, this feels a lot like Zootopia. And then I was like, but wait, Zootopia is a Disney movie. Is this a Disney? No, this is a Pixar. Is it a Pixar movie? Wait, what was Zootopia again? And I just had this weird moment where I had kind of basically forgotten which movie was Pixar and which was Disney. I think it's a widespread problem for Disney. I think the Disney Renaissance kind of solidified the concept of what a Disney movie is. And that concept is certainly not
frequently showing up in the current set of Disney animated films. One big reason why it's so difficult to distinguish these brands anymore is because Disney no longer makes hand-drawn animated films. Following the dawn of Pixar, Disney made fewer and fewer hand-drawn films. And by 2013, Disney dropped the whole division. Closed up shop, laid off its Rembrandts.
From then on, Disney and Pixar movies would all be computer animated, meaning they'd all look pretty similar. The rounded faces, the photorealistic lighting, the gee whiz technological novelty that was feeling a little less gee whiz by the day. But it's not just the look. It's the feel, too. The style, the kind of stories Disney started making.
Even before Disney closed down its hand-drawn division, it released the computer-animated Wreck-It Ralph. When Felix does a good job, he gets a medal. Are there medals for wrecking stuff really well? To that, I say, "Ha!" And no, there aren't. This is a movie about how cool it would be if the bad guy in a video game proved he could be the hero. It happens to be terrific, but I keep having to remind myself that it's a Disney movie.
Bob Iger may have purchased Pixar to burnish Disney's brand as the king of animated films. But in retrospect, it looks like it's dulled our sense of what a Disney movie even is. When everything is Disney, nothing is. That's how it feels now because all the lines are blurred.
At some level, the Disney is becoming an umbrella brand. This is David Collis, a professor at Harvard Business School. For 40 years, Collis has studied what makes the Disney brand tick. He teaches a class on corporate strategy built around his findings.
One of the things we make sure students leave with is what we say is this question about what is your Mickey Mouse? What sits at the middle of your enterprise creating value across all the different businesses in which you compete? And classic Disney is just such a wonderful example of it. Historically, it was Mickey and the animated cartoons. Disney was the gold standard for brand clarity, and its animated cartoons were the source of it.
When Collis teaches the class today, he still pushes his future entrepreneurs to find their Mickey Mouse, even though the mouse is kind of hard to find these days.
Today, Disney is obviously much broader than just animated films, animated cartoons. And in fact, they talk about what they see, I think, as the middle of the enterprise today as being quality owned franchise entertainment. So intentionally, they have bought Pixar, then they bought Marvel, then
And then they bought Lucasfilms to get Star Wars, so now they have franchises that appeal to all the different generations. So today, the center of Disney, the source of its brand identity, is quality-owned franchise entertainment? Doesn't really have the same ring to it, does it? More to the point, it's taken Disney's singular and pristinely clear brand and replaced it with a bunch of smaller, slightly less potent brands that aren't necessarily traced back to Disney.
I'm not even sure how many people know that Star Wars is owned by Disney or that Pixar is Disney.
Josh Spiegel sees the same kind of franchise atomization happening on an even more granular level within the animation studios themselves. There's just franchises. There's different franchises now. Well, we've had four Toy Story movies. Well, let's make sure we have a fifth one before you have to exhume the corpses of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen to voice these characters again. We're going to have a second Zootopia. We're going to have a second Moana. And we're all awaiting the third installment of Frozen.
As much as I moan at the thought of a Frozen 3, I'd be pretty surprised if it didn't do well. The franchise strategy has reduced the risk factor of something new and unfamiliar. In a world of way too much content, a million ways to watch movies, or choose your next TV show, what can possibly cut through the noise? You used to be able to trust that the next Disney movie would be a winner, and then it was the next Pixar flick.
Now, it's just a sequel, or a prequel, of a story you've already fallen in love with. Indeed, as I speak, Pixar is in the midst of proving this point with the wildly successful Inside Out 2. All of this is crazy because once upon a time, Disney didn't make sequels. Or rather, it didn't release them in theaters. Sequels went straight to video to pad the annual profits. Pride of Place went to its original titles.
The Disney animation films now often feel to me like they're grasping for something that has passed. This is my fellow film critic, Alyssa Wilkinson, who writes for The New York Times.
She recently wrote a piece for the paper that looked at the decline of Disney's films as cultural touchstones. It feels like a coda to something instead of something new to me. And I guess we'll see how the next Lion King movie turns out before we can really make a judgment on that. But it feels like a rehash of something that was, to me, better the first time around.
Wilkinson's talking about the prequel, Mufasa: The Lion King, coming out this December. That's a follow-up to Disney's 2019 remake of The Lion King, which neither Wilkinson nor I liked. Now, call me cynical, but Disney's strategy sort of makes sense. If I see the 2019 adaptation of the original Lion King and I love it, well, that's obviously a win for Disney.
But if I hate it and consider it a desecration of the wonderful 1994 hand-drawn Lion King, well, that's sort of a win for Disney too. Because I'm now recalling my fond memories of a Disney original. And that's one way of keeping a 30-year-old movie in the cultural conversation. In other words, to keep its brand alive and relevant, Disney doesn't even need to make good movies. It just needs to remind us that it once did.
But that strategy, depressing as it is, also tells me that Disney still wants its animation studio to resonate with its audience as Disney, not as Pixar. And that's what the movie Wish was, too, as pathetic as it was. Here's Josh Spiegel again. Well, as much as I did not enjoy the film Wish, I do think Wish is trying very hard to remind you that it's a Disney movie from almost the first moment. For worse more than for better, that's a Disney movie. There's no doubt about it.
Does it matter that the Disney animated movie is kind of hard to ID these days? Well, it certainly matters if you're Disney, I think. But I think it does matter also in the sense that everything has become very flat in culture. And one thing is not like better than another, the way a lot of people think about the entertainment they consume.
And there was an expectation of quality that came along with the Disney brand. But if you don't know that a movie is a Disney movie, or if there's not like a meaning attached to that, or you don't call it that, then you start to lose a sense of whether it's
these movies are good anymore and whether you should bother going and seeing them or, you know, not waste your time. Because there's a lot of bad animation out there, much of which is not made by Disney. Endless troll sequels. The Brothers Super Mario. The Minions Industrial Complex. There's so much competition. Not all of them are terrible, especially if you have young, minion-crazy kids. But that's exactly it.
In Disney's eyes, those kids should be obsessed with Disney movies. Because they don't just go to the movies. They buy things. And they go to theme parks. Illumination, which is responsible for flooding us with Minions content, is now sending its throngs of fans to Universal's parks around the world.
Endless choice with zero brand recognition isn't necessarily a good thing, especially if the brands in question are more interested in the bottom line than making anything of quality. Without the kind of imprimatur of Disney in your head on the good stuff, then you're just going to equate everything with everything and become disillusioned and uninterested and just plop something on YouTube, which apparently is what a lot of children end up doing.
Disney's animation studio has gone through slumps before. Arguably, its greatest streak of films was produced in the wake of one such slump. But the competition is now fortified. It's ready to steal your family's loyalty. And Disney probably can't win the fight with homages to the past. So maybe that would be my wish. That Disney care about making excellent original animated films again. Not just to keep its brand alive, but to keep its soul alive as well.
Soul, which is a Pixar movie. Pixar was Bob Iger's first big acquisition, but it might not have been his most important. Adding the Marvel and Star Wars universes to Disney's IP portfolio turbocharged the company's growth, one blockbuster after another. And then television shows and theme park attractions. It was all working according to plan, until it wasn't. They needed a reality check. And this was a slap in the face reality check.
That's what Hollywood is all about. It's trends. You're trying to make the next film that fits into a trend that is working. And so why stop until it doesn't work? Well, guess what? It came to a dead stop with Eternals and Marvels and Quantumania. And so they have to course correct. On our next episode, how Disney's business decisions let the air out of Marvel and Star Wars and what it might take to get them up and running again.
Land of the Giants, The Disney Dilemma is produced by Vulture and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This episode included clips from Walt Disney Studios, Pixar, Touchstone Pictures, Universal Pictures, MGM, Warner Brothers, The New York Times, ABC, and the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty. Charlotte Silver is our lead producer. Jolie Myers is our editor. Claire Cronin is our fact checker.
Brandon McFarlane composed the theme and mixed and scored this episode. Neil Janowitz is the editor-in-chief of Vulture. Art Chung is our showrunner. Nishat Kurwa is our executive producer. And I'm Bilge Ibiri. If you liked this episode, tell a friend and follow us to hear our next episode when it drops next Wednesday. Illumination! Illumination!
