Even if the positive reviews (our Russ Fischer was less enraptured than many, but still impressed) can’t convince you that the prospect of Jon Favreau remaking “The Jungle Book” as a live-action extravaganza was a good idea, it’s a phenomenon we’re all going to to have to get used to. The classic Disney verse is about to get a whole lot more photo-real, with live action remakes/prequels/versions of “Beauty and the Beast” (starring Emma Watson), “Mulan,” “Aladdin,” “Tinkerbell,” “Winnie the Pooh” (focusing on Christopher Robin and to be penned by Alex Ross Perry), “Dumbo” and “Prince Charming” all in various stages of development right now. And this on the glass-slippered foot of Kenneth Branagh‘s triumphantly traditionalist 2015 take on “Cinderella” which made $542m worldwide, along with Angelina Jolie‘s $758 million worldwide earning “Maleficent.”
You can either see it as a symptom of increasing creative bankruptcy or… well, it’s not entirely clear what else there is to see it as. But if the new versions can be as good as or (hopefully) even better than Favreau and Branagh’s renditions (and Disney’s trend toward hiring respected independent directors as writers is certainly an interesting unforeseen twist), perhaps we’ll be forced to eat our words.
READ MORE: What D23 Says About The State Of Disney Feature Animation
But if we are a little wary of this live-action, CG-infused future, it’s only because we have so much love for so many of the 2D, often hand-drawn animations that Disney are now revisiting. So to mark the release of “The Jungle Book” and to remind you just how great the originals of so many of these soon-to-be-remade stories are, here’s our own ranking of the top 20 Disney animations of all time.
We know there’s little that raises controversy among cine-literate adults more than a listing of kids/family films (here’s our Miyazaki feature and our Pixar feature for comparison), and there are certainly some inclusions and exclusions that are likely to raise hackles. But please believe we’re not aiming to “destroy” any “childhoods” here. This is just to celebrate what we believe are, without regard to nostalgia, the best examples of Disney’s signature genre and to justify the buckets of joy-tears shed during the research for this feature.
20. “Hercules” (1997)
“Hercules” was the lowest-grossing of the 1990s second Golden Age of Disney Animation —it was crushed at the box office in a competitive summer by “Men In Black” and some middling reviews. And we’ve always thought that was somewhat unfair: John Musker and Ron Clements’ follow-up to megahit “Aladdin” doesn’t quite hit the heights of its predecessor, but it’s a pretty successful attempt at tweaking a similar formula and somehow keeping it fresh. The film’s very loose version of the Greek myth sees baby Hercules turned mortal and adrift by the machinations of the evil Hades (James Woods), who’s plotting to free the Titans and conquer Olympus (Hercules’ mythological origins, in which he was fathered by Zeus with a human, were changed presumably due to Disney’s aversion to gods shagging around). Years later, Herc (Tate Donovan) discovers his heritage and sets out to be a hero worthy of the gods. It’s a lighter, poppier affair than “Aladdin,” with a distinctive style of animation influenced at once by Greek vases and Pink Floyd-affiliated cartoonist Gerald Scarfe (who worked on the film), and is exemplified best by the villain, a witty and memorable creation among Disney’s best. The hero’s a bit bland, but the set pieces are striking, the Motown-influenced music is fun, and in the Susan Egan-voiced Meg, the film has one of Disney’s best and most complex female characters.
19. “The Little Mermaid” (1989)
There’ll no doubt be an outcry at the perceived low placement of a film that was the childhood Disney animation for a large swathe of our readership. But nostalgia aside, while the exploits of Ariel and her quest to become human are enjoyable, the songs characterful and charming, and the film’s importance in ushering in the 1990s Disney Renaissance after a couple of wilderness decades can’t be overstated, it doesn’t quite hold up as well as others [*gets pelted with seaweed and guano*]. It’s a somewhat predictable take on the Disney princess formula, a straightforward romance between pretty mermaid Ariel (Jodi Benson) and handsome sailor prince Eric (Christopher Daniel Barnes) which is only given dramatic stakes by the intervention of Ursula (in fairness, an excellent villain voiced by Pat Carroll) and her dastardly plot to wrest dominion over the underwater realm from Ariel’s dad Triton (Kenneth Mars, the Nazi playwright in “The Producers“!). Where later, more sophisticated stories from Disney’s second Golden Age would make their heroines’ psychologies a bit more complex, the 16-year-old Ariel has few qualms about leaving her home, friends and family forever for love, which strikes a slightly discordant note in an otherwise sweet and harmonious confection.
18. “Robin Hood” (1973)
After the death of Walt Disney, the company went into two decades of difficulty with a series of flops through the 1970s and 1980s, with only “The Little Mermaid” helping to right the ship in a big way. Which is odd, because the first film made entirely without Disney’s involvement (he’d greenlit “The Aristocats” but didn’t live to see its release) was actually an excellent note on which to start things, despite the odds. In light of uncertainty over the post-Walt era, the film was given a meager budget and was made with a fair amount of recycled animation (hence Little John’s resemblance to “The Jungle Book“‘s Baloo, not aided by Phil Harris returning to voice him). Yet despite its difficulties, the film (directed by the estimable Wolfgang Reitherman) is a highly engaging animal-centric take on Nottingham’s finest, with the Errol Flynn-ish fox Robin (Brian Bedford) clashing with the leonine, plummy Prince John (Peter Ustinov) and his sidekick Hiss (Terry-Thomas), while reconnecting with his childhood sweetheart Maid Marian (Monica Evans). There are some missteps (a rabbit child character for one), and the budgetary strains do show, but it’s got a ton of charm, and Reitherman’s vision —equal parts British pastoral and bluegrass music— somehow coheres. If nothing else, it’s roughly four hundred times better than the Ridley Scott/Russell Crowe version.
17. “Winnie the Pooh” (2011)
As adults (albeit in various stages of arrested development), we’re in danger of including picks that work better for the grown-up audience than for kids, especially very young children. But “Winnie the Pooh,” while the polar opposite of the eye-janglingly colorful, squeaky-voiced irritants that a characterize a lot of animation aimed at elementary schoolers and younger, is the rare animation that manages to entirely sustain its naive and completely unironic charms across its slim, 69m runtime no matter your age. A lot of that is due to the deceptive simplicity of the approach, in which the very best places to get your Pooh fix —the books— are appropriately honored and homaged by an inventive device that knits the words into the action, and has the narrator (John Cleese) comment on both as well as interacting with the beloved characters. The stories remain slight and sweet and faithful to AA Milne‘s originals, but under Stephen J. Anderson and Don Hall’s direction, and populated with a wonderful voice cast including Jim Cummings, Travis Oates, Bud Luckey, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Craig Ferguson, they engage in a way that both evokes and transcends the printed page. Essentially, they put a new-fangled, metatextual sensibility at work to promote the most old fashioned of values: that reading is cool, kids!
16. “Sleeping Beauty” (1959)
Produced on widescreen 70mm and at a budget more than twice those of proceeding films like “Peter Pan” and “Lady And The Tramp,” the modest box office of “Sleeping Beauty” caused layoffs at Disney Animation, and between that and some mixed reviews, it was initially seen as a disappointment. These days, it’s one of the solid gold classics of the 1950s era for the company, and one of its finest fairy tale films. Adapting the classic folk tale, it sees the evil fairy Maleficent (Eleanor Audley) cursing Princess Aurora (Mary Costa) after her parents fail to invite her to the christening, a curse that will mean that after her 16th birthday, if she pricks her finger on a spinning wheel, she’ll fall into an eternal slumber. It’s thinly plotted stuff with a boring hero and heroine, but it looks absolutely gorgeous, thanks to design by painter Eyvind Earle that’s among the distinctive the studio ever made, melding Italian Renaissance, Gothic art and bright primary colors. And when the iconic Maleficent (sanded down and made sympathetic in the studio’s poor recent live-action retelling named after the villain) is onscreen, the film’s far more than a visual feast, taking on a crackle and fizz that puts those moments, if not the sappy romance, among the studio’s finest.