Winnie the Pooh (2011)

Pooh gets the feature treatment once again.

For Disney, Winnie the Pooh and all of his friends have been the gift that keeps on giving.

At one of the shortest run-times of any films in the animated canon (just 63 minutes), Winnie the Pooh tells a simple tale of how gloomy Eeyore lost his tail and his friends worked hard to help him find a new one. Meanwhile, the group misreads a note from Christopher Robin saying he’ll “be back soon” and instead fear he’s been captured by an imaginary beast they call the Backson, so they set off to come to his rescue. All the usual hijinks that befall Pooh and the gang occur.

It should be noted that, despite the library of Pooh titles that bear the Disney name, only this one and 1977’s The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh were produced by Disney Animation Studios — and it’s only the third time a sequel has been included in the official canon.

Gaining the film rights in the 1960s proved to be a very lucrative move for the studio. The company has produced numerous featurettes, television shows, and feature films, both theatrical releases and direct-to-video, including favourites like The Tigger Movie, Piglet’s Big Movie, Pooh’s Heffalump Movie and Pooh’s Grand Adventure.

The Princess and the Frog (2009)

Tiana dreams of something big.

Not only does The Princess and the Frog bring back that old Disney magic in full force, but it’s also well worth the wait. The film marks a return to the traditional hand-drawn animation the studio is known for and also introduces the company’s first black princess.

Based on the classic Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale, The Frog Prince, (with a little help from E.D. Baker’s novel, The Frog Princess), Disney’s version is set in early-20th century New Orleans. When a visiting, jazz-loving, care-free prince is turned into a frog by an evil witch doctor, Tiana kisses him to turn him human again. The spell backfires, and Tiana is turned into a frog, as well.

New Orleans, with its rich musical and cultural history, is one of the hearts of the American south. All of the great parts of this city are featured in the movie: Mardi Gras, jazz, voodoo, Creole and Cajun food and, of course, beignets. Tiana is the most ambitious and independent Disney princess yet. She has grand dreams of owning and operating her own restaurant, and tirelessly works two jobs to save enough for the down payment. She has an admirable mantra that hard work can make your dreams come true (although, by the end of the film, she comes to accept that, in life, there is a little luck involved, too).

Home on the Range (2004)

Roseanne Barr’s and Judi Dench’s bovine alter egos.

Disney’s downward spiral of an identity crisis continues with Home on the Range, the story of two dairy cows and a show cow who set out on a western adventure in a bid to save their ranch, Patch of Heaven, from foreclosure.

Rather than focus on the expert storytelling for which Disney had become known during the renaissance, this film was more about playing catch-up to the other animation studios that had burst on the scene in the 1990s — notably Dreamworks and Pixar. There was a lot going on in this film that was clearly about imitating the primary competition, and it proved to be very distracting. Lucky Jack, the rabbit, drew similarities from Ice Age’s Scrat; the slapstick comedy of the farm took a page out of Warner Brothers’ famous Saturday morning cartoons; and the antics of the pigs and goat bore an amazing resemblance to Chuck Jones’ Looney Tunes. In this case, though, the story was weak and the opening setup was just plain dull, even confusing. The film never came close to rivalling the films coming out of both Dreamworks and especially Pixar at this time. Disney was being left behind in a bad way.

Treasure Planet (2002)

Jim Hawkins turned out to be a bit unlikeable among audiences.

During the 2000s, Disney not only abandoned the formula that had granted them unparalleled success in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but the company was also churning out animated features at lightning speed. Quality was bound to suffer, and 2002’s Treasure Planet probably got more flak because of that downturn than it really deserved.

The idea sounds a bit hokey: an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic novel set in space. But it actually worked. Personally, I could have done with a more traditional retelling of the story, but the space-age setting didn’t detract from the story of young Jim Hawkins (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Jim longs for adventure, longs to prove himself and feel that his existence has meaning. In a sea of galaxies, his inner struggle shouldn’t come as a surprise. He’s also coming to terms with an absentee father and a few of his own run-ins with the law. He’s a quintessential troubled teen who embarks on a grand journey that ends up drastically changing his life.

What is distracting, though, is the film’s steampunk style. The look and feel of the character design is drawn from Victorian England with inspiration from the Industrial Revolution, but the settings are futuristic. I mostly just wished the animators had picked one era and stuck with it. And while recognize the style’s place in the world of art, even though Treasure Planet wasn’t the first Disney film to make use of it, as pointed out by Steampunk Scholar, the style wasn’t fitting of the story Disney was trying to tell in this film. Critics also bemoaned the “mainstreaming” of steampunk — because, of course, there’s no way it could ever be cool again now that Disney had jumped on the bandwagon.

The story was a fair adaption, the animation was fluid and the action tense, but the characters had trouble making a real connection with the audience. Even as self-sacrifice and personal connections drive the movie forward, it’s hard for audiences to feel much for them. It all amounts to a less-than-satisfying, if adventurous, finish.

The lack of an animated hit was starting to put financial strain on the studio. It was particularly painful that their most successful film during this time was the low-budget Winnie the Pooh sequel The Tigger Movie. The big-budget, high-concept “official” releases just weren’t performing. And the rising success of rival studios Pixar and Dreamworks (who released Shrek in 2001) certainly wasn’t helping. According to the LA Times, the $140-million Treasure Planet was a dream directors John Musker and Ron Clements had been trying to get off the ground for almost two decades. The film’s dismal $12-million opening weekend gross was one of the weakest ever for Disney and lead the company to revise its already-reported fourth-quarter earnings, providing further fuel for the skepticism beginning to develop around the studio that it wasn’t up to producing the big blockbusters of the past. The studio blamed a lacklustre marketing effort, but it was clear more was amiss. The ordeal ended up leading to a shrinking of the animation department, several layoffs across the division and a slowdown in the number, and size, of the animated features that would come.

In the context of what else the studio was releasing in the 2000s, Treasure Planet is certainly not even close to being at the bottom of the barrel (and even ended up with an Academy Award nomination for best animated film). But it remains further proof that Disney had lost its Midas touch.

Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)

Milo gets choked up when he gets his first aerial view of Atlantis.

Atlantis is an oddity, mainly because it never feels like you’re actually watching something produced by Disney.

For this animated outing, Disney decided to take the action/sci-fi route. After a brief history of how the island of Atlantis went missing, the film jumps to 1914 and introduces us to linguist Milo Thatch (voiced by Michael J. Fox) and his lifelong goal of discovering the lost city of Atlantis. After being turned down, yet again, for research funding for his expedition, Milo is summoned to the home of an eccentric millionaire named Whitmore who was good friends with Milo’s grandfather. Whitmore makes two very important contributions to Milo’s quest: a journal that may contain the secret to Atlantis’s location and ragtag team of explorers, scientists and mercenaries to join him in his search.

Milo is a likeable hero, despite portraying all the stereotypes of a science nerd to a T. Even Kida, the Atlantean princess-turned-love interest, tells Milo: “Judging from your diminished physique and large forehead, you are suited for nothing else.” Milo is not tragically flawed, like Beast, or delightfully charming and funny, like Prince Naveen to come, but from his first introduction, you’re left with the impression that he is a good guy with a dream he desperately wants to come true. And you can’t help but root for him. While the look and feel of the film may not be what audiences are used to from the company, rooting for an underdog hero is undeniably Disney.