Follow The Leader / Animated Films

• The Disney studios in general have always been the most influential animation studio around. Consider the following:
  • Disney practically invented and popularized the full length animated feature film with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). For better or worse, almost every American animated feature film released for decades afterwards took elements from this film: comedic sidekicks, tragicomic elements, musical numbers, stories inspired by classic literature or fairy tales...even the evil witch queen was the blueprint for every Disney villain to come!
    • Snow White's Disney Death really inspired alot of character "Fake Deaths" in almost every animated work.
  • Disney's Fantasia was the inspiration for many animated films without any dialogue and just scenes set to classical music, such as Allegro non Troppo, What's Opera, Doc?, A Corny Concerto...
  • The pink elephants segment in Dumbo has inspired a lot of Disney Acid Sequences, Deranged Animation and/or Big-Lipped Alligator Moment scenes in animated feature films ever since.
  • The success of The Rescuers, the highest-grossing animated film of its time, lead to a brief flurry of movies starring mice living in Mouse World settings. Don Bluth, one of the directors of The Rescuers, would break away from Disney with The Secret of NIMH and follow it up with An American Tail.
  • The idea of a theme park around famous cartoon characters originated with Disneyland and was also widely copied.
  • Back in the late-1980s/early-1990s Disney animation renaissance, quite a few 2D animated features were cranked out by other companies (or finally released). Most were fantasy musicals written around a young attractive female who just wants "more" from life (The Swan Princess, Thumbelina), even if they weren't initially written as such (Quest for Camelot, The Thief and the Cobbler). All that was put to an end with (like Airplane!) South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut.
    • As The Nostalgia Chick and many others have pointed out, after Don Bluth had an awesome decade of the 1980s while Disney slumped, it turned the other way in the 1990s. Bluth gave in and tried to copy them. Anastasia is probably the most blatant try, even though it's a good movie in its own right.
    • Thumbelina, though less remembered than Anastasia presumably because it's simply not as good, is in fact an even more blatant attempt at cloning the Disney Animated Canon style—in particular, The Little Mermaid. Both films are based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale about an Interspecies Romance that ends in the heroine becoming her beloved's species. They then went further by taking elements not from the Anderson stories, such as the heroine being red-haired and beloved for her singing voice. They even went as far as casting Jodi Benson in the role of Thumbelina. There were also Aladdin elements, such as an aerial love duet and a Gilbert Gottfried role.
  • Thanks to the success of Toy Story, Finding Nemo and other works of Pixar, the movie biz is flooded with CGI children's movies. Nowadays, any animated movie must be computer-generated if is to have any chance against the viewing public, or face utter commercial failure. Hence the saying that traditional 2D animation is dead, or at least not meant to be taken seriously. In addition, up to late 2010s, it caused many 3D animation studios to try to replicate Pixar art style and body proportions.
    • That's arguably, in large part, due to certain box office bombs of the past that have been animated in 2D such as Rock-A-Doodle and Happily Ever After. While most of these bombs were made by companies outside of Disney, Disney itself was not spared. After Lilo & Stitch, Disney movies would only experience huge success if they were CGI, which, conversely, helped fuel Pixar. One medium's failure is another medium's opportunity.
    • Disney gave 2D another chance with The Princess and the Frog. While successful, it was not as big a hit as they had hoped, thus resulting in them changing the animation on Tangled from 2D to 3D. Disney tried again with Winnie the Pooh (2011), but that got buried running alongside the juggernaut that was Harry Potter And The Deathy Hallows Part 2. Frozen was converted from 2D to 3D in was.
    • Actually, some tiny animation studios, such as Vídeo Brinquedo, started ripping off some animated movies to create their own Mockbusters. Examples included Ratatoing for Ratatouille, The Little Panda Fighter for Kung Fu Panda and A Car’s Life for Cars, to name a few.
  • One exception is the popularity of The Simpsons Movie. But to be fair, The Simpsons has been around since 1989, and was obviously bound to do well, thanks to its already long-established worldwide appeal.
  • The success of The Simpsons and its TV copycats prompted DreamWorks to create its trademark of animated movies with lots of Toilet Humour, pop-culture references, Celebrity Voice Actors, and Fractured Fairy Tales, beginning with the Shrek series. Most family films have followed this pattern, with varying degrees of success.
  • Disney started the Celebrity Voice Actor trend as early as the late 1930s, when Cliff "Ukulele Ike" Edwards appeared in some films (most notably Pinocchio) and in 1950 they cast Ed Wynn as the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland. It only really caught on when Robin Williams did the voice of the Genie in Aladdin, however.
  • The massive success of Aladdin: The Return of Jafar was responsible for kickstarting the Direct to Video sequel market. Disney at first continued with its more recent films before digging into its classic library. Other animation studios have replicated Disney's foray, many doing so with little to no involvement from the original creative team. Perhaps the most notable non-Disney franchise was The Land Before Time which had almost annual direct to video sequels from 1994 until 2007 and a fourteenth movie in 2016. Even after John Lasseter forced Disney to stop doing them, this trend still hasn't gone completely out of favor. The Swan Princess is still in this market, even in The New '20s.
  • After the blockbuster success of Zootopia, many other All-CGI Cartoon films starring Funny Animal characters began popping up, such as Rock Dog and Sing. Considering animation lead time, several probably began during Zootopia's development.
  • For a while DreamWorks Animation was single-handedly playing Follow the Leader against Pixar, as part of Jeffrey Katzenberg's Take That! against Disney after the success of Toy Story. A Bug's Life begat Antz (which was rushed for release before Bugs), Monsters, Inc. begat Shrek, Finding Nemo begat Shark Tale, Ratatouille begat Flushed Away (produced by then-partner Aardman) and The Incredibles begat Megamind. The practice stopped when Pixar finally stopped publicly discussing their projects in advance, to John Lasseter's dismay (he felt that DreamWorks' copycat tactics betrayed the studio-agnostic camaraderie that animators previously nurtured). DreamWorks must be the only animated film studio capable of copying off of its own movies. The commercial success of Madagascar begat their other animal movie, Over the Hedge. With that success, Disney finally gave DreamWorks a taste of their own unoriginal medicine with The Wild... which they only distributed from a small Canadian studio who created the film without Madagascar in mind.
  • In the case of Shrek in particular, the film sparked a craze for All CGI Cartoons that relied on a combination of popular culture jokes, World of Snark, and merciless iconoclasm of classic fairy-tales. Nearly all of these films were found lacking compared to their progenitor. In doing so Shrek also basically killed Disney's more traditional 2D animated films from the era, films like Atlantis: The Lost Empire and Treasure Planet.
  • Aladdin and the Adventure of All Time is a combination of The Page Master using an Aladdin inspired by Disney's Aladdin. It borders on being a mockbuster but it just deviate enough.
• Ralph Bakshi kicked off the trend for animation more geared at adults with taboo subjects such as sex, drugs, violence and politics. This both lead to forgettable bawdy cartoon films with nothing more than dirty sex jokes (Down and Dirty Duck, King Dick, Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle) and more critically acclaimed series (The Simpsons, South Park) and films (Fantastic Planet, Waltz with Bashir, Persepolis).
  • Similarly, the success of Sausage Party in 2016 opened the floodgates for a number of other adult animated movies. Some, such as Loving Vincent Isle of Dogs and The Bob's Burgers Movie, have already been released while others, such as two R-rated comedies from Sony Pictures Animation, those being called Fixed and Bubble, are still in development.
• After the success of The Incredibles, more and more CGI-animated movies started mirroring its method of animating human characters with caricature proportions so as to create smoother human animation and avoid freaking out the audience.
• To piggy back off of Balto, Goodtimes Entertainment adapted The Call of the Wild and White Fang. They're all about wolves or wolf-dogs in rural Alaska.
• The success of The Prince of Egypt, which was the highest-grossing non-Disney traditionally animated movie until The Simpsons Movie, lead to a wave of theatrical Christian movies in the late '90s and early 2000s. Among them were two record-breakers of their own: The Passion of the Christ, which became the then highest-grossing R-rated film of all time (the record is currently held by Joker) and Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie, which was the highest-grossing film based on an Edutainment Show for 17 years until Dora and the Lost City of Gold surpassed it.
• Before they began copying Disney, the success of Don Bluth in the mid-1980s (back when he was under Steven Spielberg's control) led to a number of animated movies that are mostly about non-humans (or in some cases, humans) saving their home from danger. These include Rover Dangerfield, FernGully (which also included certain Disney elements), We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story, Once Upon a Forest, Balto, and The Pagemaster.
• While cartoons such as The Loud House and DuckTales (2017) have experimented with the comic-book/comic-strip style of animation, it was the release of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse that really popularized the style in large part due to an effective blend of 2D and CG animation styles, what is now dubbed as Painted CGI. As a result, it was a critical and commercial success that ultimately earned it the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Following its release, several different animated films (and even television series) have been inspired by Spider-Verse, including:
  • The Mitchells vs. the Machines, another Sony Pictures Animation film that also shared Phil Lord & Chris Miller as co-producers.
  • The Bad Guys (2022) from DreamWorks Animation that adopts a more "illustrative and stylized" aesthetic than their previous films while also taking inspiration from Japanese anime/manga such as Lupin III and Sherlock Hound; French animated films such as Ernest et Célestine and The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales; and American films such as Ocean's Eleven, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Heat, and The Fifth Element.
  • Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, also from DreamWorks Animation and released the same year (in 2022), took on a more painterly-style design to make the film resemble more like a fairy-tale world with storybook illustrations. Like The Bad Guys, The Last Wish was also inspired by a Japanese anime/manga, this time AKIRA.
  • Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah, the directors of Ms. Marvel (2022) (set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe), was inspired to create the hand-drawn style of visual effects as a means to "translate the vibrancy of the comics into live-action".
  • Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (2023) for Disney Television Animation was inspired to recreate the similar energy of the film but on a TV budget; music also plays a large part in the series despite not being a musical.
  • Netflix's Entergalactic, a television special starring Kid Cudi homages the animation style of Into The Spider-Verse with a vibrant New York aesthetic.
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem sees this iteration of the Turtles visualized with a sketchier comic book/doodle aesthetic that pushes further than even the first Spider-Verse film. Notably, the project's helmed by Jeffery Rowe, who was the co-director of The Mitchells vs. the Machines.