Disneyesque

So that's where "those good, old-fashioned values on which we used to rely" went.

Any non-Disney work adopting an art style that is typical of the Disney Animated Canon, for the purpose of an Homage, Affectionate Parody, or even a Take That!, to the Disney style.

Well, at least the stereotypical style is adopted. Regardless of the actual variety of the art in Disney films, many people think that all Disney films have the same general look, with traits such as:

• Soft lines.
• Large round doe eyes.
• Outlines done in colors rather than black.
• Very smooth animation in every movement.
• Only one tonal layer applied with a gaussian blur in compositing.

This can appear in a TV show, a comic book or a feature-length film; and it doesn't matter if this style lasts through the entire work or is just an Art Shift for a single scene. It can involve a character having a pleasant fantasy, even overlapping with Disney Creatures of the Farce or the Roger Rabbit Effect.

Animesque is a Sister Trope... or might even be a Sub-Trope, depending on how much you take into account Osamu Tezuka basing his style on the various Walt Disney works.

For works mimicking retro-Disney art style, see Inkblot Cartoon Style.

Contrast Limited Animation.

Not to be confused with Disneyfication, All Animation Is Disney (though it could easily lead to that), or being a Follow the Leader to Disney films.

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Examples

Anime

• Belle (2021): Belle herself stands out from every other user's avatar in U for having a very Disney Princess-inspired design, particularly with her large doe eyes and prominently drawn lips. In fact, she was originally designed by Jin Kim, a veteran Disney animator and character designer.
• Dragon Quest: Your Story controversially used an artstyle more inspired by Disney's 3D CGI films instead of the traditional Akira Toriyama style that Dragon Quest is known for.

Advertising

• Find the One: The commercials' looks, themes, and music all evoke the Disney oeuvre. The first two commercials play off the Disney Princess feel, while the last two are partly inspired by The Incredibles
• A "No Talking or Phones" Warning was couched as a trailer for a Talking Animal movie about a young female bald eagle and her goofy porcupine sidekick rescuing her father from a flock of villainous vultures.
• In 2022, Heinz Ketchup had an animated ad for No Sugar Added ketchup about a woman singing about adulting sucks with singing animals and objects.

Films — Animated

• Don Bluth was a former animator turned bitter independent rival of the Disney company. Of his many productions in the latter capacity (The Pebble and the Penguin, Titan A.E., An American Tail, The Secretof Nimh, The Land Before Time to name a few) one of the most successful was Anastasia which is noted for being one of the most Disneyesque both in aesthetic and story structure. Ironically, Anastasia now belongs to Disney being a 20th Century Studios property.
• The Warner film Quest for Camelot has a heavy influence of the Disney Renaissance movies, particularly in its character designs, use of anachronistic gags and a Award-Bait Song as its main theme.
• Some of the early DreamWorks Animation (such as The Prince of Egypt and The Road to El Dorado) show a certain influence from Disney films of the 90s.

Films — Live-Action

• Used in Enchanted, which opens with the sequences in Andalasia animated. Notably these scenes weren't done by Disney's own animation studio, as it had not yet relaunched their 2D department (though it was animated by Disney veterans).
• In the film 9 to 5, Violet has an Imagine Spot while thinking of a way to do in Mr. Hart. Dressed as Snow White, she poisons Hart's coffee with help from animated Woodland Creatures.
• Another imagine spot in Fletch Lives, this time based on Song of the South.
• A Dream Sequence in The Beautician and the Beast is done in the Disney style.
• Borat Subsequent Moviefilm features a fake Disney Princess-style movie about Melania Trump. And of course it is as kid-inappropriate as it gets.

Live-Action TV

• A running gag in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is Rebecca's obsession with the (fictional) animated film "Slumbered", which had a massive effect on her childhood and severely warped her expectations regarding romantic love. In Season 4, we finally get to see a portion of it, and it is this trope to a t. Rebecca only has access to a VHS she taped from cable as a child, as the copyright is in the Disney Vault, and not legally available.
• Kimmy's happy place in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.

Video Games

• The Banner Saga has a distinct Disneyesque graphical style.
• The character models of FeralHeart are heavily influenced by Disney's Funny Animal movies.
  • Likewise, its predecessor Impressive Title has its player characters modeled after the lions from The Lion King. In fact, it's not hard to recreate Simba, Nala, or Zira in the Character Customization menu, especially since some of the fur markings are directly pulled from the franchise, such as the Hyena's triangular spots and Zira's head stripe. And that's not mentioning the many, many hairstyles based off of Simba's and Kovu's manes.
• BioShock Infinite has a very localized instance of this regarding the design of Elizabeth. While she exists in the cynical world of Columbia and is depicted within the game's realistic art style, the game's developers explicitly took much inspiration from Disney princesses while creating her, sporting big, expressive blue eyes, a modest, yet adventurous personality similar to that of Belle from Beauty and the Beast, and even starting out in an outfit similar to what Belle wears at the start of her movie. The same artists have even mentioned needing to tone down some of Elizabeth's animations as they feared they were starting to unintentionally rip off Rapunzel of Tangled (and given that Elizabeth is also a MacGuffin Super-Person whose life was defined by entrapment in a tower by an abusive foster parent/kidnapper, that wouldn't be the only similarity).

Web Animation

• CollegeHumor has done this a fair number of times:
  • "Colors of the Wind: Stoner Edition" (aka "Tokahontas").
  • "DuckTales (1987) Theme Gone Horribly Wrong!". And by "Gone Horribly Wrong", they mean it.
  • And "Pixar Logo Gone Horribly Wrong!" Again, they mean it.
  • Prince Harry as a Disney Prince casts the UK Royal Family's Prince Harry as a Disney Prince, with predictable results: he's a stereotypical bro or chav in all the roles. Most humorously, he gets along with Gaston just swimmingly.
  • "Aladdin's Mistake". At the end of Aladdin, Aladdin wishes for Genie to become human (not free), and he also does this just as Genie comes out of the lamp. As a result, Genie becomes a helpless mutant with a death wish.
  • Website/{{Cracked]} and Rachel Bloom's video If Disney Cartoons Were Historically Accurate is parody of Disney cartoons done in their signature style.
• Applying this trope to JoJo's Bizarre Adventure sounds like a ridiculous idea, but the One Cartoonist's Dream fan musical project makes it work, for both the heroes and the villains. The art even edits Disney characters into JoJo characters, giving the viewer an idea of how the series might look in the Disney style.

Web Original

• Unshaved Mouse discusses this when reviewing Sleeping Beauty, noting that Disney had imposed their house style on lots of artists over the years, and the film itself was Walt Disney's attempts at breaking away from that style.

Western Animation

• As in the picture, Family Guy did this as one of several Alternate Universes Brian and Stewie visit in Road to the Multiverse, which included making Lois look like a Disney Princess.
• Princess Sissi, a German cartoon very loosely based on Elisabeth of Bavaria, is drawn in this style to the point the titular character herself resembles Aurora.

• Princess Clara (and anyone and anything related to her) from Drawn Together, as the show uses characters from different animation styles.
• Tex Avery's early Looney Tunes shorts aped the Disney style as closely as possible for the sake of parody.
• Tex Avery MGM Cartoons: The first Screwy Squirrel cartoon Screwball Squirrel (1944) has Screwy encountering a very Disneyesque little squirrel, who announces the cartoon will be about him "and all his cute furry friends" (a plot sounding suspiciously like Bambi), whereupon Screwy beats him up.
• The Simpsons:
  • A Valentine's Day Episode featured a Lady and the Tramp parody named "Shady and the Vamp". Although the characters were still drawn in the standard Simpsons style, the backgrounds were painted in the Disney style and the characters' lines were done in color.
  • Disney animator Eric Goldberg directed the Couch Gag for the episode "Fland Canyon", where the Simpsons appear as various Disney characters. Again, drawn in the Simpsons style, but with much smoother animation. It also depicts the wide variety of art styles within the Disney Animated Canon, with Maggie done in the Inkblot Cartoon Style of the early '30s and Homer as Baloo in the sketchy Xerox style of the 1960s and '70s.
  • The Simpsons Movie had a scene where Homer and Marge get ready for bed while in Alaska and some Disney esque animals help them, complete with a buck and a fawn that resemble Bambi and his father, the sequence was animated by former Disney animator John Pomeroy.
• Early Chuck Jones shorts, such as those featuring Sniffles the Mouse, employed this.
• Adventures from the Book of Virtues looks pretty Disneyesque for a PBS cartoon.
• Tom and Jerry and the Wizard of Oz (2011) does this with the settings and characters derived from the latter film, but lets the T&J characters have their typical look.
• For a brief period in the late 1940's at Walter Lantz studio the shorts had a very Disneyesque style, this is because Fred Moore a Disney animator worked there during the period he had been temporarily fired, Moore was largely credited for creating the Disney style, in his scenes Woody Woodpecker looked like a mix between Donald Duck and the Aracuan Bird, Andy Panda looked like Mickey Mouse in a panda costume, and in the short "Pixie Picnic" several of the titular pixies looked a lot like the Seven Dwarfs.
• One of the complaints that Paul McCartney has about the Beatles animated movie Yellow Submarine was its heavy the use of psychedelic, Pop Art and Limited Animation, since he's more a fan of Disney and the Disneyesque style.
• Ken Muse's scenes in his earlier work for Tom and Jerry was very Disneyesque, he was a former Disney animator who left the studio after the strike and came to work at MGM.
• Suzy’s story from the Johnny Bravo episode “That’s Entertainment” has a Disneyesque look to it, one sequence with a Princess (voiced by Lea Salonga who provided the singing voices of Jasmine and Mulan) that parodies Sleeping Beauty, and Suzy imagines herself as a mermaid princess looking similar to Ariel, the sequence was designed by Dan Haskett who worked on The Little Mermaid.

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