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Spiritual Successor in Animated Films.


  • As well as being based on an earlier play, a live-action film, and of course historical facts, Anastasia is also the closest we have to an animated version of My Fair Lady. Both are Rags to Riches musicals set in the early 20th century, about a poor yet plucky guttersnipe girl whom two men (a Jerk with a Heart of Gold and his nicer friend) transform into a refined lady and bring into high society, and in the process she and the Jerk with a Heart of Gold move past their initial animosity and fall in love. Don Bluth considered My Fair Lady as the subject for a film before he settled on Anastasia instead, so the parallels are no coincidence.
  • The Bad Guys (2022):
    • Take the zany heist scenes, the designs of the humans, and render them in 2D black-and-white, and you'd be forgiven for thinking it's for a new installment of Lupin III. Officer Luggin's status as a dedicated member of the law constantly coming close to but always failing to apprehend her suave and crafty lupine nemesis directly bring to mind Zenigata.
    • This is the closest we'll ever get to a Sly Cooper movie. Mr. Wolf is the suave Lovable Rogue protagonist standing in for Sly, while Diane Foxington and Chief Luggins feel like a Decomposite Character of Carmelita Fox (the former being the Foxy Vixen love interest, and the latter the police officer obsessed with catching Mr. Wolf / Cooper).
  • Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022) has multiple.
    • It's a Bonkers adaptation as they're both meta Disney animated crossovers that take place in Hollywood.
    • It's the closest thing we'll get to a Who Framed Roger Rabbit sequel, being a Massive Multiplayer Crossover between multiple film companies with a heavily meta slant and a focus on the "behind the scenes" lives of famous characters.
    • Can be one to The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle as they're both meta tv show movies reviving cartoons, are incredibly self-aware No Fourth Wall Take That! movies to the dominant media from their period of time (Television and Reboot Movies) both use cel-shaded 2D for a main character, the main characters both have a buddy cop dynamic of the serious and jokester one and both of them involve the Big Bad using advanced technology to mutilate cartoon characters.
    • Possibly until it releases it is the closest thing to the film adaptation of The Amazing World of Gumball due to Medium Blending cartoons of different artstyles, both of them being lighthearted cartoons that are simultaneously self-aware meta satires that take a lot of potshots as much as they gush about animation, and both being very esoteric and unhinged cartoons full of Crosses the Line Twice humor for what would one would expect to be a family comedy.
  • Are you disappointed with the actual Ghost Rider movies we got in 2007 and 2012? Watch Disney-Pixar's Coco (although it's a Lighter and Softer Ghost Rider Musical, it's the best Ghost Rider movie we can watch, albeit without the Motorcycle thing and the Day of the Dead thing replacing many of the Underworld stuff, however).
  • Felidae:
    • The Felidae books came out before Warrior Cats, but many Warriors fans see Felidae as the ideal Warriors film in terms of concept. It's a film about talking cats that doesn't hold back on violence.
    • The similarly dark themes and scenes involving Animal Testing makes Felidae similar to an adaptation of Stray.
  • The Fox and the Hound doesn't seem to be a very faithful adaptation of the original book at all. But it does seem to be a fairly faithful adaptation of the book The Ballad of The Belstone Fox and its film adaptation, with some elements of The Fox and the Hound attached along with the name.
  • Frozen:
    • Brad Jones referred to Frozen as "the best of all the X-Men origin movies". Patton Oswalt and Joss Whedon apparently agree with him.
    • It also may be the closest thing we ever get to a big-budget Animated Adaptation of Wicked—right down to having Idina Menzel starring as an emotionally conflicted sorceress who lives alone in a castle. Not to mention that they're both revisionist retellings of popular modern fairy tales (The Snow Queen and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz), and both of them have single-word adjectives as their titles. Quite a few people have also pointed out the rather striking similarities between both musicals' Signature Songs ("Let It Go" and "Defying Gravity", respectively).
    • Jane Austen lovers sometimes view this film as Disney's equivalent of Sense and Sensibility. Both revolve around the bond between two sisters, the dutiful older one whose name starts with "El" and who hides her deep inner feeling and pain under a stoic facade, and the naïve, emotional younger one who rashly falls in love with a man who later betrays her, and then almost dies from exposure to cold, but in the end recovers and ends up with a less conventionally charming but truly better man as her Second Love.
    • The sequel can be considered one of these to Avatar: The Last Airbender . Arendelle’s role as a colonizing state can stand in for the Fire Nation, including an ancestor of two prominent character (the girls’ grandfather King Runeard and Zuko and Azula’s great grandfather, Fire Lord Sozin) killing a peaceful leader (Northuldra tribe elder and Avatar Roku) as a means to an end to start colonizing. The stories both revolved around the four elements, Anna and Elsa’s role as the fifth element to bring peace is similar to that of the Avatar’s, and their mixed heritage of good (Northuldra tribe) and bad (King Runenard) is analogous to Zuko being the great-grandson of a Big Good figure (Avatar Roku) and bad figure (Fire Lord Sozin). The main trios of both consist of two siblings, one of whom is magical (Elsa/Katara) and one of whom is not (Anna/Sokka) with the third member of the trio being one of the sibling’s love interest (Kristoff/Aang). The Enchanted Forest is also very similar to the Spirit World from the show.
    • There are a lot of similarities to Tangled, from title to character design to setting. This led many to believe it was just going to be ''Tangled'' IN SNOW before the film proved them very wrong.
  • The 1995 animated film Ghost in the Shell is cited by the Wachowskis as a direct influence on The Matrix films, so much so that it's practically The Matrix's spiritual predecessor.
  • Henry Selick's James and the Giant Peach and Coraline could also be seen as Spiritual Successors to The Nightmare Before Christmas, considering that Selick directed it. In fact, Jack Skellington makes a cameo in Peach as an undead pirate.
  • Hotel Transylvania can be seen as a western adaptation of Don Dracula, as is deals with a friendly Dracula raising a teenage daughter who develops a relationship with a human boy, to which Dracula objects. Both versions also feature The Igor as Dracula's sidekick. It's no coincidence that Genndy Tartakovsky is a big Osamu Tezuka fan.
  • How to Train Your Dragon (2010) and The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep (2007) are unintentionally similar. Both are kids' movies about a boy who befriends a large, misunderstood reptilian creature, going against the whims of his family. And the characters have Scottish accents.
  • How to Train Your Dragon to Lilo & Stitch, sharing the same writer-directors (Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois). Toothless the dragon is even partly based on Stitch.
  • The Land Before Time and The Lion King (1994) are both Spiritual Successors to Bambi. All three films take place in the wild and feature a cast of Nearly Normal Animals, with no onscreen humans, and all three center on the coming-of-age journey of a male animal child whose birth opens the story, who makes friends of various different species, and who at one point faces the tragic death of one of his parents. In the case of The Lion King, just like Bambi, Simba also grows to adulthood over the course of the story, falls in love with a childhood friend, eventually takes his father's place as ruler of the animals, and becomes a father himself in the end. These parallels were intentional on the part of the filmmakers: Don Bluth and Steven Spielberg's original core concept for The Land Before Time was "something similar to Bambi, but with dinosaurs," while The Lion King was nicknamed "Bamblet" during production, because the plot's two biggest inspirations were Bambi and Hamlet.
  • The LEGO Batman Movie is pretty much an unofficial adaptation of Holy Musical B@man!, with both being Affectionate Parodies of Batman that are all about how Batman doesn’t need to be obnoxiously dark and edgy to be cool, and how it’s okay for him to have friends and family like Robin. They even share a few identical jokes, like having a Running Gag about Batman hating Superman.
  • The LEGO Movie is basically an unofficial adaptation of a Monolith Soft title, especially given their affinity for adapting gnosticism-inspired themes. Given that the core plot is about the characters learning that their world is an illusion created by someone who wants to keep them oppressed, it is quite close.
  • The plot on the protagonist dealing with Time Dilation along with seeing their friends go on with their lives while remaining young Light Year caused some of the audience to compare it with GunBuster.
  • Monsters, Inc. was called "the best movie that Jim Henson never made" by Muppet performers shortly after its release. Appropriate, as director Pete Doctor is a huge Muppets fan and wanted to be a Muppeteer before becoming an animator; not only that, but Muppet veteran Frank Oz has a minor role, as Randall's scare assistant Fungus.
  • Within the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fandom, the plot of My Little Pony: A New Generation has driven comparisons across the board to Fallout: Equestria. Both take place far, far after the events of the original show, when the events of it have become legends. Both feature a pony travelling out from her secluded home, joined by a gang of ponies from various tribes on a long cross-continental trek. The Pegasi in both have retreated to the clouds and formed a more technologically advanced society, while down below a red Earth Pony utilizes fear and coercion to begin gathering an army he can control Equestria with. The message of both stories is about how friendship can still win out after centuries of hatred and prejudice, and the legacy of the Mane Six that continues to inspire ponies long after their deaths.
  • Robin Hood (1973), even more than to earlier retellings of the legend, is a Spiritual Successor to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as both films revolve around the adventures of two Lovable Rogue outlaws. This explains why the film cuts most of the traditional Merry Men and focuses just on Robin Hood and Little John instead; director Wolfgang Reitherman allegedly made this choice because he wanted Robin and John to emulate Butch and Sundance's dynamic.
  • Toy Story is the closest we'll get to an animated remake of Jim Henson's The Christmas Toy. Both revolve around Living Toys, with the child's favorite toy as the protagonist, both deal with the issue of the favorite toy being replaced when the child gets new toys, and in both, the potential new favorite is a space-themed superhero(ine) action figure who doesn't realize (s)he's a toy.
  • The Transformers: The Movie can be seen as a robotic version of The Coming of Galactus, having a Planet Eater transforming an alien into his herald and a flame-themed Idiot Hero finding the MacGuffin.
  • Treasure Planet is an adaptation of Treasure Island IN SPAAACE, that combines aesthetics, themes and genre tropes of both Space Opera and Wooden Ships and Iron Men. Or, if you ask Dungeons & Dragons fans, the best Spelljammer movie ever made.
  • Trolls was very much a reboot of Smurfs before the actual Smurfs reboot came out; the Smurfs are reimagined as a small, technicolor MacGuffin prey species in a (more or less) medieval environment with castles and kings, and instead of humans, we get another fictional species that looks like the ogres in that other Follow the Leader of Smurfs, the Gummi Bears.
  • Turning Red, as a movie taking place in Toronto that deals with a teenage girl's puberty in the form of an animal transformation, with an overprotective mother as an antagonist, it's probably the closest thing possible to a Disney adaptation of Ginger Snaps.
  • Up: The "Married Life" montage is sometimes referred to as Pixar's best short film, as it could have exactly the same impact if it were one.
  • Richard Linklater's Waking Life is at least a visual companion to A Scanner Darkly. Though it is a spiritual successor to Linklater's 1990 film, Slacker.
  • The Nostalgia Chick said that WALL•E is a better adaptation of The Lorax than the actual film adaptation.
  • Wreck-It Ralph could be considered one to Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Alternative Title(s): Animated Film

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