New Era of Disney

They chose lots of different stories and source materials, but usually forced them to fit the same general mould. Disneyfication was a huge problem with both Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Hercules, none of which was really a story fit to be told as a traditional, family friendly Disney adventure. That's not to say I think these films are bad, but their potential was wasted because of Disney's insistence on not straying too far away from their formula.

I hope they really experiment more. Of course they still need to make sure the movies gross at least around $400 million or it's considered a "FLO-op"!

There was a lot which went wrong already during the Disney Renaissance...Pocahontas, which was designed as Oscar bait and failed spectacularly, the Cheapquels, the inability to get away from the formula which they used no less than six times in a row (from beauty and the beast up to Hercules, and the only reason I don't count The Little Mermaid is because The Rescuers Down Under was thrown in inbetween).

Add to how they thought The Lion King, in production in tandem with Pocohontas, would be their weaker film (talking animals? Pfff!). Booooy did they ruin a whole decades' worth of business.

which I honestly don't get...it's not like they didn't do a whole era with movies about talking animals beforehand. The advantage of talking animals is that they can get away much easier with killing off a deer or a lion than a human parent. So they can get much darker.

But I guess they have learned from it...they seem to be trying to mix it up a little bit and keep the princess formula to the actual fairy tale movies instead of using it for them all.

The thing was that 90's Disney didn't think people wanted to see movies with talking animals anymore. Looking back at the behind-the-scene stuff for TLK, there was a lot of doubt in the studio about whether people would want to see Hamlet with lions.

Yeah, I know, they basically did a test drive with TLM vs The Rescuers Down Unter....they did the same with Pat F and Tangled. Apparently they still haven't learned that is always about how good the movie is, and not how the character looks like or which animation is used.

So Iger is just as evil as Eisner now?

I like to think of this new era of Disney as the Reconstruction era. After people got tired of the Shrek formula, the way Disney's The Princess and the Frog, Tangled, and Frozen played with and modified various fairy tale tropes without outright deconstructing them and still maintained a sincerity and seriousness about its fairy tale elements that pretty much no other animated studio would dare to do was a lot like Disney saying, "Yeah, there are some elements of our classic fairytale films that need to be updated, but there's still a place for them in our contemporary society."

It's no second Renaissance because Disney is no longer the unchallenged and undisputed animation titan that can singlehandedly revive and codify an entire medium/genre (hell, the best animated film of this year might very well turn out to be Warner Bros'), but it's nice to see Disney find a balance between honoring tradition and trying out new approaches and become an animation contender again.

For now, anyway. I'm worried that Big Hero 6 will try too hard to appeal to Marvel fans (who will likely turn up their noses at an animated "kids" film) and end up alienating its core audience like the action/adventure-heavy Atlantis and Treasure Planet did. And I'm less than enthused about Zootopia because I feel like the "talking animal" film has become much more Dreamworks's style than Disney's. But we'll see.

Their era of Talking Animals also happened to be their Dark Age.

Try to look at it from the Executive's Viewpoint; before The Lion King was released, The Little Mermaid put them back on the map, Beauty And The Beast was the first animated film ever to be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars, and Aladdin was (at the time) The Highest Grossing Animated Movie ever. In a lot of ways, The Lion King was a throwback to the 70's and 80's where a lot of their movies featured talking animals and majority of them performed crappily at the box office. So in their mind, The Lion King was just going to be filler just like The Rescuers Down Under.

Pocahontas on the other hand was "tailor made" with critical success in mind. It was even based off a true story instead of a fairy tale.

edited 5th Mar '14 5:38:44 PM by Lionheart0

It amuses me that their "filler" work still hires the voice of Darth Vader, Elton John to write the songs, brings live animals to the set, and tried to reunite the classic comedy duo Cheech and Chong.

edited 5th Mar '14 6:35:18 PM by Tuckerscreator

Yeah Disney will never be able to reestablish themselves in a new prosperous animation age, because 20 years ago, they were the only studio in the USA doing animated films like that! Now, we have several studios all doing films globally, many which are even better than Disney! They're finding a new place of themselves in this new market.

I like Reconstruction Era. It fits the situation pretty well.

While there are other studios poised for success, I think there is still a pretty clear order of rank between them. There is Pixar at the top (even though it is currently waning) and Disney (who just managed to find their footing again). Together they are still dominating the industry. As successful as Dream Works is, they are still one step behind. And everyone else is one step behind Dream Works, with Aardman and Ghibli thrown into the mix as wild cards.

Maybe someone can add it to the YKTTW section and see where it goes from there.

Reconstruction Era? Makes me look at Princess and the Frog in a new light.

I was gonna say what about Sullivan Bluth Studios, but then I remembered their early nineties stuff wasn't so good, and it was founded by ex-Disney people anyway...

Yeah I say we avoid referring to it as the reconstruction era...

"War without fire is like sausages without mustard." - Jean Juvénal des Ursins

...Whoops, I didn't realize the potential Unfortunate Implications of that term. Maybe we could call it the Decon Recon era instead? Wreck-It Ralph, now that I think of it, was a Decon-Recon Switch of video game roles.

On a side note, what kind of eras do you usually divide the earlier Disney films into? I've seen many different names being used for some certain periods like Dark Age/Dork Age/Lost Era/Modern Era for the period between the Renaissance and this new era, and people disagree on how to classify the period after Walt died and before the Renaissance. Not to mention how some people like to split the Renaissance into two parts, the first half ending with The Lion King.

Even before I heard of Tvtropes, I still divided Disney's ages in the Golden Age, Silver Age, Dork Age, the Renaissance, and this one.

Wouldn't the package films from Saludos Amigos to Ichabod and Mr. Toad count as its own era between the Gold and Silver ages?

Dork age? lol!

The time between the Golden Age and the Silver Age is usually called the "Package movie era" since that's the only thing Disney did during the time. Some people don't like the name "Silver Age" though, because it implies that it was somehow lesser than the "Golden Age". And some people like to divide the Dark Age, since the change to a new group of animators happened during it.

I prefer to refer to the eras in a way that doesn't imply that the movies of X era are superior/inferior just because they came out in that era. Except the Renaissance, but only because it took place during the Renaissance era of animation in general. Because even if Disney wasn't doing so hot as a company when stuff like The Fox And The Hound or Treasure Planet came out, I still consider them good movies.

I love Treasure Planet too, but you'll have to acknowledge that financially, it's one of, if not THE least successful films of the Disney canon. The moniker "Dark Age" for both eras has as much to do with financial income as with quality.

Well, that's the difference between the first Dark age and the last one. During the first dark age, Disney was forced to economize on the animation. Only a few pet projects like The Jungle Book got really elaborate animation. Everything else was kept very "scratchy" and limited. I adore some of the movies they made during that time, but the animation is nevertheless subpar (Robin Hood has by far the worst animation of all Disney Movies...it works nevertheless overall because everything else is so good). From Fox and Hound onwards it got a little bit better, because the computer technology slowly developed and Don Bluth's challenged Disney with works like "Secret of Nimh", "Land before time" and "An American Tail". The 2000s on the other hand didn't disappoint on the technical aspect at all. All those movies were big projects and that is kind of the problem. They had to be successful, but they also had much more concurrence...and I am not just talking about other animation studios, this was also the time of the Movie series. Treasure Island for example was pretty much put on the spot by Disney. Not only was it the second movie they released in the same year (Lilo and Stitch was the first), they also expected the movie to hold up against Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings - The movie had a snowball chance in hell from the get go (btw, I think the price for the least successful movie still belongs to The Black Cauldron - no other movie ever lost against the Care Bears). Though the era did end in a string of really bad movies.

edited 7th Mar '14 2:14:39 PM by Swanpride

Swanpride, are you the same Swanpride who comments on the Unshaved Mouse's blog? I recall that Mouse called these eras the "Scratchy Era" (101 Dalmatians to The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh), "Mourning Era" (The Rescuers to Oliver & Company), and "Lost Era" (Fantasia 2000 to Bolt).

Personally, I think that "Dark Age" does work pretty well to describe said Mourning Era, in the same way The Dark Age Of Comic Books refers more to their writings' Darker and Edgier tone than to their actual quality; The Black Cauldron in particular was much more grim in tone and what it seemed to portend for Disney animation (total animation death instead of just the death of 2D animation) than Treasure Planet. Well okay, Oliver & Company can't exactly be called "dark" but there always seems to be one odd duck in every Disney era (The Rescuers Down Under in the Early Renaissance, Hercules in the Late Renaissance, Winnie the Pooh in this new era).

I think of Treasure Planet's period as more of an "Experimental Era" when Disney was basically experimenting with multiple formulas/genres/animation styles to try to break away from their animated musical formula without alienating their core audience. Turned out to be easier said than done.