The Minions from Despicable Me were lauded as the movie's funniest characters and became the series'Breakout Character group. This, of course, wound up leading to other companies wanting a piece of the pie and coming up with their own Minion-like characters themselves. (i.e. McDonald's Happy Meal creatures, the elves in Dreamworks' Rise of the Guardians, and the lemmings in Norm of the North, etc.) The verbally-impaired-friends/helpers-of-the-protagonist trope has seen so much use that anyone who went back to watch the movie that broke it into the mainstream will likely fail to see the appeal of the Minions.
Disney princesses. Snow White, Princess Aurora, and Cinderella. People often complain that these characters are boring and don't do much, especially compared to their later counterparts. However, at the time of their release, these characters would have been considered proactive when compared to most depictions of women in media (especially women in animation or children's entertainment in general). They appear even more proactive and nuanced when compared to the characters from the original fairy tales, who did and said far less. For example, both Snow White's and Aurora's relationships with their princes were an improvement over the original fairy tales, in that they met and interacted before they were saved. Aurora in particular was the first princess to actually properly get to know her prince.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Back in 1937 this was the first studio animated feature that was so perfectly executed that it surpassed all the previous attempts to make an animated feature. While the film is still popular in modern times, few people realize this cartoon pretty much placed the standard on which all animated cartoons afterwards are still judged to this day. It was a landmark film because it proved that animation was a viable medium alongside live-action. And it's not just a great cartoon, a lot of techniques pioneered in this movie were even groundbreaking and impressive when compared to most live-action movies at the time. This also means that every animated movie that followed would take cues from it, and as a result, the 80+ years of films homaging, parodying, and generally being influenced by Snow White make the original film look like a Cliché Storm.
Computer graphics, either splicing it with cel animation or using it as an All-CGI Cartoon, has evolved a lot over the years. The Black Cauldron (1985) was the first to use CGI as a special effect. Watching it nowadays, it veers almost into Special Effect Failure. Disney's subsequent film, The Great Mouse Detective (1986), has similar problems with the very obviously CG gears. Pixar and Dreamworks's early movies also look a lot more rubbery and stiff compared to their most recent cartoons, and the human characters fall right into the Unintentional Uncanny Valley. But at the time, they were some of the most technically impressive films on the market.
On a similar note, it can be hard for latecomers to glean how groundbreaking the ballroom sequence in Beauty and the Beast was. Instead of enhancing an effect or environment like the above examples, the computer-aided environment brought not just greater fidelity to the ballroom, but was able to help the animators simulate a swooping camera so that the two-dimensional Belle and Beast looked like they had 360 degrees of movement for their dance. Until the release of Toy Story, it was generally seen as the most visually watershed sequence in a full-length animated movie.
Genie in Disney's Aladdin (1992). A-List actors did not star in speaking roles before this. Nowadays it's more uncommon for a mainstream film to not have celebrities as voice actors. This film also set the trend of Anachronism Stew and Parental Bonus, which was notably different to what Disney was doing at the time, and has since influenced countless subsequent movies including Shrek.
The Little Mermaid might seem like a paint-by-numbers Disney flick these days. But when it came out in 1989 it was hugely groundbreaking. It was the first Disney film to merge the fairy tale plot with Broadway elements. Numerous other stock cliches of the Disney Renaissance—feisty Plucky Girl, the "I Want" Song, Award-Bait Song, comedic animal sidekicks (great potential for tie-in merchandise), a campy villain—were all codified in this movie. Pretty much all animated projects made in the 90s owe their existence to this film.
Pocahontas is a strange one. When it came out, it was badly received by American audiences (but did very well in Europe). The main reason? It was an animated film that took great Artistic License with American history, something that hadn't been seen in an animated feature film before (though the filmmakers insisted they were adapting the legend of Pocahontas and weren't trying to be accurate)note Anastasia's producers took note of the reaction to Pocahontas and marketed the film as merely a historical fairy tale not to be taken as fact. After Pocahontas we got films like Anastasia, Titanic: The Legend Goes On, Mulan and The Hunchback of Notre Dame—all of which took place in named times and depicted historical events, but differed heavily from history in order to make a better story. Nowadays it's quite common for animated movies to take some historical artistic liberties as needed and nobody bats an eye.
This is easily the trope that ruined Don Bluth's career outside of Disney. His selling point when he first started making independent features was to do the kind of movies Disney was too stingy to consider making at the time. Unfortunately for him, Disney finallylistened, which left Bluth with heavy competition and little voice of his own.
The English dub of the original is still relatively well-done by today's standards, but it comes off as Narmy to most first-time modern-day viewers. In The '90s it was considered a major step forward for anime dubbing, featuring a reasonably faithful translation of the source material, correct pronunciations of Japanese names, and semi-believable voice acting. Incidentally, this is also true for the original German dub of the movie, so much in fact it later got a new dub along with Stand Alone Complex, taking the German cast for Stargate SG-1 under contract.
Ralph Bakshi: His 1970s animated feature films, like Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic and Coonskin, were groundbreaking for introducing adult topics in a medium that had been almost exclusively child friendly up to then. Nowadays, in an era where adult animation with references to drugs, sex, politics and bloody violence have more or less become part of the mainstream, Bakshi's work doesn't look that special anymore. Apart from the explicit nudity and pornography, there's nothing that you won't see in The Simpsons, South Park or Family Guy these days. To a modern audience, something like "Fritz the Cat" now comes across as a Random Events Plot, with a few boobies here and there to make schoolboys snicker. It's also very dated, even for something from The '70s. Bakshi himself has stated that if he did Fritz the Cat today the censors wouldn't harass him as much as they did.
Most consider this trope to have reached up to eleven with the misleading ad campaign for Disney's Tangled, which tried to portray a more traditional fairy tale as a hip spoof of fairy tales—meaning, in essence, that the Trope Maker for such traditional movies is now scared to admit they're still making them.
While Toy Story's graphics were state-of-the-art back in 1995, they pale in comparison to what's being done today. The humans look almost as plastic as the toys, there's an airless quality to the outside scenes, and the animation is not nearly as fluid and nuanced as what we see today. Compare it to Toy Story 2 just four years later and the improvement is remarkable. And then compare that to Toy Story 3 eleven years after and Toy Story 4 nine years after that, and you appreciate how much CGI has evolved in the quarter-century since the first film's debut. Also, consider the fact that before Toy Story, the number of fully computer-generated feature films was exactly zero, and it would be three more years before there was another such film. With CGI so ubiquitous today, it's hard to imagine how mind-blowing an experience it was to see Woody and Buzz for the first time.
When Bambi first premiered in 1942, audiences were blown away by the realistic appearance of the animal characters, as they were more used to the cartoony animal characters as seen in the Silly Symphonies shorts, along with films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Dumbo. The idea of using real-life animals as a reference to design and animate them realistically was groundbreaking at the time. Nowadays, thanks to films like Watership Down, The Lion King, Balto, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and Brother Bear, realistic animal characters are not only common, but practically the rule in animal-focused films (at least hand-drawn ones), and thus Bambi does not stand out as much to modern audiences.
, the impact is significantly lessened.