Good Advice From Disney Animated Features

I am working on a project that requires me to rewatch all 53 of the Disney animated features produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation.

Thank heavens the project doesn’t include all the Disney live-action films with a signficant animation segments, like Song of the South (1946) and Mary Poppins (1964). Nor does it encompass the 46 animated features from DisneyToon Studios, even though some of those films received a theatrical release, including A Goofy Movie (1995), Return to Neverland (2002), Piglet’s Big Movie (2003), Planes (2013) and others.

The project also does not require me to rewatch the 14 animated feature films produced by Pixar since it is operated as a separate entity from Walt Disney Feature Animation, nor do I have to review the stop-motion animated features, like The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), and James and the Giant Peach (1996), among others.

And, obviously, I do not have to concern myself with the animated features that The Walt Disney Company has acquired over the years, or ones that it merely distributes, like the Hayao Miyazaki films made for Studio Ghibli.

In general, I think the public and most Disney fans just lump all these films together as “Disney animated feature films.” However, there is a very different purpose and tone for each of these separate units.

Walt Disney Feature Animation began with Walt and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was the first U.S. animated feature film. It was also the first animated feature to be produced using cel animation and in color.

While most people consider the film to also be the first animated feature film ever made, some scholars have argued that seven films using puppets or stop-motion should be considered:

• El Apóstol (1917), Sin Dejar Rastros (1918) and Peludópolis (1931) – were all directed by Quirino Cristiani, and reportedly drawn in the style of political editorial cartoons. All copies of the films were destroyed in a fire and are considered officially lost, so it has been difficult to accurately evaluate what they truly looked like when they were first screened.
• The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) – directed by Lotte Reiniger, was made using cardboard cutouts like shadow puppets and this film has been shown on TCM.
• The New Gulliver (1935) – directed by Aleksandr Ptushko and A. Vanichkin, mostly used stop-motion puppets. These puppets had removable heads with pre-molded expressions (similar to stop-motion techniques used by George Pal and Tim Burton).
• The Tale of the Fox (1937) – directed by Irene and Wladyslaw Starevich, also used stop-motion puppetry. The film was actually completed seven years earlier but was not released at the time due to challenges with the soundtrack.
• The Seven Ravens (1937) – directed by Ferdinand and Hermann Diehl, was yet another stop-motion animated film.

There is no record that Walt Disney ever saw any of these films. For myself, and I think most of the world, I would have difficulty considering any of these films, as good as they may have been, as what people think of as a traditional animated feature.

It would be like saying that I was the prototype for someone like actor Chris Evans who plays Captain America (my favorite Marvel comic book character, especially in the stories done by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the 1960s and 1970s). Yes, we are both male so there are some similarities, but I think the differences are much more significant that no one would confuse the two of us.

For me, animated feature films begin with Snow White.

As early as 1932, Walt Disney considered making a feature length animated film in Technicolor. In May 1933, it was announced that Walt was developing Alice in Wonderland. Popular silent screen actress Mary Pickford would appear as a live action Alice in an animated wonderland (in a more elaborate version of the early short Alice Comedies that Walt had produced).

When Paramount Pictures released their fully live action version of the story in December 1933, it helped kill the Disney development of the project.

Walt initiated talks with his friend and folk comedian Will Rogers to star in a feature length film titled Rip Van Winkle. Rogers would have appeared as the title character in live-action, but the world with the little bearded men playing at nine pins would have been animated. Rogers untimely death in an airplane crash ended that dream.

Around the same time, Walt was also in discussions with King Kong’s film producer Merian C. Cooper about a co-production to make an animated feature of Victor Herbert’s operetta Babes in Toyland.

No one had ever made a traditional cartoon full-length feature length film because no one thought audiences would be interested. People believed that no one would sit still long enough for a feature-length cartoon and would quickly be bored with joke after joke after joke. Others proclaimed that the bright cartoon colors would irritate eyes watching for that amount of time.

In 1933 in Sweden, Willard G. Triest working for the vice president of United Artists film distribution, put together a 55-minute compilation of Disney short cartoons to try to promote booking them into theaters in Scandinavia.

It was an immediate sell-out in theaters in Sweden, prompting additional prints to be made for theaters in Norway and Denmark, and followed by long-running releases of this program in 20 other countries, including France.

The continued success of this compilation convinced Walt that American audiences would accept a feature-length animated film.

By October 1934, Walt had made his decision that his first animated feature film would be based on the story of Snow White. The Disney version was not so much inspired by the original Brothers Grimm fairy tale, but by the 1916 silent film adaptation that Walt had seen as a young teenager.

While in production, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was ridiculed by Hollywood as “Disney’s Folly.”

When the film premiered at the Carthay Circle Theater in Hollywood in December 1937, it sent shockwaves through the film industry because it was just as good, if not better, than the best of Hollywood’s live action films. In fact, it became the highest grossing film of all time and only dethroned from that position by the release of Gone With the Wind in1939.

Its success prompted other film studios to put into production fantasy films, including MGM’s The Wizard of Oz and Max Fleischer’s Gulliver’s Travels.

Walt, in anticipation of the success of the film, had already acquired a multitude of other properties and had them in various stages of development.

This was the beginning of Walt Disney Feature Animation that became for decades the preeminent animation studio whose development of technology and production processes along with its approach to content influenced other animation studios worldwide.

In somewhat recent years, satellite feature animation studios included Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida (1989–2004), responsible for films like Mulan (1998) and Lilo and Stitch (2002), and Walt Disney Feature Animation France (1994–2003), responsible for films like Tarzan (1999).

The most recent Disney animated feature film, Frozen (2013), is the highest-grossing animated feature film ever produced, winning Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature Film and Best Original Song.

I have discovered there have been several benefits to rewatching all of these films. It is fascinating to see the development from film to film as well as the fact that the films remain timeless, not tied to the era when they were made.

In addition, I constantly run across words of good advice, comfort, and inspiration that I have long forgotten even though I have seen these films so many times.

To brighten your day, here are a few phrases from each of the 53 films that caught my attention. I am sure you have favorites of your own.