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Here is my continuation of “My Ranking Of The Disney Animated Canon Part 1“
Oliver & Company is a film that I found surprisingly enjoyable. While several of the characters are forgettable, I do like the characters of Oliver, Dodger and Fagin quite a bit and care about what happens to them. The animation is very pleasant as well, more so for the characters since there are some scratchy backgrounds of New York City that I don’t care for.
I recently rewatched the vast majority of the Disney Animated Canon, the animated movies developed by Walt Disney Animation Studios, with a few other people and had a fantastic time discussing the history of Disney, the place of each film within it and my thoughts on each movie. Having finally finished with Frozen II, I don’t have Raya and the Last Dragon or Encanto on Blu-Ray, I thought it might be interesting to do a personal ranking of each movie within the Disney Animated Canon. Understandably, discussing 58 films is quite a daunting task so I decided, to shorten the overall length of this article, I’m going to purely discuss my own thoughts on each movie, i.e., I’m not going to discuss their premises. With that being said, let’s start with my ranking from worst to best.
As far as I’m concerned, Chicken Little is the worst film that Walt Disney Animation Studios has ever produced. The animation and character designs are very unappealing and the story itself is surprisingly mean-spirited and unpleasant. I’ve only ever seen this film once and, as you can imagine, I have no desire to see it again.
I’ve been covering many animation studios and animation legends recently and there has been a particular studio that I’ve been holding off discussing, Aardman. The reason that I’ve held off on discussing Aardman Animations is because I have a weird relationship with their works in that I hold many of their titles in high esteem while I also feel that they’ve wasted their potential. However, I feel that it’s high time that I take a look at the company, their works and my thoughts.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Aardman Animations, they are a UK based animation company that are famous for using stop-motion. They were originally founded in 1972 and have since developed many notable animated works such as Morph, Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run etc. It’s also worth noting that Chicken Run, their first theatrical movie, retains the record for being the highest-grossing stop-motion animated film in history.
I would hope that, by this point, readers are well aware of my passion for the medium of animation. While I do cover the topic of anime quite extensively, I’ve also spoken about my admiration for Western animation and my frustration at how many people look down on animation as being inferior to live-action. However, this viewpoint that animation is inferior to live-action did not simply come out of a void. Instead, this damage to the legitimacy of animation as a storytelling medium developed over the course of the Dark Age of Animation whose devastating impact continues to be felt today.
Prior to the advent of the Dark Age of Animation, animation was in a golden age with numerous popular theatrical shorts such as Merrie Melodies, Looney Tunes, Disney, Betty Boop etc. earning critical praise and delighting audiences of all ages. Additionally, Disney were developing theatrical feature films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Peter Pan and more that proved to be financially and critically successful. However, the rise of television presented a new threat to the film industry and the box office failure of Sleeping Beauty, which was released in 1959, along with the death of the theatrical animated short heralded the Dark Age of Animation.
There are a lot of things that I’m proud of in my DVD/Blu-Ray collection but one of the more notable things that I have are nearly every film from Walt Disney Animation Studios (I refuse to buy Chicken Little even for completion purposes). A lot of people seem drawn to that section of my collection whenever I have them over and they quite often show a great deal of familiarity with a lot of the films there. However, one section of my Disney collection that always seems to be unknown to a lot of people seems to be movies six through eleven. These films were known as “Package Films” and, while strange in comparison to a lot of other Disney films, prove to be an incredibly important part of the history of the company.
Before we get into the films themselves, I feel it’s important to explain why they are called package films and the reason they were produced in the first place. Disney had been incredibly successful with the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs but Pinocchio and Fantasia had both been box office failures and while Dumbo and Bambi were successful, they weren’t anywhere near as successful as Snow White had been. By 1942, the year Bambi was released, the US had entered World War II and many of Walt Disney’s animators had been drafted or had left the company due to the 1941 Disney animators’ strike. Due to this shortage of funds and staff, the next six films that Disney would produce would combine multiple stories from as few as two to as many as ten, hence the name “Package Films”.
Being a Japanese product, it’s pretty obvious that manga will be adapted into a wide variety of Japanese media such as anime series, live-action films, etc. It’s also clear that America, with the largest film industry in the world, would also adapt various manga series. However, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some non-Japanese/American adaptations of manga since it feels like these are less well known.
While Japan had worked with other countries to coproduce film adaptations of manga, such as the Golgo 13 films and Lady Oscar, the first film that I’m aware of that adapted a manga without any involvement of the Japanese film industry was the 1990 Hong Kong film “Killer’s Romance” which was a loose adaptation of Crying Freeman. Amusingly, another Hong Kong film called “The Dragon from Russia”, which was also released in 1990, also adapted Crying Freeman!
I have recently been watching some of the more questionable in quality Don Bluth films in an effort to both say that I have seen them and to learn more about his change in style over time. One of these films was Bartok the Magnificent, a prequel to the 1997 film Anastasia, that follows Bartok, the minion of Rasputin in the original film. Watching Bartok the Magnificent, I observed that it was clearly a below average animated film but, more importantly to me, it was a terrible prequel. Realising the difference between the quality of the movie and its purpose as a prequel, I decided to take a look at what makes a good prequel and a bad one.
Having brought up Bartok the Magnificent, let’s begin by analysing this film. The structure of the film isn’t terrible even if it is very generic. Bartok is an entertainer who works with a bear called Zozi, voiced by Kelsey Grammer with the character being a clone of Fraser Crane. They visit Moscow and Bartok finds himself responsible for rescuing the child Tsar who has been kidnapped by Baba Yaga. He encounters Baba Yaga, must perform some tasks for her in return for the location of the Tsar and there is a twist, albeit a predictable one at that, near the end of the film. While not a good film in my humble opinion and it’s certainly not one that I could imagine myself rewatching in my spare time, there is some pleasant animation, the characters are voiced well and there are moments of entertainment from time to time.
There are a wide variety of extras that I love to get along with the media that I enjoy. From commentaries to behind the scenes information to appendixes, there is so much extra content that I love to see included with releases. However, an area that I would love to see more from would be concept art, an extra that I would consider to be highly underrated.
First, let’s discuss what concept art is. Concept art is artwork that is produced for a wide variety of creative mediums such as animation, graphic novels, video games, live-action media etc. These concept art will develop ideas for characters, settings, technology etc. and will tend to go through several iterations as feedback, both creative and practical, is received. Concept art can be used for a variety of purposes from advertising to refining the product itself to even seeking funding from investors.
Here is my continuation of “The Important Animator Ralph Bakshi Part 1“.
After The Lord of the Rings, Ralph Bakshi wanted to create another original film and approached Columbia Pictures to finance his next film. After securing the deal, Ralph set about making a film that would incorporate a large number of songs into a story that stretched across multiple generations of a Russian Jewish immigrant family. Similar to The Lord of the Rings, American Pop used a lot of rotoscoping to create the animation although it also incorporated other techniques such as live-action and archival footage as well. The film was ultimately successful when it was released in 1981, doing well at the box office and being warmly received.
I recently wrote about the amazing American animator Don Bluth and the impact his films have had on American animation. However, there is also another animator who contributed greatly to the development of American animation and that is the incredibly important Ralph Bakshi, a pioneer of independent, generally adult animation throughout the 70s and 80s.
Born in the city of Haifa in modern day Israel, then the British Mandate of Palestine, in 1938, he and his family emigrated to America in 1939. When Ralph was 15 years old, he discovered Gene Byrnes’ “Complete Guide to Cartooning” and studied the book intensely, learning the techniques associated with cartooning. By the age of 18, he was hired at the New York animation studio Terrytoons to clean animation cels. He worked on a variety of Terrytoons shows such as Heckle and Jeckle, Deputy Dawg and eventually created his own animation series for them, The Mighty Heroes. However, he was unhappy with the quality of the show due to limitations by the studio and left to create his own animation studio. He eventually came across the Fritz the Cat comic strip and became determined to produce a film based on it.
