Disney might be the #1 name in animation, but even they’ve made some stinkers in the past.
What are the biggest stains on the Disney Canon?
(It should be noted that a movie that’s bad by Disney standards is still better than the majority of movies out there)
(Also, animated feature films only)
A weak retelling of Oliver Twist, with a poor storyline, meh voices, only average animation and forgettable songs.
A year later Disney came out with Beauty and the Beast.
To be fair, Disney’s been known to take some creative liberties with the source material of their movies.
And you mean Disney came out with Little Mermaid.
According to both Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, the two worst Disney pictures are Chicken Little and Brother Bear. Metacritic has Home on the Range third. Those movies just happen to be the last three released by Disney before they bought Pixar. (Rotten Tomatoes has the aforementioned Oliver & Company third; Metacritic doesn’t have a score for it.)
The worst I’ve personally seen (out of roughly half of them) is Pocahontas.
The Fox and the Hound. Dull and exceedingly bland. It’s as if they were afraid of failure, so played it as safe as they could.
Home on the Range has little to recommend it, either.
3 years later, not 1. The Little Mermaid was 1 year later.
Oh, my, so many bad ones to choose from. And no, I’m not a Disney Hater. I like most of the early stuff, but some time in the seventies, I think, they got on a very bad jag, and pumped out crap after crap after crap. Intensely formulaic, with extremely limited range of ideas. Robin Hood was from that awful run, Fox and Hound, Aristocats. Sword in the Stone was pretty weak.
I don’t see near as many as I used to, since my kids are grown. I haven’t seen any of the direct-to-disk sequels. Since I haven’t heard any talk about them, I assume they are formulaic dreck as well.
Mulan 2 is a really good one, but most are subpar.
Hey! I liked Home on the Range and Chicken Little!
What about
**Treasure Planet
Atlantis – The Lost Empire
Meet the Robinsons**
Black Cauldron
The Lion King.
For “lack of originality”.
I second this one, and what makes it worse is that I loved The Chronicles of Prydain books and have been really wanting a movie made from them.
Disney’s films foundered after Walt’s death, with his brother Roy at the helm, and with a lot of the company’s focus on building out Disney World. They cranked out formulaic cartoons and live-action films through the 1970s and early 1980s, and the only reason I can’t name the turgid “The Black Hole” as a nominee for this thread is that it was a live-action film.
Michael Eisner and Frank Wells were brought in (in '84, I believe), and they oversaw the revival of the animation studio, as well as the growth of the Touchstone label for non-kids films.
Pretty much every Disney sequel is terrible. The Little Mermaid II? Terrible. The Hunchback of Notre Dame II? Awful. Mulan II? Atrocious. Beauty and The Beast- The Enchanted Christmas? Lazy and actively aggravates you. The Fox and the Hound II? Boring and depressing. (It’s actually a mid-quel so the entire time you’re watching it, you know that no matter what happens in the movie, they’re still doomed to suffer the ending of the first movie.)
This. I recently saw snippets of the cauldron born sequence. What was that, Disney’s idea of a bad acid trip?
All three are weak, but not bad.
By and large, those sequels were done as direct-to-video, rather than for theatrical release, and they usually didn’t have the same top-tier creative teams involved (even if they often got some of the voice actors to return). So, I’m not too surprised that they aren’t very good.
The Good DInosaur
This was one of the first ones Disney put out that was after their Pixar acquisition, but not a Pixar film. Not only was the film boring, but the characters made no sense and the human that acted like a dog was just stupid.
I think (know…) I’ll be in the minority of this, but Mulan did nothing for me and I thought it was a pretty dumb movie.
CalMeacham:
No way! That movie is such wacky fun! And the ending, even if a bit predictable, was full of heart.
Nope. Good Dinosaur was Pixar all the way. Disney acquired Pixar in 2006. Good Dinosaur came out in 2015. Toy Story 3 was the first Pixar film to begin production after the acquisition. (Ratatouille, Wall-E and *Up *were all in production prior to the acquisition, and were being shopped around, as *Cars *was the last film in the existing Disney-Pixar deal, and Steve Jobs and Michael Eisner couldn’t get along). Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios are still operated as separate entities, despite being under the same corporate umbrella and John Lasseter being Chief Creative Officer of both.
So strictly addressing Disney Studio feature product…
Of the ones I’ve seen (pretty much everything prior to 1999 and scattered ones the kids were interested in since then), I’ll go with Robin Hood. Even at 7-years-old, I thought it was too long and had too many scenes that went nowhere. Seeing it as an adult I noticed all the recycled animation and general cheapness.
For more recent stuff, I thought *Bolt *was pretty weak (despite a great opening sequence) and couldn’t wait for it to be over.
I’m glad they’re on an upswing right now. I’ve enjoyed everything I’ve seen starting with Tangled.