Public perception of Disney is that their work has taken a hit in quality as of late. Wish, the studio's big hundredth-anniversary event movie, underperformed both critically and commercially. Moving on from the flop of both Wish and 2022's Strange World, the upcoming slew of Disney and Pixar sequels does not inspire a lot of confidence in fans. With some of these movies digging deep into existing franchises (Toy Story 5, Frozen 3, Cars 4) and the recently announced Moana 2 coming from a reworked television series, it seems to many that the corporation is in desperation mode.

While certainly not the only problem Disney is facing right now, an often-cited issue of theirs is the animation quality of their movies. Having left hand-drawn animation behind, Disney's 3D animation is really beginning to stagnate, with the same style having been used for movie after movie. This is in stark contrast to the rest of the current animation landscape, which is in a period of brilliant innovation. It is also a depressing step behind for Disney and Pixar, who bear so much responsibility for the very existence of animated cinema.

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Disney's History In Animation

Disney was very directly responsible for the birth of animation as a financially lucrative medium. Walt Disney was not the creator of animation as a whole, of course. While Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs is often cited as the first animated film, there are several caveats to that claim. Historians consider the first true animation to be the French piece Fantasmagorie, a short film created in 1908 by Emile Cohl. The first animated feature film, meanwhile, is considered to be the Argentine El Apóstol, directed by Quirino Cristiani. Made in 1917, El Apóstolpredates Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs by a good twenty years. Tragically, the only existing copy of El Apóstol was destroyed in a fire in 1926, causing some historians to give Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs as the first feature film that is not lost.

While Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs' designation as the first ever feature-length animated film is dubious, its place in history as the first profitable animated feature film is well cemented. The film was a marvel in every sense of the word and was something the world had quite literally never seen before. Entirely hand-drawn and incorporating a Germanic art style, Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs became the highest-grossing film of 1937 and quickly grew to become a cultural phenomenon. World culture had been introduced to animation in cinema, and Disney sat at the forefront of the movement.

The techniques created by Disney Pictures revolutionized animation and allowed them to stay at the top of the game for some time. 1940's Fantasia combined vibrantly colored animation with classical music, forgoing a traditional narrative structure. 1961's 101 Dalmations was the first feature film to incorporate a Xerox method of animation created within the studio. Previously, cel-animated movies would have the animators' drawings recreated on each cell by inkers. With the Xerox method, original drawings could be placed onto the cels directly so that the animation would consist of the animators' unedited drawings. With films like Alice in Wonderland, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and Princess and The Frog, Disney continued their streak of 2D animated films that looked a cut above the competition.

In the realm of 3D animation, a huge leap forward was made through the release of Pixar's Toy Story, the first ever feature-length film to be entirely computer-animated. The film was directed by John Lasseter, a former Disney animator, and was released in 1995. Toy Story was co-produced and distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. This relationship between Disney and Pixar continued until 2006, when Disney purchased Pixar outright. Already strong for having created the first 3d animated film, Pixar's reputation continued to gain favor as they released an incredibly strong series of movies. Films like Wall-E, Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles featured groundbreaking animation and impressively mature themes for children's movies.

With both animation studios under their belt having started off at the highest of highs, Disney's grip on the animation industry seemed ironclad. Other studios, like DreamWorks, Blue Sky, and Studio Ghibli, had long coexisted with Disney and continued to thrive, creating many excellent films themselves and continuing to push the genre forward. For a long time, however, Disney and Pixar remained the first names most people would think of when they thought of animation.

When Disney and Pixar Started Falling Behind

From their earliest days, Disney films aimed for realism in their animation. When creating Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney had his animators study real animals and models in order to capture their movements as accurately as possible. In the modern day this trend continues, with Soul featuring details as intricate as fuzz on a shirt and the short film Piper looking like it could be a shot of the real ocean. Unfortunately, the methodology that once made Disney's animation so revolutionary now leaves them feeling bland and uninspired.

Art school curriculum teaches realism and portraiture as bases. Students learn to draw realistically with a very similar style among them before anything else. However, in the art world, most works of art that are extremely real-world accurate and nothing more tend to only be noteworthy if they're old and a part of art history. This is because while being able to accurately draw or sculpt realistically is impressive, it isn't very interesting on its own. Students learn the skills so that they can use the fundamental understanding of art to develop their own unique styles.

This seems to be the core of Disney and Pixar's current animation problems. Disney and Pixar were the frontrunners of 2D and 3D animated film, respectively. The techniques they developed and the films they created were what gave birth to animated movies as a cultural presence. However, while Disney excelled at creating the fundamental tools of animation, in recent times they have struggled with innovating and moving past these fundamental tools.

In 2018, both Pixar's The Incredibles 2 and Sony Animation's Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse were released. The Incredibles 2, on a strictly technical level, looks incredible. It pushes Disney's classic animation philosophy to a point never seen before. The level of realism and precise detail is highly impressive. The film's animation is intricate enough to where tiny bits of fuzz can be seen on Mr. Incredible's shirt in closeup shots. In contrast to this stark level of technical detail, Into the Spiderverse employs a completely new style of animation. The movie combines hand-drawn and computer-rendered techniques to create an incredibly flashy, colorful appearance. Filters and sections of text flash across the screen. Characters are rendered at different frame rates in order to visually communicate aspects of their character. In short, the film gave audiences the same reaction they wold have had watching Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs or Toy Story: it was like nothing they'd ever seen before.

There's more that separates the two movies besides the animation. The story and themes of Into the Spiderverse were considered far better, and in general it was just a far superior film to The Incredibles 2. However, the visuals still remain an enormous draw. Many people will simply choose to see something that looks unique over something they've seen before.

In the aftermath of Into the Spider-Verse, a number of animated movies have moved forward and worked with a similar style with a unique twist. These include The Mitchells vs The Machines, Puss In Boots: The Last Wish, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and of course the sequel to Into the Spider-Verse. Disney has abandoned 2D animation, which leaves Studio Ghibli to completely dominate that field with immensely beautiful and unique looking movies like The Boy and The Heron. Disney and Pixar, meanwhile, seem to be stuck. They keep producing films like and Encanto and Elemental, which, while technically impressive, don't look different enough from their previous efforts. They feature the same clean and realistic style. In the case of Disney, they have also received some criticism for their characters looking too similar, particularly their female protagonists, who all tend to share a very similar face.

What makes things worse is that when Disney has attempted to innovate, their efforts haven't worked out as well as one would hope. 2023's Wish was once rumored to be a hand drawn animated movie, in line with Disney's classic films. This turned out not to be the case, however, and instead Wish was a 3D animated movie made to mimic the style of traditional animation. Unfortunately, the end result didn't work very well. Rather than looking like a classic Disney film, Wish looks more like it was released before it was complete. The colors are washed out and in general the movie looks like it didn't finish rendering. Who knows what the future will hold, but things don't look too magical for the moment. Fans can only hold out hope that Disney and Pixar will find a way to tap into that old school charm they once possessed.

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