Stale Popcorn: The 'Disney Renaissance'

Like many older brothers, I have a younger sister. And you know, we get along all right; she's pretty cool. Heck, a lot of the time, we're actually very similar, and it's during these times that our age difference of eight years seems trivial. Other times, however, it becomes painfully clear how wide the generational gap can really be.

I'm speaking, unmistakably, about hand-drawn animated Disney films; namely that our generation got all of the awesome ones, and hers somehow got saddled with baloney like "Brother Bear" and "Home on the Range."

Our generation was lucky enough to grow up during the "Disney Renaissance" - a period where Disney shifted its strategy regarding source material and returned to the classic musical format of its older films, beginning with "The Little Mermaid" and being phased out around the end of the 90s. It's hard for me to imagine a childhood that wasn't punctuated annually by Disney Studios' latest retooling of a timeless classic.

The advent of computer-animated films made quick work of the hand-drawn industry, single-handedly crippling it in around half a decade. As computer-animated films became more and more profitable, the harder a time hand-drawn animation studios had attempting to compete with them. Now, in 2009, affording traditional animators is much tougher for an animation studio than it was even 10 years ago.

Although Pixar (which is still owned by Disney, but receives miniscule creative direction from them) has maintained an outstanding track record after 14 years in the business of feature-length animated films, I can't help but watch these visual extravaganzas and feel a little sorry for my sister's generation. Could they ever feel the subtle tenderness of Belle and the Beast dancing in that grand, gilded ballroom? Or the cathartic power of waves crashing upon the rocks at the end of "Part of Your World"?

Perhaps the greatest success of the Disney legacy is how it has shifted the paradigms of American mythological perspectives. As a crude example, I took a Classical And Mediterranean Studies course during my sophomore year, and I couldn't have been the only person who pictured Hades as a schmoozing megalomaniac with blue fire-hair who sounds just like James Woods (to anybody taking the class now: don't use that as an answer on your midterm. Turns out it isn't correct).

The impact of these films on our generation is not lost on Disney. "The Princess and the Frog," the company's rumored one-time-only return to the medium of 2-D animation, is set to be a return to form for the house Mickey Mouse built. At least, that's what trailers are promising (the latest teaser opens with crude line drawings of famous scenes from "Aladdin," "Beauty and the Beast," and "The Lion King.") Can this film possibly have the same cultural impact of its predecessors? More importantly, should it?

Maybe it's wrong for a small part of me to want my sister's interpretation of these stories to be colored by a corporately homogenized translation, one optimized for marketing and merchandizing potential. Maybe the stranglehold these movies have over my understanding of fairytales will not monopolize her generation's culture the way they did ours, and the corporate Americanization of the fairytale is dying. Maybe, in Disney's failure to produce anything remarkable in the past decade, her generation has been given a fresh start. Maybe she won't get a C+ on that stupid classics exam.

But if the youth of my generation are to wane with the passing of an entire industry, I'm grateful that we were there to experience it while it was fresh and vibrant with promise, even if that promise did not last.