There have been 61 official, Disney animated features since Snow White in 1937, and we watched every single one and ranked them from worst to best.
It's hard to rank the Disney animated films, and not just because there are so many of them. These are films that mean so much to so many people, that are inherently linked to powerful memories of childhood and have informed what we so many adults consider magical. Ranking their respective strengths and weaknesses becomes as much an investigation of why you loved something as it is to their relative worth as a creative endeavor.
59. Home on the Range For a while it looked like Home on the Range would be the last traditionally animated movie Disney would ever release. And if that had been true it would have been a truly inglorious demise. Home on the Range, originally envisioned as an ambitious supernatural western called Sweating Bullets , soon mutated into a dinky musical comedy featuring three female cows who attempt to stop a cattle rustler .
55. The Black Cauldron This movie is terrible but the stories that came out of it are beyond delicious. More than ten years in the making , The Black Cauldron was the first Walt Disney animated film to feature computer-generated imagery, the first to have a Dolby Digital soundtrack, the first to be rated PG and the first to extensively use 70mm since Sleeping Beauty in 1979. It was the nadir of the post-Walt period; the production was wasteful, exorbitant, and creatively unfocused.
51. Make Mine Music The third of the World War II-era "package films" designed to keep the studio afloat while the actual physical studio was being occupied by the US military and forced to churn out artful propaganda films, Make Mine Music has slightly more prestige and a handful of memorable pieces, but like the other films in this series feels like what it is – a collection of unrefined ideas shoved next to one another and released theatrically.
47. The Aristocats This, of all things, was the last film approved by Walt Disney himself before his untimely death in 1966. Originally conceived as twin episodes of his prime-time television series, Walt liked the story so much that he suggested it might work better as an animated feature. Even with more than two years of work put into refining the storyline, the movie often feels worn and like a lesser version of better Disney films .
44. Raya and the Last Dragon In many ways, Raya and the Last Dragon is a film about resurrecting the past and going back to what worked before, and this certainly feels like Disney sticking with tried and true formulas. For example, Raya’s story of a princess who must go out on her own to save her family and her home thematically feels a bit like Moana, while Awkwafina’s performance as Sisu the dragon can’t help but remind of the Genie from Aladdin.
41. Fantasia 2000 Walt had always wanted to do another Fantasia. Before it was released he hypothesized that it could have run for decades, with an occasional new segment being added to appease new audiences. While work on a follow-up was flirted with in the early 1980s, it wasn't until Fantasia was released on home video in 1990 and sold 15 million copies that company head Michael Eisner gave the project a green light.
39. The Rescuers Down Under Looking at Walt Disney Animation Studios' upcoming slate, it almost seems quaint that The Rescuers Down Under was the studio's first big-screen animated sequel. This follow-up to 1977's The Rescuers found Bernard and Miss Bianca traveling to Australia to assist in the rescue of a rare golden eagle, a fictitious species that I 100% believed was real after seeing the film.
36. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad Disney's last "package film" for almost 30 years, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, instead of featuring a constellation of shorts, is cleaved down the middle – one half is The Wind in the Willows, an adaptation of the E.H. Shepard novel that also borrowed from Toad Hall, a stage adaptation by Winnie-the-Pooh author A.A. Milne, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, based on the classic story by Washington Irving.
Of course, all of that production time meant that the budget ballooned to more than $260 million, making it the costliest animated film of all time and one of the most expensive movies ever. And there are people who love Tangled. To me, it's definitely the start of an exciting period for Disney animation but lacked the adventurousness and verve of The Princess and the Frog, released the previous year and accomplished using good old-fashioned hand-drawn animation.
Later, Walt would more honestly say it was a "terrible disappointment." And, he's not wrong. This could have been something spectacular. But by all accounts, nobody on the movie was particularly happy to be working on the project and directors of different sections of the movie were constantly trying to outdo the others, resulting in a kind of flamboyant blandness. When everything is crazy, nothing is. Still, its legacy is unusually long.
27. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh This charming collection of shorter adventures featuring Winnie the Pooh featured three sections that had already been released theatrically, and a fourth was newly created for this program.
24. Encanto For the last decade or so, Disney's animated films have been playing with the audience's expectations of what a Disney animated film can be, but rarely has this felt as lively, beautiful, and charming as it does in Encanto.
21. Lilo & Stitch Produced largely in secret at the Walt Disney Animation Studios outpost in Orlando, Florida, Lilo & Stitch is truly one-of-a-kind. It's a buddy movie about an alien posing as a dog and his friendship with a young Hawaiian girl with anger issues. You know, that old story. Written and directed by the genius filmmaking team of Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, Lilo & Stitch is aggressively unusual, in the best possible way.
17. The Little Mermaid Originally proposed during one of the infamous "gong show" pitch meetings at the studio, it was dismissed for being too similar to Splash, a recent live-action hit for Disney that also involved a mermaid. Filmmaker Ron Clements revisited the idea after his work on The Great Mouse Detective was completed and, with a fuller presentation that included elements absent from the original pitch, it was promptly green-lit.
Still, the film is so rich and rewarding, and lovable. Set in the Louisiana bayou, it practically oozes atmosphere, complete with spicy Cajun musical numbers by Randy Newman that are fierier than New Orleans Jambalaya and a cast of bewitching supporting characters, including a jazz-loving alligator and lovesick firefly. It also has one of the greatest villain villains ever in the form of Dr. Facilier , a smooth-talking witch doctor whose voodoo spells and incantations get the better of him.
11. Winnie the Pooh If you want to know how you successfully kill an animated feature , take a page from former Disney exec Dick Cook, whose displeasure with Winnie the Pooh led him to schedule its domestic release against the insanely anticipated Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2. Yep. If you've never seen this film , that's probably why.
7. The Lion King Up until The Lion King, every Walt Disney Animation Studios feature had been based on some kind of preexisting material, which made the film truly unexplored territory. At the same time that the film went into production another, much more prestigious piece was gearing up. Animators had a choice as to what film they wanted to work on; unsurprisingly The Lion King crew was scrappier and more inexperienced.
4. Bambi One of the films that could have been the studio's first animated feature, Bambi wound up being something that was put on the back burner for a few years because Walt was worried the animators weren't capable of capturing the story's naturalistic textures yet. By the time the movie was finally put into production, Walt was secure with the animator's talents, specifically signing some of his favorites to specific tasks, like background animation or special effects work.
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