Disney Renaissance

• 1. Introduction

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  The Disney Renaissance ran from 1989 to 1999, and in that single decade Walt Disney Feature Animation went from near-collapse to producing some of the highest-grossing animated films ever made. Before The Little Mermaid arrived in theaters, Disney's animation department had been exiled from its own studio lot, shunted into hangars and warehouses two miles away in Glendale. One of the animators who had built the studio walked out mid-production on an earlier film, taking eleven colleagues with him. The question hanging over everything was whether Disney could make animation that mattered again. What follows is the story of how a studio clawed its way back, the Broadway songwriters who rewired its DNA, the Japanese filmmaker whose work quietly reshaped its ambitions, and the ten films that defined a decade.

• 2. Before the Comeback

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  Walt Disney died in 1966, and his brother Roy O. Disney followed in 1971. What they left behind was a company in the hands of Donn Tatum, Card Walker, and Walt's son-in-law Ron Miller, with creative control over animation passing largely to Wolfgang Reitherman. Reitherman's governing instinct was caution: soften the villains so they read as comic rather than frightening, and make only material guaranteed to earn back its budget. The result was a decade-plus of films that rarely matched the studio's earlier peak. Then, during production of The Fox and the Hound in 1981, animator Don Bluth resigned and took eleven of Disney's sixty-five animators with him to launch Don Bluth Productions. Production on The Fox and the Hound was delayed by six months. Bluth's first independent film, The Secret of NIMH in 1982, was a story Disney had already turned down for being too dark, and the company spent the rest of the decade as Disney's primary rival in the animation market.

  A hostile takeover attempt by businessman Saul Steinberg forced organizational changes in the mid-1980s. Michael Eisner arrived as CEO in 1984 from Paramount Pictures, bringing with him Jeffrey Katzenberg as studio chairman. Frank Wells, formerly of Warner Bros. Pictures, became president. On the 1st of February 1985, the animation department was physically displaced from the main Burbank lot to free up space for live-action production. The new home was a cluster of hangars, warehouses, and trailers at the former Grand Central Airport site in Glendale, about two miles east. The department was told it was a temporary arrangement. It would stay there for ten years. The box office failure of The Black Cauldron in 1985 made the animation unit's future genuinely uncertain, and Roy E. Disney, who had resigned from the company in 1984, returned at Eisner's invitation specifically to try to reverse the division's fortunes.

• 3. The Spark: Bluth, Miyazaki, Spielberg

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  Three outside forces lit the fuse for what became the Renaissance. The first was Don Bluth himself. When Disney released The Great Mouse Detective in 1986 and Bluth countered with An American Tail the same year, An American Tail outperformed The Great Mouse Detective and became the highest-grossing animated film released to that point. The competitive pressure, combined with The Great Mouse Detective's own critical and commercial respectability, shook Disney's executives into taking the animation unit more seriously.

  The second force came from Japan. Hayao Miyazaki's 1979 film Castle of Cagliostro, an adaptation of the animated TV series based on Monkey Punch's Lupin the Third comics, directly influenced the climactic sequence of The Great Mouse Detective. That two-minute scene used computer-generated imagery, making it the first Disney film to use computer animation extensively, a distinction the studio leaned on in its marketing. Glen Keane, one of Disney's leading animators, has described Miyazaki's body of work as a "huge influence" on the studio's films.

  The third catalyst was Steven Spielberg. Working with Disney on Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988, a live-action and animation hybrid featuring cartoon characters from the 1930s and 1940s drawn from many studios, Spielberg helped produce a film that won three Academy Awards plus a Special Achievement Award and became the biggest hit of that summer. Disney moved to first place in box-office receipts by 1988, and renewed interest in theatrical animated cartoons followed. Spielberg also produced three Roger Rabbit shorts with Disney. When Oliver and Company opened on the same day as Spielberg's Land Before Time in 1988, Oliver and Company outgrossed its rival in the United States, completing a domestic turnaround that made the Renaissance possible.

• 4. Broadway Comes to Burbank

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  Howard Ashman and Alan Menken had worked Off-Broadway on Little Shop of Horrors. Their collaborator on that production's business side was Peter Schneider, who by 1988 had become president of Walt Disney Feature Animation. When Disney decided to turn The Little Mermaid into a Broadway-style animated musical, Schneider brought Ashman and Menken in to write the songs and score. Ashman's specific contribution was structural: he worked to have the songs woven into the story rather than dropped in as ornamental numbers, importing the mechanics of musical theater into an animated film.

  The Little Mermaid opened on the 17th of November 1989 and won two Academy Awards: Best Original Song for "Under the Sea" and Best Original Score. It also outgrossed Don Bluth's All Dogs Go to Heaven, which opened the same day. The formula it established became the template for the decade that followed. Characters sang about what they wanted from life; chorus numbers gave the supporting cast a voice. Critics noted that the music style shifted from film to film, with The Little Mermaid using Calypso arrangements and Hercules drawing on Motown.

• 5. Record Breakers

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  Beauty and the Beast, released on the 22nd of November 1991, was the first animated film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, and it remains the only animated film to have received that nomination when the category was limited to five entries, a span running from 1944 to 2008. It won the Golden Globe Award for Best Picture in the Musical or Comedy category, took two Academy Awards for Best Original Score and Best Original Song, and became the first animated film to reach $100 million at the US box office. In 1994 it became the first Disney Renaissance film to be adapted for Broadway.

  Aladdin, released in 1992, became the highest-grossing animated film at the time of its release. Then The Lion King, released on the 24th of June 1994, surpassed it. The Lion King earned $422 million in the United States alone and $968 million worldwide, and it remains the highest-grossing traditionally animated film ever made. The production necessitated a physical return: with sufficient funds now available, Disney built a 240,000-square-foot building designed by architect Robert A. M. Stern, which opened on the 16th of December 1994 across the street from the main Disney lot in Burbank, ending the ten-year Glendale exile.

  Roger Ebert, reviewing the era in 1997, grouped The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King as the "big four" of the Renaissance. Six of the ten films across the decade scored above 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, with Aladdin reaching 96% and Beauty and the Beast reaching 95%.

• 6. The Waning Years

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  Pocahontas opened in 1995 and earned $346 million worldwide along with two Academy Awards, but its box office total was substantially lower than The Lion King's. Its Rotten Tomatoes score sits at 58%, the lowest of any Renaissance film. The Hunchback of Notre Dame followed in 1996 as the first Disney animated film produced on a budget exceeding $100 million, earning $325 million worldwide. Hercules in 1997 earned $252 million, $73 million less than The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and trade press began openly discussing a downward trend.

  DreamWorks Animation and Pixar had entered the market, and the competitive pressure was real. Hercules carried a production budget of $85 million; Mulan, released in 1998 with a score by Jerry Goldsmith and songs by Matthew Wilder and David Zippel, had a budget of $90 million and earned $304 million, which was enough to be seen as a commercial and critical recovery. Tarzan in 1999 spent $130 million in production and returned $448 million worldwide, winning the Academy Award for Best Original Song for Phil Collins's "You'll Be in My Heart." It was Disney's most commercially successful film since The Lion King.

  Debate persists about exactly where the era ends. Brandon Zachery of Comic Book Resources has argued that Tarzan is widely considered the finale because it was the last Disney film in succession to follow the era's standard traits: multiple songs, cutting-edge visuals, and celebrity appearances in smaller roles. Some analysts extend the period to include Dinosaur or The Emperor's New Groove, both released in 2000, which would also place Fantasia 2000 within the Renaissance lineup.

• 7. Industry Ripples

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  Robin Williams voiced the Genie in Aladdin, and many attribute his performance as the reason other studios began casting major celebrities as voice actors in animated films. The practice spread industry-wide. The success of the Disney Renaissance also prompted major studios to establish dedicated animation divisions. Fox Animation Studios, Warner Bros. Feature Animation, and DreamWorks Animation all formed with the explicit goal of making Disney-styled musicals, producing films such as Anastasia in 1997, Quest for Camelot in 1998, and The Prince of Egypt in 1998.

  Disneytoon Studios, formed to handle direct-to-video sequels, released The Return of Jafar in 1994 as its first title, using television animation crews. Sequels to nearly every Renaissance film followed over the next decade, including The Lion King II: Simba's Pride in 1998 and Mulan II in 2004.

  The live-action remakes that arrived beginning in 2017 brought the Renaissance's original composers and songwriters back to their material. Alan Menken returned for the 2017 Beauty and the Beast alongside Tim Rice, and again for the 2023 The Little Mermaid alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda. The 2019 live-action Lion King, directed by Jon Favreau, brought back Hans Zimmer as composer and Elton John and Tim Rice for new songs, with Beyoncé added as a new collaborator. That film grossed over $1.6 billion worldwide. A live-action Hercules, again with Guy Ritchie as director, was in development as of the source period.