Top 10 Best Classic Disney Movies

Within the walls of the studio, The Lion King was considered the B project. The established top artists fought to be allowed to work on Pocahontas, which was seen as the prime Oscar candidate. The newcomers and remainers were assigned a vague animal story that initially had the uninspiring working title King of the Jungle. Things turned out completely differently. Inspired by Shakespeare's Hamlet, the team created a compelling African royal drama. The wildebeest stampede alone took the fledgling computer animation department almost three years of work to realistically simulate the behavior of hundreds of animals. Coupled with the thumping percussion and choral chants of Lebo M and Hans Zimmer, the film blew away all records: with a gross of almost a billion dollars, it remains the most commercially successful hand-drawn animated film ever.

Even his own wife Lillian begged him to stop: “Nobody pays a cent to watch dwarves for an hour and a half.” All of Hollywood thought Walt Disney was crazy when he announced that he would make a full-length cartoon in color. Bankers turned off the money tap and the press mockingly renamed the production “Walt's Folly”. To complete the film, Disney had to take out a second mortgage on his own house. Disney went all out and developed the revolutionary Multiplane camera, a meter-high scaffold with which different glass plates moved at varying distances from the lens. Suddenly flat drawings took on a dizzying depth. When the film premiered at the Carthay Circle Theater in December 1937, the assembled film elite, including Charlie Chaplin and Clark Gable, openly wept at the mourning scene around the glass coffin. The spotters dropped off: the era of the modern animated film had irreversibly begun.

In the spring of 1992, something happened that no one in Hollywood had thought possible: between heavyweights like The Silence of the Lambs and JFK, a cartoon received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. It broke the decades-long stigma that animation was only intended as a pastime for preschoolers. The film owes that status to its mature emotions and a groundbreaking technical triumph. During the famous dance scene, a virtual camera moves through a three-dimensional computer-generated ballroom as Beauty and the Beast waltz across the floor in traditional hand-drawn style. However, the triumph had a bitter edge: lyricist Howard Ashman, the driving force behind the script and music, died of AIDS six months before the premiere. The film was posthumously dedicated to him.

No high-flown epic, no philosophical pretensions and a running time of barely 64 minutes. Dumbo was put together on a tiny budget to close the financial craters of Pinocchio and Fantasia. The film proves that limitations sometimes bring out the best in artists. The circus elephant with its huge ears does not speak a single word during the entire film. His grief for his imprisoned mother and his triumph when he learns to fly are conveyed purely through body language and expressive looks. And then there's the infamous scene in which Dumbo accidentally swallows a sip of champagne: the hallucinatory parade of pink elephants that follows is pure avant-garde art that many modern surrealists would envy.

As a technical experiment, Pinocchio borders on madness. Anyone looking at the underwater scenes today will see hundreds of bubbles, refracting light, moving seaweed and shadows, all drawn and painted by hand. The craftsmanship radiates from every single frame of film. Moreover, the story never shies away from the macabre. Little boys on Pleasure Island drink beer, smoke cigars and then turn into screaming donkeys to work in the salt mines: it is nightmare food that modern studios would never dare to make again. The terrifying climax with the giant whale Monstro sets the tone for a film that combines moral lessons with breathtaking animation art.

Rudyard Kipling would hardly have recognized his own book. Screenwriter Bill Peet originally worked on a dark, faithful adaptation of the stories about the wolf child Mowgli. When Walt Disney saw the first designs, he firmly dismissed everything. His instruction to the team was as simple as it was compelling: put the book down, make it fun and put some jazz in it. That sober decision turned out to be worth gold. Phil Harris was cast as Baloo the bear and brought a wonderful, uncomplicated laziness that infected the entire film. Disney died suddenly in December 1966 while completing the project. Jungle Book became his swan song: an uncomplicated celebration of swinging music, sharp timing and pure zest for life.

There are barely a thousand words in the entire film. Bambi does not rely on witty dialogues or farcical situations, but on pure atmosphere and the relentless cycle of nature. The poetic images of the forest came from the mind of Tyrus Wong, a Chinese-American artist who was inspired by traditional landscape painting from the Song Dynasty. With vague brushstrokes and soft colors he suggested an endless forest, giving the animals plenty of space. The biggest directorial choice was keeping people out of the picture. The hunter who shoots Bambi's mother doesn't appear on screen for a second; its approach is announced solely by three menacing, monotonous musical notes. It not only makes the loss heartbreaking, but elevates the film to the level of a universal fable.

Just draw 6,469,952 black spots by hand. That was the mathematical nightmare the studio faced after the very expensive failure of Doornroosje (1959). If every spot on the 101 dogs had to be inked and painted frame by frame, Disney would simply go bankrupt. The rescue came from an unexpected source: the photocopier. Technician Ub Iwerks adapted the Xerox technique so that pencil drawings could be printed directly on transparent animation sheets. Walt Disney himself initially found the rough, visible pencil lines hideous and unfinished. He was wrong: it was precisely that sketchy, dynamic style that gave the London of Pongo and Perdita a timeless, jazzy appearance. Add to that the chain-smoking fury Cruella de Vil and you have an indestructible classic.

The production of Aladdin turned into pure chaos as soon as Robin Williams walked into the recording studio. The comedian refused to stick to the script and fired a barrage of improvisations, voices and pop culture parodies into the microphone for hours. It produced so many unscripted jokes that the film was disqualified from the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay by the Academy. For the animators it was a nightmare and a blessing at the same time. Lead animator Eric Goldberg had to throw away his original sketches and literally shape the Ghost around Williams' maniacal energy. The result was a visual whirlwind that to this day is never boring for a second.

When directors Ron Clements and John Musker proposed a film about a mermaid in the mid-1980s, they received a blunt "no" from studio executives. At the time, Disney was already working on a sequel to the live-action film Splash and two mermaids seemed like a major exaggeration to management. It wasn't until Broadway wunderkind Howard Ashman got involved that everything changed. Ashman and composer Alan Menken introduced a theatrical formula that would transform Disney forever: the principle of the musical. Instead of using songs as decoration, they had main character Ariel sing about her deepest, unattainable desire in “Part of Your World”. The audience was swept away, the critics cheered and the infamous 'Disney Renaissance' was officially born.