#2 Pinocchio

Coming just three years after Snow White, Pinocchio already shows important evolution for Disney. The story is more substantial, focusing on Pinocchio's development as a character, and there are fewer scenes that feel dispensable, with even those serving to showcase the richly detailed animation Disney's staff was capable of (the masses of clocks in Geppetto's workshop and the schools of fish underwater come to mind).

At its core, Pinocchio is a childrens' morality tale for the age it was made in, meant to impart the values of being, in the words of the Blue Fairy, "brave, truthful, and unselfish." The plot is driven by Pinocchio's desire to become a real boy by being virtuous, and every misfortune that befalls him is the result of him failing to heed his "conscience" (Jiminy Cricket, who, to the writers' credit, is not simply a moralizer, but a character with flaws and personality). And it's certainly coming from the Grimm-style "scared straight" school of morality tales, because Pinocchio has a considerable concentration of abjectly terrifying content. Over the course of the film, we're treated to Stromboli, the bombastic, scowling (and probably racist by modern standards) Gypsy who abducts Pinocchio and promises to chop him into firewood, the gigantic homicidal whale Monstro, and, of course, the Coachman and the horrific episode of Pleasure Island.

The Pleasure Island sequence and the Coachman bear special note for constituting quite possibly the darkest content of any Disney film (with the possible exception of The Hunchback of Notre Dame). The Coachman sends Honest John and Gideon off on the specific mission of luring boys to Pleasure Island with promises of a no-rules paradise, where their bad behavior somehow turns them into donkeys (in an almost uncomfortably intense sequence) to be sold off en masse with no hope of escape. To a modern audience, it's hard not to read the whole affair as a metaphor for human trafficking, especially since there's no indication in-story that it will ever be stopped. The Coachman is never defeated, only escaped, leaving him to stand as the most unsettling Disney villain.

Suffice to say, Pinocchio is very much a product of its time, and would never get made today. Modern sensibilities would never allow for its grim brand of morality fable, depictions of children drinking and smoking, or a villain as evocative of real-world evil as the Coachman. This is not to say it is a bad film; far from it, Pinocchio is a significant narrative and artistic evolution for Disney, helping further establish the legacy of Disney's Golden Age and the dominance of Disney in the world of the animated film.