#31 Aladdin

Coming off the towering artistic achievement of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin took the Disney Renaissance into the realm of Arabian Nights, marrying lavish Middle Eastern aesthetics to a story filled with adventure, magic, romance, and a surprising amount more direct humor than most of Disney's fantasy pieces.

Aladdin is a serviceable hero, though a rather bland one: his only real motivation and struggle involves how to end up with Jasmine. Jasmine herself is a bit more compelling: she's trapped by a sheltered existence in a society that demands that she play the role of a princess and get married, when she desires a more meaningful life (and of course we get the typical love-at-first-sight Disney romance we've seen over and over by this point). Jafar manages to earn himself a place in the pantheon of Disney villains through his power-hungry plotting and sleazy demeanor (courtesy of voice actor Jonathan Freeman), while his power-escalation during the climax lends it quite an epic feel. The Sultan, on the other hand, is a completely ineffectual doddering fool, effortlessly dominated by Jafar and harping on about a marriage law that, as a monarch, he surely has the power to get rid of (which he does at the end, making one wonder why he didn't do so in the first place).

The true standout of the film though, is, of course, Robin Williams as the Genie. Prior to his entrance, the film is a straightforward Arabian adventure film revolving around a romance; once he appears, he immediately steals the entire film, firing off sight-gags, pop-culture jokes and references to other Disney films with riveting abandon. The filmmakers gave Williams free reign to ad-lib during the recording sessions, with the animators translating his signature brand of manic unrestraint to the screen. The result is a character that feels one hundred percent like a Robin Williams performance, one of the few times an animated character has been made to so perfectly embody the qualities of their performer, and possibly one of the greatest voice acting jobs of all time. If there's anything negative to be said about Williams as the Genie, it's that it opened the door for a long succession of animated films that cast A-list actors more for their name than for their suitability to the role (witness half of Dreamworks' animated output).

While not quite reaching the level of elegant artistry achieved by its immediate predecessor and successor, Aladdin still manages to be a film of quality, blending disparate elements of adventure, romance, and humor into a unified package that stands as a testament to the skill of the animators, the voice cast, and especially to the never-to-be-replicated talents of Robin Williams.

#30 Beauty and the Beast

Continuing Disney's early-Renaissance streak, Beauty and the Beast was the first animated film to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, and for good reason; it's a marriage of artistic style, music, animation, and story that comes together with a fantastic sense of unity and cohesiveness as it redefines a classic fairy tale for the modern age.

In crafting the film's aesthetic, the animators delved straight into the original story's French origins, rendering both lush, picturesque countryside landscapes, and expansive Gothic architecture for the Beast's castle. The attention to detail and atmosphere in the castle is such that it almost becomes a character unto itself, especially in early scenes: the dimly lit, massive rooms feel at once vast and suffocating. As for the characters themselves, they're an excellently varied cast. Belle manages to stand out among the crowd of Disney princesses by being unashamed of being intelligent and wanting more out of life than her backwater town can provide. The Beast himself stands as a triumph of character design, combining aspects of various animals into a whole that isn't recognizable as any existing creature, but manages to embody the definition of the word "beast" with perfection, while Robby Benson's performance as a bitter, angry, childlike creature succeeds in adding complexity and humanity to what could be a generic animal-man character (he is not, as one commentator termed it, "Disney's Wolverine"). Gaston, meanwhile, emerges as a uniquely sinister villain: he's a supremely arrogant boor who believes that his masculinity entitles him to women's affections, and whose driving goal is to domesticate an independent woman - in short, he's the kind of misogynist we all know.

The animation sequences, meanwhile, are bolstered by a more liberal use of CGI to have masses of characters and objects moving in concert (witness the spectacularly choreographed "Be Our Guest"), as well as to add a new cinematic dimension to sequences like "Beauty and the Beast," with the camera free-flying throughout the ballroom. And on the subject of the music, it's another standout of the film, with Alan Menken and Howard Ashman crafting a set of songs that move the story forward, while still leaving space for showstoppers like "Be Our Guest" and "Beauty and the Beast." (Incidentally, the song "Human Again," cut from the original film and restored for the Special Edition, would be better left out; the lyrics are subpar by Menken and Ashman's standards, and the sequence as a whole is too similar to "Be Our Guest.")

Beauty and the Beast is, much like Sleeping Beauty, an absolutely beautiful film, but while Sleeping Beauty embodies storybook elegance, Beauty and the Beast delivers a more modern, diverse beauty, peppering in Gothic regality, timeless love story tropes, mystical intrigue, and moments of humor. If fairy tale films are the meat of Disney's canon, Beauty and the Beast represents their pinnacle.