#34 The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Of all the places Disney has mined for source material, Victor Hugo's grim Gothic tragedy is surely one of the more unexpected choices. In adapting Hugo's novel into a musical about prejudice, social outcasts, and religious zealotry, Disney created what is doubtless their most adult film. It's a bit surprising The Hunchback of Notre Dame managed to scrape by with a PG rating - and, had Disney allowed it to go to a PG-13, it could have been one of Disney's greatest films.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is anchored by the relationship between its protagonist, Quasimodo, and its antagonist, Frollo. Quasimodo is designed to be genuinely ugly without being visually repulsive, still allowing the audience to sympathize with him, and Tom Hulce's performance conveys his naivete and innocence perfectly - he is a gentle being, raised in isolation, desiring to experience life outside Notre Dame, but convinced by Frollo that the world is too cruel to accept him. Frollo, meanwhile, is truly one of the great villains of Disney's pantheon, for much the same reason that Gaston is such an effective villain: he is a villain that exists in reality, whose evil we can know from our own experience. Frollo is a religious zealot, too deeply convinced of his own sanctity to ever admit fault, obsessed with destroying the Gypsies he holds responsible for the immorality of the world around him. Most dangerous is his obsession with the Gypsy woman Esmeralda, who he blames for corrupting him by inciting his lust, to the point where he will willingly kill innocents and burn Paris to remove her temptation from his life. Tony Jay's sublime baritone grants Frollo his sinister presence and menace, nowhere more effectively than in the song "Hellfire," which ranks with Pinocchio's Coachman and Fantasia's "Night on Bald Mountain" as the darkest sequence in Disney's canon. Filled with imagery of damnation and sexual lust, "Hellfire" steps into unprecedented territory for a Disney film.

On the subject of music, The Hunchback of Notre Dame captures the grandeur and drama of a true theatrical musical more than any other film of the Disney Renaissance. Rather than being concerned with providing earworms or fun sequences, the songs largely serve as a means of character development. "Out There" establishes Frollo and Quasimodo's relationship and illustrates Quasimodo's yearning to experience life outside Notre Dame; "God Help the Outcast" draws the contrast between the desires of the ordinary people of Paris and the persecuted gypsies. Composer Alan Menken also delivers some of his most underrated work, with towering strings, horns, and choirs giving the score a grand Gothic feel, anchored by the "Hellfire" leitmotif.

For such a boldly mature film, it may come as unsurprising that the weakest aspects of Hunchback come when it tries too hard to be typically "Disney." Specifically, one can look at the three gargoyles, Victor, Hugo, and Laverne, whose presence severely taints the film. The three are painfully one-note, their personalities amounting to "old woman," "fop," and "Jason Alexander," and their musical number, "A Guy Like You," is quite frankly wretched, attempting to inject the anachronistic humor of Robin Williams' Genie into the film. But this is not Aladdin, the three are not Robin Williams, and the gargoyles' antics are totally at odds with the tone of the film. 

While the presence of the gargoyles certainly drags the film down, the superior qualities of The Hunchback of Notre Dame are readily apparent. Had Disney been more willing to dispense with fluff and fully embrace the film's identity as a dark, mature story, it could have been one of the pinnacles of Disney's canon. As it is, while certainly a film of quality, it stops just short of true greatness.

#33 Pocahontas

All good things must come to an end. After the powerhouse five-film run of The Little Mermaid, The Rescuers Down Under, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King, Disney broke their hitting streak with Pocahontas, which, while not exactly a bad film, fails to live up to the heights set by its predecessors (though anything was likely to be a letdown after the triumph of The Lion King).

Artistically, the animation loses something from the lifelike fluidity of The Lion King, though that may be due to the switch from graceful animals back to a human cast. The voice acting is decent, although having Mel Gibson voice the English John Smith causes him to stick out sorely when he's the only colonist with an American accent. Musically, the film is nothing to write home about either; while some of the Native-inspired score pieces set the atmosphere well, most of the songs are forgettable, with "Colors of the Wind" being the only one most people are likely to remember, although its sequence within the film is frankly ridiculous when you step back and look at it. Indeed, the best song in the film might be the end-credits number "If I Never Knew You," which wouldn't sound out of place in an American Idol finale.

The film's real problems, however, run a bit deeper. The term "Disneyfication" has long been applied to Disney's tendency to clean up the source material its films are based on to make them appeal to a family audience and fit the traditional formula of a rapidly blossoming romance with plenty of musical numbers. In many cases, the resulting films are of enough quality that this can be forgiven or overlooked. What is harder to excuse, however, is Disneyfying actual history, especially history with as bloody of a legacy as American colonization. In the film, we're given an 18-year-old Pocahontas who falls in love with John Smith, saves his life, and brings the Natives and English to mutually respect each other. In reality, the incident in question occurred when Pocahontas was a child, if it actually happened at all. The film also tries to paint the conflict between the Natives and English as a misunderstanding fueled by prejudice on both sides, grossly oversimplifying the roots of colonialism. While the idea of peoples in conflict being brought together by a love affair could certainly be a compelling one, applying it historical events that ultimately led to the destruction of one side in favor of the other is tone-deaf at best and culturally damaging at worst. While Pocahontas is nowhere near the worst film in Disney's canon, its sins are certainly unique.

#32 The Lion King

Has there ever been a better opening shot of a Disney film (or of a film, period) than the red sun rising over the horizon of the African savannah with Lebo M. wailing in Zulu? It's a fantastic moment that sets the tone for the film to follow, an exercise in lush artwork, incredibly lifelike animation, and a new level of cinematics for Disney. More than just a great Disney film, more that a great animated film, The Lion King is the first entry in Disney's canon that just truly feels like a great film, period.

Rather than a fairy tale or princess-based romance, the story is more mature, almost Shakespearean in tone (there are marked similarities to be found between The Lion King and Hamlet). We have a rightful prince afraid of his past in Simba; in Scar, we have the power-hungry outcast, plotting the deaths of his family in his rise to the throne(ironic that a lion ends up being one of the most humanly evil villains of Disney's canon); in Mufasa, we have the wise, beloved father who dies the most emotionally devastating death in all of Disney - unlike in Bambi, where the protagonist had to learn what death was, Simba knows exactly what is unfolding in front of him, and he's forced to watch the whole thing. The themes of betrayal, redemption, and acceptance of the past run strong throughout the plot, which culminates in one of the most visceral fights ever seen in a Disney film; thanks to the strikingly fluid, realistic animation and the brilliant slow-motion action, the scene is elevated to the highest of drama.

Artistically, the film elevates Disney to a level never before achieved. The cinematic flourishes present in some of the free-camera shots of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin blossom here into a true replication of live-action cinematography, with the result that the production value feels far higher than any film before it. The artistic centerpiece of the film is the wildebeest stampede, which earns its place as one of the great scenes in cinema history: everything about the scene is absolutely perfect, from the mounting tension at the beginning to the panicked action to the devastating culmination of Mufasa's death. And all of this says nothing of the film's music, with an epic score by Hans Zimmer and easily the greatest Disney soundtrack, courtesy of Alan Menken, Tim Rice, and Elton John.

The Lion King would ultimately prove to be the peak of the Disney Renaissance. While the remaining Renaissance films would carry on the cinematic values it introduced, none would fully replicate its success. In the end, there's little denying it: The Lion King is, hands down, the greatest film Disney has ever produced, and one of the pinnacles of the entire animation medium.

#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.

#29 The Rescuers Down Under

Numerous Disney films have gotten sequels over the years, most of them direct-to-video and almost all of them uniformly terrible. The Rescuers Down Under is the only one to be considered official Disney canon, and also the only one to be superior to its predecessor in every conceivable way. Gone is the stiff xerographic animation and musically sterile production of the original; Down Under is so relentlessly fun, adventurous and exciting that the original seems positively glacial by comparison.

While The Little Mermaid was still a bit of a transition from the post-Walt era to the Renaissance in terms of animation, Down Under is the first true display of what made Disney so great in the nineties: fluid animation, impeccable artwork, a restrained use of CGI, and cinematography that feels genuinely cinematic. The sequences of the golden eagle, Marahute, seem to exist chiefly to display the fantastic style of Disney's new order, and they succeed admirably: these sequences on their own possess more of a grand sense of exhilaration than some entire post-Walt films. Even the characters and environments returning from the first film seem entirely fresh and new, reimagined through the lens of Disney's new artistic paradigm.

And those returning characters are better than they ever were in the original film, thanks to a fantastically fun script with an emphasis on characterization. Bernard and Bianca emerge as far more active and interesting characters (partly because Down Under actually lets them do things), while their relationship actually gets some time to establish and develop. The objective of their mission, Cody, is essentially a male version of Penny, and while he's admittedly the least interesting character, he is at least proactive, evidently spending his time releasing animals caught by poachers. The villain McLeach, played with cackling relish by George C. Scott, is a far more effective antagonist than Medusa, being both more insidious (he's a poacher who gleefully sings about murdering animals) and actually having some legitimately funny scenes - plus he drives a vehicle that looks like he stole it off the set of Fury Road. Even the supporting cast are all memorable and full of charm and personality: Jake, the charismatic mouse equivalent of Crocodile Dundee; Wilbur, the albatross voiced by the always hilarious John Candy; Frank, the neurotic frill-necked lizard; Doctor Mouse, who apparently performs surgery with a chainsaw he calls the "epidermal tissue disruptor."

While The Rescuers is fairly well-known, The Rescuers Down Under remains one of Disney's least-remembered films, possibly because it was released in the middle of Disney's greatest run of films - it's immediately preceded by The Little Mermaid, and followed by Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and The Lion King. While it doesn't quite reach the spectacular, visionary heights of any of those films, it's still a well-written, fun adventure film in it's own right. In short, it's everything The Rescuers should have been, but even better.

#28 The Little Mermaid

After over 20 years of post-Walt Disney hit-or-miss films, The Little Mermaid proved to be the critical turning point for Disney's entire history. It began the Disney Renaissance, the resurgence of animation talent and artistry that continued through the nineties, redefining Disney for the modern age and reestablishing it as a true cultural institution. As a film, it established many of the tropes that would define the Renaissance, and after decades of misfires like The Aristocats and Oliver and Company, it comes off as a revelation.

Undeniably both the most ambitious and beautiful Disney film since Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid establishes the elegant, lifelike style of animation that would prove a hallmark of the Renaissance. The character designs and voice acting combine in a perfect marriage to produce a fantastically memorable cast; no one feels annoying or unnecessary. The true standout is Ursula, the best Disney villain since Cruella de Vil, who conveys a fantastic diva-esque menace before blossoming into grand scale, godlike evil for a climax that feels genuinely epic. The story, while still running with the Disney standbys of love at first sight, mutual love within a few days and getting married as a teenager, manages to still be compelling enough that its flaws can easily be ignored, and it carries a genuine sense of stakes and urgency, while having some fantastic moments of emotion.

And on the subject of emotion, it's helped along by one of the best soundtracks in Disney's canon (courtesy of the first collaboration between the powerhouse team of Alan Menkin and Howard Ashman, whose work would go on to define the Renaissance, and, for many people, Disney in general). Every song hits the mark; "Under the Sea" is irresistibly fun, "Poor Unfortunate Souls" is one of Disney's greatest villain songs, and "Part of Your World" is the establishing moment for both Ariel as a character and Menkin and Ashman as a team (and also just might be my favorite Disney song).

By the time it reaches its happy ending, The Little Mermaid feels like a massive payoff. It's the first film in decades to fully recapture the majesty, artistry, fun and excitement of Disney's best efforts; above all, it's a beautiful film. If a Renaissance is a rebirth, The Little Mermaid is just that, paving the way for quite possibly the greatest era of Disney's history.