From its feature film debut in 1937, Disney Animation Studios has defined the genre of animated movies. Not only did it create the best and most beautiful of the genre, it mastered a certain mode of storytelling, bringing into many of its films a singular style and theme—so much so that comparing a movie to Disney or calling it “Disney-esque” evokes a unanimous vision of what that movie is like.
However, this Disney style—conceived in its inaugural film, Snow White, and perfected for decades through Cinderella, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, and others—has seen radical change with the introduction of computer animation in movies like Toy Story and Frozen. While some elements have remained the same, the new medium for animation has produced changes aesthetically, thematically, and even politically. Let’s look at what these changes are and how computer graphics may have caused them.
In his video essay, Sage Hyden sees the 2D animated films produced by Disney for most of its history as “conservative fairy-tales” while the newer 3D computer-animated films as “liberal allegories.” The language here isn’t completely political—though there is a little of that. Instead, when Hyden speaks of Disney classics as conservative fairy-tales, he’s getting at two things: first, the company’s legacy largely consists of adapting public domain stories to the silver screen. These stories, while they may not exhaustively be actual fairy-tales, they almost always have a fairy-tale element—often rural, magical, and with clear villains. Think Snow White, The Little Mermaid, or Pocahontas.
Second, by labeling these movies conservative, Hyden understands the early Disney tendency to restore the status quo. Again, think of the ending scenes for Sleeping Beauty or Beauty and the Beast—the castle having been darkened and turned evil is restored and light washes over the ramparts. Or for something a little less obvious, consider 101 Dalmatians: the goal of the story is to return the puppies to their home.
This is not so with the computer-animated liberal allegories of today. These modern CGI films tend to find themselves in urban settings or a bustling civilization—think Zootopia, Wreck-it-Ralph, or, even though they’re not Disney, Bee Movie, Robots, and especially The LEGO Movie. As films, they are concerned with society as much as the individual and the potential for that society to see real change.
According to Hyden, the protagonists in these movies usually come in one of two types: the master of the universe or the outcast. The master of the universe you’ll find in Toy Story (Woody) and The Incredibles and the outcast in Ratatouille or (again, not Disney) How to Train Your Dragon. Inside Out has both. For the master of the universe archetype, the hero must learn to deal with a changing world, while the outcast must teach the world that it can (and should) change. And yes, traditionally animated movies have these standards as well, particularly the outcast, but there is a radical difference in they are used. In classic Disney, the outcast usually accepts the binary they’re given—humans and merpeople, gods and mortals—and eventually joins one side (usually the better one) but appreciates both. In computer-animated films, the hero will reject that binary, finding a way to break it down or simply bring the differing worlds together—rats eating with people, vikings riding on dragons, balancing joyfulness and sadness, etc.
This brings us to the modern emphasis on breaking out of the mold of society. While Disney for multiple decades now has encouraged individuality, this focus on bucking the system all together has been catalyzed by an innate strength of computer animation: more movement. Because of computer modeling and the ability to copy-and-paste, modern animators are able to produce a lot more movement and dynamic action in their films and set their movies in the busy city. This technological ability has, in turn, affected the themes explored in these newest films.
Of course, not all classic or contemporary movies follow these trends, but they generally demonstrate a change in animation film-making. A part of that change is that new movies, relying primarily on CGI, are more political than their classic, fairy-tale counterparts. For some, this may be troubling. Do we really want politics in and societal critiques in our children’s movies? Hyden suggests that like Joy and Sadness in Inside Out, we learn that both are necessary and good. I can get behind that: we should appreciate both.
Yet there are two active consequences that we should not ignore. First, if we appreciate both thematic intentions—the modern theme of looking forward to future progress, and the classic theme of looking backward to ancient wisdom—we acknowledge that a lot more content has been made in the classic vein (it had a 56 year head-start), but we cannot simply stop producing stories with that thematic slant. Sure, we understand that the Sword in the Stone is a conservative fairy-tale and Wall-E a liberal allegory and appreciate them as such, but if we stop making Sword in the Stones, we’ll have a problem.
The second consequence is simply to remember when watching movies, even children’s movies, that there is an ideology at work. It’s rarely if ever anything too radical, so you have next-to-no reason to hide your children from them. But, there is an ideology present all the same, and it’s worth your time and attention to figure out what that is. If you don’t, you might go your whole life without realizing that the Lord of the Rings is anti-progress.