Disney doesn’t always bat a thousand, with outdated cultural references and so-so films
within its catalogue. But not every movie the Mouse House made deserves a poor reputation.
Some worthy ones just happen to fly under the radar.
Here are some of the best Disney movies you’ve probably never seen.
Disney’s theatrical release of Winnie the Pooh in 2011 was easy to dismiss as a recycled retread.
After all, there had already been three Pooh movies since 2000 - The Tigger Movie,
Piglet's Big Movie, and Pooh's Heffalump Movie - and none of those were that impressive. But
this Winnie the Pooh is as sweet as the honey-loving cubby stuffed with fluff.
It’s also clever and gorgeous, thanks to traditional hand-drawn animation from Walt
Disney Animation Studios and inspiration from author A. A. Milne’s original stories.
Winnie the Pooh spins a charming tale where Eeyore loses his. Meanwhile,
the Hundred Acre Wood friends think a monster has abducted young Christopher Robin. The good-hearted
Pooh tries to help everyone while his tummy rumbles for honey like a character all its own.
“brumpt-tt-tt-tt”
With wordplay literally rescuing these friends and
jokes that don’t rely on pop culture references, it’s an all-ages delight.
“Thank you all ever so much.”
Meet the Robinsons came out in 2007, shortly after Pixar's John Lasseter took over Disney Animation,
which led to a lot of perhaps unnecessary scrutiny and comparisons for this film at the time. On its
own merits, it’s a zippy family sci-fi romp with heart and a marvelous retro-futuristic aesthetic.
The story focuses on Lewis, a young orphaned science prodigy, who wants to find the family
he never knew between creating inventions that are a blast for all the wrong reasons.
One day, he meets a boy from the future named Wilbur Robinson.
“What is this? Where are we going?”
“To the future!”
Wilbur whisks Lewis off to save the day from a time traveling baddie with
world-conquering ambitions, a surprisingly dangerous hat,
and a secret connection to the past. Lewis also meets Wilbur’s eccentric extended family,
a swinging band of frogs, and a frustrated dinosaur henchman - er … hench-a-saurus?
“I have a big head and little arms. I’m just not sure how well this plan was thought through.”
The way the time travel story comes full circle at the end is one of the most
satisfying things about it, so we won't spoil that, but as the title implies,
Meet the Robinsons is all about the timelessness of family.
Released in 2001, Atlantis: The Lost Empire is a science fiction adventure that just didn't do what
audiences expected from a Disney animated film. But it’s worth rediscovering. For starters, the
production design of Mike Mignola, better known as the creator of Hellboy, gives the film a striking
look that ratchets up the cool factor of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The film also
boasts a strong voice cast led by Michael J. Fox as Milo Thatch, a young researcher and linguistics
expert who finds the way to the legendary undersea kingdom even as everyone around mocks him for
believing that Atlantis is real. With funding from an eccentric millionaire, Milo joins an
amusing group of explorers including a demolitions expert, a crackerjack female mechanic, a geologist
who’s like a human mole, a cook who thinks lard is a food group, and a daredevil leader.
Once the group finds Atlantis, the architecture and lost civilization prove enchanting, as does
the kingdom’s Princess Kida, a formidable warrior who doesn’t look one bit of 8,000 years old.
“By the way, we were never properly introduced. My name’s Milo.”
“My name is Kidagakash.”
“K-K-Kidamashnagna.”
Fox is adorably awkward, his rapport with Kida is endearing, and the story dips into
some strong themes around the explorers’ intrusion. It also features some stunning
effects, showing that this underwater civilization is anything but all wet.
The backstory of 2011's Mars Needs Moms is confusing - and that’s even
before we get into the plot. The animation studio ImageMovers, founded by director Robert Zemeckis,
actually produced the film, but Disney released it under a partnership with ImageMovers at the time.
So it’s at least partly a Disney film - and one of the more offbeat entries under the studio’s name.
Based on a children's book by Bloom County cartoonist Berkeley Breathed, Mars Needs
Moms is about a boy on Earth who races to stop Martians from extracting his mom’s memories and
essence of "mom-ness" to implant in their robot nannies, basically killing Mom in the process.
Definitely dark, and perhaps too much for kids who find Bambi and Finding Nemo too intense. But
older fans who enjoy the classic sci-fi flair of The Twilight Zone might appreciate its innovative
twists. Plus the Zemeckis style of motion capture-based animation featured in films like The
Polar Express actually works well with this film’s Martian characters, who are meant to look inhuman.
Even if you don’t like the overall result, it’s worth checking out as a bold creative leap.
The title of John Carter is likely one reason this 2012 sci-fi adventure escaped viewers’ orbit.
It was originally meant to be John Carter of Mars and launch a whole series based around the books
by Edgar Rice Burroughs, which director Andrew Stanton loved as a child. But Disney apparently
decided to hide the Red Planet part after the colossal flop of 2011’s Mars Needs Moms.
Unfortunately, that left people who weren’t familiar with the books clueless. That’s too bad,
because John Carter is an old-fashioned epic complete with monsters, arena battles,
and huge action set pieces with cities and ships that soar through the air.
Based on the first John Carter book, A Princess of Mars, the film tells the story of a Civil War
veteran who finds himself teleported to Mars, where several races are battling for domination.
After being held prisoner, Carter falls in with the four-armed Green Martians, falls in love with
Martian Princess Dejah Thoris, and ultimately unites several groups against a manipulative
order. Lead couple Taylor Kitsch of Friday Night Lights fame and Lynn Collins have playful dialogue
and decent chemistry, possibly because they both appeared in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine as
Gambit and Kayla Silverfox. Kitsch also proved himself winsome enough to be a big-time action
star, even though the film never took flight at the box office like Carter does in Mars’s gravity.
Sky High did well enough at the box office in 2005, but this fun family
comedy seemed to get lost beyond tween-age viewers among that year’s Batman Begins
and Fantastic Four movies. A young Michael Angarano, who plays Nick Pearson on This Is Us,
is the main character, Will Stronghold. His parents are well-known superheroes
The Commander, played by Kurt Russell, and Jetstream, played by Kelly Preston.
Will attends Sky High, where future heroes and villains learn about
sidekicks and rescue strategies, but he doesn’t appear to have any superpowers,
landing him at the bottom of the school’s social order. When the teen uncovers a
supervillain’s plot, he gains confidence and discovers which friends he can trust.
The humor in Sky High also should make any superhero fan smile, along with sly touches
such as casting TV’s former Wonder Woman Lynda Carter as the school’s principal.
“I am Principal Powers. On behalf of all the faculty and staff, welcome to Sky High.”
Treasure Planet took Robert Louis Stevenson's classic 1880s pirate adventure novel Treasure
Island and transplanted it to a steampunk version of outer space. The 2002 film stars
Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Jim Hawkins, who develops a complex surrogate father-son relationship
with mutinous pirate John Silver, imagined here as a cyborg with a laser-scanning eye.
Silver first meets Jim while cooking with a robotic arm that’s like a kitchen Swiss Army tool,
able to dice food as well as an enemy’s fingers. Silver has a cute shapeshifter pal named Morph,
a tiny blob that resembles a pink cloud with eyes, and Jim has a high-tech surfboard to weave through
canyons and around flying pirate ships. Filmmakers have adapted Stevenson’s tale several times,
even with Muppets, and sci-fi has plenty of smugglers and scoundrels, so the futuristic twist
isn’t much of a stretch. But this gamble didn’t pay off at the box office. Nevertheless, Treasure
Planet is a rollicking, propulsive adventure story, with spectacular visuals that combine
traditional animation and CGI backgrounds, as well as evergreen themes about finding one’s family.
Disney’s Tarzan from 1999 won an Oscar for Best Original Song, which is actually one of
its least memorable qualities. Sure, it has comic relief animal sidekicks, which some
viewers may find annoying, and a noticeable lack of Black characters for a story set in Africa.
But it’s an overall agreeable retelling of the famous Edgar Rice Burroughs story about a man
raised by apes who encounters humans as an adult, and then has to decide where his loyalties lie:
with the ape family who nurtured him, or with other human beings? Much of the
story focuses on Tarzan’s romance with Jane Porter, a proper 1911 English gal,
and the humorous - and sometimes breathless - voice work from Minnie Driver is a highlight.
“And I was saved, saved by a flying wildman in a loincloth!”
“Loincloth? Good Lord.”
But there are also touching moments between Tarzan and his ape mom,
Kala, who teaches young Tarzan that as different as they seem on the outside,
their hearts care the same. Animation fans will appreciate that animators
modeled Tarzan’s movements through the trees after extreme sports athletes.
“I’d been watching my son do his skateboarding and snowboarding and
started thinking of Tarzan as kind of having this attitude like a surfer kind of a guy.”
Plus, the jungle looks every bit as lush, enticing, and dangerous
as it should. If you’re not in the mood for The Jungle Book, give this a swing.
Victor Hugo's novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame was always a strange choice for an animated Disney
film. It's a grim story with a strong sexual element and no small amount of death. Disney
gave this tale a relatively happy ending, along with fun songs and a trio of talking gargoyles,
but the story still has a lot of darkness around the edges that took audiences by surprise
when the film was released in 1996. However, those oddities make it an interesting watch,
especially for older viewers. Plus, The Hunchback of Notre Dame has Frollo, one of the wickedest
Disney villains of all time. Frollo is the local minister of justice, but he’s pure evil,
developing a lustful obsession with Esmerelda, the Romani dancer who befriends the humble Quasimodo,
the hunchback who has lived inside Notre Dame cathedral in Paris since he was a baby.
Frollo basically wants to wipe out the Romani people of Paris and tries
to control Esmerelda - before attempting to burn her at the stake. Meanwhile, Quasimodo
and a heroic soldier named Phoebus attempt to stop his plans. It's not quite Hugo’s original,
but it's still a complex and compelling take with an unlikely hero who finds courage and acceptance.
The idea of updating Fantasia goes back to the release of the original 1940 film,
which Walt Disney wanted to re-release regularly with new segments replacing older ones
so the movie would constantly change and evolve. Unfortunately, the original Fantasia lost money
upon its initial release, which nixed Walt’s plans of doing more. However, the concept was revived in
the '90s, and this sequel ended up coming together just in time to celebrate the new millennium.
Fantasia 2000 includes the well-known "Sorcerer's Apprentice" sequence from the original film,
along with new segments such as "Pines of Rome" featuring flying whales and
"Pomp and Circumstance," where Donald Duck has to help Noah lead animals to the ark.
A standout is "Rhapsody in Blue," an evocative New York story set to
Gershwin’s jazzy composition and animated in the style of caricaturist Al Hirschfeld.
It's unlike anything else in either film, and distinctive among Disney productions in general.
The beloved 1962 fantasy novel A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle was considered unfilmable for
decades because of its space-time distortions, shapeshifting aliens, and peculiar landscapes.
But acclaimed director Ava DuVernay brought it to life in 2018 with the help of modern digital
effects, an appealing young protagonist named Meg, played by Storm Reid, and the impressive trio of
Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling, and Oprah Winfrey as the cosmic beings who assist her in finding her
lost father, played by Chris Pine. Some of the plot proved too complicated - some might
say convoluted - for viewers, and the film’s mix of sci-fi and children’s lit is an unusual fit.
But those surreal vistas that might have been tough to imagine are sights to see, and the story
of a character finding a strength and power that she didn’t know she had is as relevant as ever.
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