Rethinking the Disney Renaissance

Fig. 1 - A warm, avuncular Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) accompanies a reserved, standoffish P. L. Travers (Emma Thompson) around Disneyland in Saving Mr. Banks.

The Disney Renaissance is one of those curious constructs that circulates among the Walt Disney Company and its fan communities, entering academic studies of Disney animation largely unchallenged. What, exactly, was the Disney Renaissance? One of the many pleasures and privileges of being an animation scholar is not only to think about Disney, but to think about how we think about Disney. And unsurprisingly, a lot of the critical discourse on Disney is shaped by Disney itself. While many scholars are comfortable using “Renaissance-era Disney animation” or “the films of the Disney Renaissance,” it became clear to me in my research that there is no common understanding on what it was then or is now. Was it The Little Mermaid (John Musker and Ron Clements, 1989) to The Lion King (Roger Allers & Rob Minkoff, 1994)? Or perhaps later, to Tarzan (Kevin Lima & Chris Buck, 1999)? For my recent book, Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance, the Disney Renaissance discourse becomes an object lesson not only in how we do film history, but in how we do media industry studies.

Perhaps more than any other media conglomerate, the Walt Disney Company has a longstanding financial investment in producing, promoting, and protecting its own history. Features films such as Saving Mr. Banks (John Lee Hancock, 2013) are blatant attempts to offer a way of understanding the company and its greatest creation (Fig. 1), Walt Disney. Coffee-table books, richly illustrated with production stills, concept art, and photographs, chronicle the painstaking process, innovation, and ingenuity of Disney animation. During the October 27th 1954 premiere episode of Disneyland, Walt Disney famously celebrated his “old partnership” with Mickey Mouse with the oft-quoted line “Our only hope [is] that we never lose sight of one thing--that it was all started by a mouse.” In so doing, he effectively erased the significant contributions of Mickey’s predecessors, including Alice and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and forged the history of his company that he wanted the public to remember. Such simple, often self-aggrandizing, accounts of Disney history persisted through various company products, including documentaries, television specials, and theme park attractions. The Disney+ series Sketchbook and One Day at Disney as well as the Disney 100 exhibition currently touring the world (and featuring a posthumous virtual recreation of Walt himself [Fig. 2]) reinforce a corporate-sanctioned history of the company–what Richard Schickel (1967) called “the Disney version.” That Disney actively would work to protect its corporate legacy, especially since it is rife with labor disputes, Walt’s HUAC testimony, and demoralizing racial and gender stereotypes, is unsurprising. But scholars’ uncritical reinforcement of this narrative warrants redress and revisions.

Fig. 2 - The Disney 100 Exhibition features an introduction from an animated Walt to preface a simplified, celebratory account of creativity, innovation, and wonder.

But before we look closer at the Disney Renaissance, we might consider the implications of “renaissance” more broadly. Scholars of the Middle Ages, for example, have long challenged the periodicity of the Renaissance as a backhanded slap at their object of study.[1] Indeed, the assignment of “renaissance” to a period, in fact, implicitly creates three periods at the same time: a triumphant initial period of creative flourishing (the classical period or the “Golden Age”), a woeful period of artistic decline and stagnancy (the “dark ages”), and a period of renewed vitality and productivity (the “renaissance”). Upon arrival at Disney in 1984, Michael Eisner committed himself to reviving the company as it emerged from a successful, but costly, defense against an attempted hostile takeover. He himself was using the term “renaissance” as early as 1986, when he deemed his tenure’s preliminary victories as an “early indication of an enormous reawakening at Disney, a renaissance sure to occur when talented new people blend their fresh ideas with our company’s traditional values” in the annual report to stockholders.[2] Eisner’s skilled self-promotion was reinforced by the trade and popular presses and trade nonfiction titles such as Joe Flower’s Prince of the Magic Kingdom: Michael Eisner and the Re-Making of Disney and Ron Grover’s The Disney Touch: How a Daring Management Team Revived an Entertainment Empire, both published in 1991. But it also imposed an artificial, unfair historicity onto his predecessors.

Fig. 3 - Standard accounts of the Disney Renaissance curiously neglect Who Framed Roger Rabbit, despite its technological feats, critical acclaim, and box office success.

Eisner’s initial efforts were in live-action filmmaking and television production with a specific focus on comedy. Animation was far from Eisner’s priority; in fact, he and his production chief Jeffrey Katzenberg initially considered outsourcing or even shutting it down altogether. The historical reality of the Disney Renaissance is consequently more complicated than we may have realized. For one, if we understand the Disney Renaissance as a creative revival in animation at the company, we might trace that innovation back at least to Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988), which was a much bigger financial hit and a larger technical feat than The Little Mermaid (Fig. 3). But doing so ignores the clear artistic advances being made at Disney throughout the decade. The company experimented with digital animation in TRON (Steve Lisberger, 1982), and in the traditional cel-animated feature, cel animators began using digital visual effects with The Black Cauldron (Ted Berman & Richard Rich, 1985) and continued with The Great Mouse Detective (John Musker, Dave Michener, Ron Clements & Burny Mattinson, 1992). Oliver & Company (George Scribner, 1988) was not an integrated musical in the Broadway mode that Ashman and Menken promoted, but its use of pop music, celebrity voices, action-adventure hijinks, and marketing were evocative of the high-concept storytelling that Eisner and Katzenberg did at Paramount. This thinking would be adapted to the animated musicals of the 1990s, though hiring Billy Joel and Bette Midler types would yield, at least for a time, to theatrically-trained Broadway belters.

Fig. 4 - The Disney Renaissance might better be understood within an animation renaissance across film, television, and video games, including Don Bluth’s The Land Before Time (1988).

Secondly, the Disney Renaissance was part of a much larger and longer revival in interest in animation across film, television, video games, and emerging digital forms in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1993, Eric Smoodin (1993, 188) acknowledged an animation renaissance including and beyond Disney had unfolded, yet it is an observation that bears repeating. Although the video game industry crashed in the early 1980s, Nintendo fueled renewed interest in video games with the Nintendo Entertainment System and Game Boy, which escalated further with the US introductions of Sega Genesis (1989) and Super Nintendo Entertainment System (1990). Originally a segment on The Tracey Ullman Show (1987-1990), The Simpsons premiered as a half-hour series in 1989, and its irreverent take on the family sitcom helped reinforce Fox’s attempts to brand itself as an edgy alternative to the other US broadcast networks. In film, Disney defector Don Bluth recovered from the critical and commercial failure of his freshman effort, The Secret of NIMH (1982), through a successful partnership with Steven Spielberg that yielded An American Tail (1986) and The Land Before Time (1988) (Fig. 4). Originally the Graphics Group of Lucasfilm, Pixar became an independent corporation in 1986—and two years later, its experimentation in computer-generated imagery led to the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for Tin Toy (John Lasseter, 1988). In short, if The Little Mermaid truly launched a renaissance in Disney Animation, it did so amidst a period of narrative, artistic, and technological vibrancy across the US media industries more broadly.

Fig. 6 - Eisner’s regime benefitted from several investments their predecessors made, including EPCOT.

Another curious aspect of The Little Mermaid as the turning point within the received narrative of Disney animation is that film history rarely pivots on a single film. Rather, change happens over time—and is often only understood and appreciated in retrospect. The Little Mermaid deserves credit for sparking renewed interest in feature animation and film musicals in Hollywood, resulting in Bebe’s Kids (Bruce W. Smith, 1992) and Cool World (Ralph Bakshi, 1992) from Paramount and For the Boys (Mark Rydell, 1991) at 20th Century Fox. All three failed to recreate Mermaid’s success with critics and audiences alike. But Disney seems unmoved by Mermaid beyond pursuing more animated musicals. Among the year’s accomplishments in 1989, Eisner lists Mermaid at #6—behind new projects in the theme parks.[3] If a Disney Renaissance began with Mermaid, Disney certainly did not think so at the time. Indeed, it seems more likely after Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale & Kirk Wise, 1991) and certainly after Aladdin (John Musker & Ron Clements, 1992), Eisner and Katzenberg fully appreciated the possibility of animation for not only box office success, but fueling franchises in the way Batman (Tim Burton, 1989) had for Warner Bros. The 1992 annual report to stockholders heralded “The New Golden Age of Animation,” finally acknowledging the idea that feature animation, in fact, could be the engine behind a revitalization of the Walt Disney Company.

Therefore, the Disney Renaissance asks us to consider not so much what the Disney Renaissance was, but how the term has been mobilized in Disney publicity, in animation studies, and in film and media history. How does it unfairly reframe earlier animation as failures? How does it link Eisner’s efforts to those of the namesake? How does it downplay, even distract, from the vital contributions made by his predecessors’ projects—EPCOT, the Disney Channel, and Touchstone Films, among others—to the company’s renewed economic and creative vitality? And how does it create a notion of film history that is all too cleanly and conveniently periodised?[4] As I hope my book reveals, the Disney Renaissance discourse reminds us to approach the media industries with a level of apprehension and ambivalence. Writing Disney history, in particular, calls upon us to not only write outside of but often against the very corporate interests we aim to understand.

**Article published: November 24, 2023**

Notes

[1] See, for example, Nancy Bradley Warren, The Embodied Word: Female Spiritualities, Contested Orthodoxies, and English Religious Cultures, 1350-1700 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2010).

[2] Michael Eisner, “Letter to Owners and Fellow Disney Employees,” December 15, 1986, in 1986 Annual Report (Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Company, 1986), 1.

[3] Michael Eisner, “To Our Owners and Fellow Disney Employees,” December 4, 1989, in 1989 Annual Report (Burbank, CA: Walt Disney Company, 1989), 2.

[4] Christopher Holliday examines similar concerns in relation to Disney animation in his recent article, “Walt’s Art History: Late Style, Digital Aesthetics and the ‘Disney Baroque,’” animation: an interdisciplinary journal, 18, no. 1 (2023): 78-95.

Bibliography

Schickel, Richard. 1967. The Disney Version: The Life, Times, Art and Commerce of Walt Disney. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Smoodin, Eric. 1993. Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons from the Sound Era. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Biography

Peter C. Kunze is Assistant Professor of communication at Tulane University. He is the author of Staging a Comeback: Broadway, Hollywood, and the Disney Renaissance (Rutgers University Press, 2023).