Dumbo (Ben Sharpsteen, 1941)

With its tight running length—barely stretching to the point of feature length—and stripped-down visual style, Dumbo broadcasts the financial desperation motivating it as if trumpeting it through the trunks of its elephants. After Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs proved one of the greatest hits in motion-picture history, Walt Disney promptly sank profits into the far more ambitious experiments of Pinocchio and Fantasia, both of which proved to be costly flops. Desperate to refill coffers, Disney took a planned short film adapting a story written for a novelty toy and had his team inflate up to a 64-minute picture to get some money, any money, back into the studio.

Yet if Dumbo is, fundamentally, a last-ditch effort to raise money, it must surely rank as one of the most delightful and genuinely creative "cash grabs" put to film. Moving away from the more detailed and expensive oil and gouache background paintings that gave Disney's previous two features their considerable artistic depth, the animation team returned to the more economical use of watercolor for backgrounds. But if the cuter, broader backgrounds lacked the intricacy of Fantasia's vastness or Pinocchio's masterfully modulated sense of scale, they also freed up the animators to focus on more vivid character animation, and one need only compare the expressiveness of Dumbo's baby blues to the more basic facial capabilities of prior characters to see how much the Nine Old Men and the rest of the animators could grow even when taking a studio-mandated step-backward.

Cars 2 (John Lasseter, 2011)

I will not ask why Cars 2 exists because I've seen the merchandising figures from the first film. Nevertheless, it's a question I couldn't force out of my mind while watching this two-hour bore. After a string of ambitious, beautiful films that established Pixar as one of the most respected studios on Earth, they finally sink to the sad state of their bosses at Disney. This isn't a film, it's a preview of coming attractions at a theme park. I didn't stay through all the credits, but I nearly did just to see if it ended with an advertisement to come check out Cars Land next year at Disney California Adventure.

Underlining the sheer cynicism of this film's conception is the near-total lack of characterization. John Lasseter, whose erstwhile evocation of the young, winsomely childlike George Lucas here brings out the mercenary side of the Star Wars creator, transparently structures the film to avoid personal connection in favor of selling toys. Forgettable as the first Cars was, it at least spent time with its characters; Cars 2 throttles past the drama between Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and his loving but tiresome best friend Mater (Larry the Cable Guy), preferring instead to get in as many new vehicles as possible to make sure Disney's merchandise wing ends this year in the black.

Beauty and the Beast (1991)

After spending nearly three decades in a creative wilderness, Walt Disney Pictures rebounded in 1989 with The Little Mermaid, ushering in the "Disney Renaissance," a period commonly accepted to have lasted through the release of Tarzan in 1999 (even a cynic would at least have to go as far as 1994's The Lion King). Yet nothing produced during the 10-year creative revival at the studio could match the power, beautiful simplicity and downright entertainment value of the two films that signaled Disney's return to prominence.

Beauty and the Beast could easily be seen as unnecessary, what with Jean Cocteau's magical adaptation floating around the ether for some 50 years before the creative teams in Glendale, Cali. and Orlando decided to finally get the twice-abandoned adaptation of the fairy tale. Yet it marks the pinnacle of Disney's style of animated filmmaking -- Broadway one frame at a time -- creating atmospheres not only romantic and lilting but intimidating and provocative. What's more, it's damn near the most subversive thing the animation studio ever put out.

Just consider the three main characters. Belle arrives in southeastern France as the daughter of an inventor, and the village folk immediately ostracize them. It would be easy, oh so easy, to point out the reductive, facile feminism of Belle, whose greatest single attribute for the first 10 minutes or so is the fact that she reads, the sort of character trait that is as much a cheap male fantasy as any of the passive homemakers in previous Disney princess movies. Yet Belle isn't a cardboard feminist, even if her only devotion is to her father; her loyalty comes off more a result of a mutually loving and supportive bond and a reaction to her discomfort with others than a sense of duty. As she walks through the village at the start of the film, everyone fixates on her bookish nature, ignoring her attractiveness.

Ironically, the only person who does notice how beautiful she is is the most boorish and pigheaded. Gaston, a muscly, self-absorbed man who makes me want to call up my old French teacher and ask, "Comment dit-on 'juicehead?'" is the most lusted-after person in the village. He's sort of alpha male that women want to be with and men want to be (to the point that they too seem to want to be with him). Where the other villagers are so rural that they don't see the point of reading, Gaston is so utterly stupid that he can't even process anything beyond physical attractiveness.

Ironically, he's one of the most brilliant characters in Disney history, because the animators and writers use him to subvert the image of the classical Disney prince. In any other movie, Gaston would be Prince Charming, wealthy, handsome and attached to the heroine, capable of improving her station beyond her wildest dreams. Here, however, he's a misogynistic tyrant who decides to marry Belle simply because she's the prettiest around and refuses to hear her opinion in the matter. Clearly, he's never not gotten his way, and Belle's polite but firm rejection is a threat to his masculinity that drives him to a murderous rage. What initial attractiveness the man might have is almost immediately dispelled by his nature, and there can be no mistaking his role as the film's villain.

Compared with the Beast, Gaston's rotted personality could set up an "inner beauty" fable on the level of Shallow Hal's fatuous nonsense. But that ignores the Beast's initial nature: he's as vile as Gaston, and his curse stems from his egotistical demeanor. There is no preferable choice for Belle's affections at the start, because she does not exist simply to give them away. She is not looking for love at all, only traveling to the Beast's castle because the monster holds her father prisoner. She asks to take her dad's place because she's young enough to spend time in a dusty, cold castle.

Fundamentally, that's the beauty of Beauty and the Beast. Rather than tell a story about separated soulmates (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, many, many more), the writers create a fairy tale that uses the fantastical elements of a castle populated by anthropomorphized objects and ruled by a demon lion/dog to tell a realistic love story. To be sure, the conceit of two antagonistic forces learning to love each other is a dead horse of a different color, but the characters don't fully realize their feelings until the last 10 minutes. Instead, Beauty and the Beast first plays as Pygmalion in reverse, a beautiful, refined woman breaking through the crude manners of a beastly male to bring out his gentler side. Only when the Beast finally ceases thinking of himself does he understand the feelings that nag at him for an hour.

From an animation standpoint, Beauty and the Beast does not quite measure up to its storytelling standard. Now, it does not want for visual imagination: rich colors and enticingly rendered characters bump against the emerging Computer Animation Production System used to handle backgrounds. CAPS allows animators to pull of shots that simply could not be done by hand, from rapidly canting angles of simulated motion to the majesty of the film's centerpiece, the ballroom dance set to the titular song.

The problem arises from time and budget constraints. Two months before the film premiered, the animators sent a workprint version to the New York Film Festival. However, that version had only 70% of the final footage, and one can see the two months' worth of cramming at times. Occasionally, secondary characters lack expressive animation, and backgrounds lose their detail in spots. When the CAPS animation sometimes jars with the 2D rendering, I can't help but wonder whether technological limitations or time issues are to blame.

What cannot be criticized, however, is the drawing of the main characters. Mark Henn, who would go on to make most of the best-drawn female characters in Disney history (he'd already co-drawn Ariel), makes Belle into someone who clearly grew up reading instead of doing chores, but she looks more ready for something bad to happen than Cinderella. And when he puts her in that yellow dress, he crafts the most stunning Disney princess since Aurora. Andreas Deja gives Gaston such a predatory stalk and evil leer that the animator clearly intends older viewers to identify a rapist mentality driving the character. It's not so explicit that children will either fail to understand Gaston's evil and thus lose interest or be scarred, but for once the creepy nature of a strapping man in a Disney film is intentional.

But nothing compares to Glen Keane's animation of the Beast. His finest creation, the Beast is first introduced in silhouette, taking on the likeness of the great demon Chernabog from Fantasia. In light, he resembles a hybrid of a lion and a wolf with demonic horns, capable of conveying terrifying, unstoppable animal force when on all fours and a comical yet believable humanity when he straightens his back. Almost as if to prove how great Keane is, the film positions the two ways of animating the Beast one almost immediately after the other (from Beast fighting off wolves to him making a buffoon out of himself learning etiquette) to demonstrate how fluidly Keane can transition between the two depictions.

The single greatest aspect of the entire film, however, more than the storytelling, more than the lead animation, is the songwriting. Howard Ashman revived Disney's tradition for great, memorable songwriting with The Little Mermaid, and his work is likely as big a reason that film succeeded and revived the studio's creative legacy as anything in the movie. Here, he ups the ante: with Alan Menken, Ashman crafts perhaps the greatest songbook to accompany a Disney film, and one of the best of any film of any kind. There are individual songs to match the hits here, from "When You Wish Upon a Star" to "Once Upon a Dream," but there isn't a single song that feels like a filler. Hell, I'm struggling to think of another Disney film that uses its songs so brilliantly not simply to adds some spice to the proceedings to but advance both narrative and character. Ashman's deliciously simple titles seem like afterthoughts but simply convey the essence of each song. "Belle" opens the film in pure opulence, creating a wave of cascading voices, some of which join into harmonies, others directly oppose one another. The effect perfectly establishes the character, whose lines are always sung the most softly and without anyone else joining in. "Gaston," meanwhile, inverts this, making the lines of all the other villagers hang off his every rhyme. "Be Our Guest" makes the opening seem tame in comparison, yet its explosion of extravagance is every bit as justifiable as "Belle": like that song, "Be Our Guest" establishes character in the midst of effervescent songwriting. The residents of the castle are all servants turned into the object they controlled, and they're thrilled to finally have a guest to wait upon once more. They are the ultimate depictions of existentialism, having literally become their jobs, so the opportunity to perform their duties simultaneously makes them feel alive once more.

As for the aforementioned title track, well, only "When You Wish Upon a Star" could possibly challenge it in my book, and I might still side with this. Sung in Angela Lansberry's beautifully soaring voice, "Beauty and the Beast" encapsulates the entire film's thoughtfulness on love, something that doesn't exist in fairy tales but in life; it's just harder to see out here. By my count, the song contains only 29 lines (including repeated ones), and all of them make an impact. "Barely even friends/Then somebody bends/Unexpectedly" starts the first stanza in earnest, and the subtlety of it has the ironic effect of being overpowering. Instead of making grandiose proclamations of destined love, Ashman goes for the truth, which is so much more romantic and rewarding: we don't know we're in love until we spend time with someone and unforced adjustments make the pieces fall into place.

Ashman died from complications from AIDS just before the film premiered, and he is beautifully (and rightly) eulogized in the credits as the man "who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul," and while Disney would make a number of fantastic films through the end of the century, Ashman's death left a hole that even the best of them couldn't fill.

Beauty and the Beast opens on a familiar sight in Disney fairy tale fiction: still images of folkloric artwork as a narrator introduces the tale. Yet compared to the storybooks of old, the animators treat us to depictions of the background on stained glass, suggesting either that this really happened or, like religious stories, it is such an inspirational tale that it deserves to be remembered even if you don't believe it. I still must choose Pinocchio for the agelessness of its dynamic vision, but Beauty and the Beast marks the pinnacle of Disney's work with fairy tales, and it's a shame Walt Disney couldn't have lived to see the purest example of what he wanted from his studio.

[Beauty and the Beast is now available on a stunning Blu-Ray from Disney. Picture and audio quality put to shame even other Disney restorations such as their sterling work on Pinocchio and Sleeping Beauty. I cannot urge purchasing it enough.]

Sleeping Beauty

Disney's Blu-Ray restoration of Sleeping Beauty presents the film in the widescreen format of its original production, making even clearer the movie's aesthetic roots in the embroidered scrolls of the Middle Ages, massive cloths that told a story visually from left to right using pictures and the occasional, clarifying text scrawl. Sleeping Beauty, out of all the studio's fairy tale adaptations, most looks the part, despite the daring art direction that separates the film from the animation pack even today.

As is befitting the old scrolls, most movement is horizontal, whisking the 75-minute story from point to point without dallying. The plot moves from Princess Aurora's birth to her hidden away from the evil wizard, Maleficent, to the villain finding her and so on. Yet enough pauses are given to give a bit of meat to the story, if mainly for the supporting characters, particularly the three good fairies. Originally conceived to look alike, animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston wisely gave distinct dimensions to Flora, Fauna and Merryweather, not only separating them by color but giving each her own personality. Yet the animators keep the fairies small enough that they fit in to the animation style and keep the story moving.

Objects that loom upward, like the tallest tower in the castle where the princess eventually lies in wait or Maleficent, thus stand out by breaking up the flow of the horizontal movement. Maleficent herself is the greatest of all the Disney villains, perfectly animated and drawn as a nearly unbroken black punctuated by sickly green skin and the flashes of purple in her cloak. Every aspect of Maleficent, from the strips at the end of her cloak to her fingers to her horned head, curves into a sharp point. At once sharply defined and mysteriously amorphous and shifting, Maleficent would make for the greatest villain if she never said a word.

But, of course, she does, and Eleanor Audley's slithering cackle adds dimensions of menace to a character already troubling in her cold intellect. The torture she lays upon the peaceful kingdom is ingenious in its psychological warfare: snubbed by the royals, Maleficent appears at Aurora's birth to lay a curse upon the child that she will die on her 16th birthday by touching the spindle of a spinning wheel, sending the king into a frenzy that leads him to burn every spinning wheel in the kingdom. Near the end, when she captures the brave Prince Phillip, she plans to hold the prince for 100 years while Aurora lies in ageless sleep waiting for his kiss. Trusting that the will to see his love again will keep the prince alive, the sorceress will release him as a decrepit man to revive Aurora, only for her to reject the wrinkled old creature that would stand before her.

Maleficent is so captivating a villain, and the fairies so amusing a comic and emotional foil, that Sleeping Beauty overcomes perhaps the least interesting main characters to grace a great Disney film. Aurora is the most useless of all Disney princesses, an almost impressive achievement considering the long line of submissive housewives-in-training to grace the studio's features. When she is not trapped in a sleep waiting for her prince to save her, Aurora dances with woodland creatures and sings beautiful songs to herself that always attract her true love. You know, that old chestnut. Phillip, too, is little more than a generic knight in shining armor, arranged to marry Aurora anyway but committed to save the woman who wooed him with her song. I like that the movie introduces the idea that arranged marriages are outdated even for the 14th century and gives Aurora the freedom to love someone else, but for the man she falls for to be her betrothed seems too easy a way out.

But the greatest pull of the film lies in its art direction. Eyvind Earle came on board as the film's chief color stylist and background designer, but with Walt out in Anaheim playing in his new sandbox as Disneyland got off the ground, Earle began exerting more an more control. By the time the film finished production, he'd become an auterial presence on the film, painting most of the backgrounds himself, in such detail that cels that would normally take a day to animate took at least a week.

Earle is also the man responsible for Sleeping Beauty's color palette, easily the wildest and boldest to grace a Disney animated feature. Storybook backgrounds rub up against the bright neon of Maleficent's green flames and the striking red, blue and green of the fairies that always look distinctive even when placed near other objects of similar colors. At times, the animation of Sleeping Beauty, without ever resorting to distortion or sudden shifts, borders on the surreal. Look at the mastery evident in the scene where Aurora, returned to the castle and mourning the seeming loss of her true love to marry another man. The scene pans over to the fireplace in the room, as flickering flames dies into smoke, which curls into Maleficent's scepter before she suddenly appears in silhouette holding it. Then, she dissolves into an orb of green energy that hypnotizes Aurora into following her through a portal away from the fairies. The entire process plays out in about a minute, but the subtlety of the swirling movement, despite its speed, proves that as peeved as the other animators must have been that Earle took over, his demanding nature paid off.

Sleeping Beauty contains my favorite villain, who manages to go from sinister to even more so when she turns into a dragon, as well as my favorite supporting character, Merryweather. Compared the more maternal characteristics of older female characters in Disney movies, Merryweather is a fantastic spitfire, unwilling to take anything lying down even if the other fairies must restrain her from mouthing off to Maleficent and subsequently dying every five minutes. She and Maleficent would be worth the movie alone, but Earle's art direction permanently enshrines Sleeping Beauty in the upper echelon of Disney features.

All of the Disney movies have some lesson to impart, and this one is no different. With snatches of screen time, Maleficent proves her intelligence and craftiness through her sadistic plotting. But when the fairies think of how to counter the sorceress' curse on Aurora, Flora realizes that the only course of action is to hide the baby away and not attract attention by giving up magic. Maleficent can anticipate any magic the fairies would use, but she cannot fathom sacrificing power for another person. The inability for villains to understand love is not a new concept, and it would be used in future children's tales, but the brevity afforded to this moment of insight due to the short running length of the film somehow takes on a slight poetry to it stressing itself more than necessary, and it's a bright spot in a narrative that takes a back seat to the visuals. But hey, when the visuals look this good, not much else matters anyway.

Pinocchio

Can there be any real challenger to Pinocchio's status as the greatest animated film of all time? History has overemphasized Disney's role in the field, rightly focusing on the studio's innovations and perfections of existing techniques, yet too often relegating the work of other studios -- of entire countries even; hardly anyone conceded the accomplishments of other nations in the field of animation until the animé blew up in the '90s -- into the periphery by those eager to establish Disney's dominion over all. Yet even those fundamentally opposed to the gargantuan evil that is the corporation's current identity cannot deny Pinocchio: it's not as colorful as Sleeping Beauty, as emotionally affecting as Dumbo, as purely artistic as Fantasia nor as varied as Alice in Wonderland, but above all entries is Disney's uneven canon it retains a certain something, a timeless of design and storytelling and a feeling of magic that Walt Disney, flawed individual that he was, used to chase so desperately.

It remains surprising, and more than a little vexing, to note that Pinocchio flopped upon its original release, a disappointment after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs proved to be the unexpected hit of its time, arguably in all of cinematic history. Not until Disney re-released it as a part of their old business model of putting old animated features back into theaters every seven years or so to ensure that every child had the chance to see these films on the big screen (Lord, how I wish they still did this).

It is true of a number of Disney Animated Features that the animation style in some way reflects another medium of storytelling, and like most Pinocchio resembles a storybook.,Yet it also looks like a series of paintings. Brushstrokes are visible, contrasting with the most sophisticated use of the multiplane camera that Disney used from its shorts all the way through The Little Mermaid in 1989. Thus, every scene looks alternately as flat as it actually is and as deep as the complicated multiplane movements allow. Consider one of the first shots of the film, after we meet Jiminy Cricket (who looks at the camera and speaks directly to the audience, immediately highlighting the storybook setup) and leap into the book he opens: after the camera pans over a cityscape, it cuts to a shot outside Geppetto's shop. Suddenly, the camera appears to hop toward the shop; this is a 1st person shot of Jiminy moving, which exists because the animators figured out how to do it and because it makes the story that much bouncier (no pun intended).

Note also how shadows seemingly grow and shrink as if real when the camera moves, and how, brushstrokes and all, Pinocchio is still one of the most finely detailed animated pictures ever, which automatically makes it one of the most detailed films period. If its color scheme is not as vibrant and immediately arresting as that of Sleeping Beauty, Pinocchio nonetheless features the richest color scheme of any Disney feature. Geppetto's shop is filled with magnificent clocks and music boxes of all shapes, sizes, colors and rhythms. The film's episodic structure gives the animators a freedom of scope that might not have been allowed for a more rigidly plotted film.

Thus, both the characters and the "sets" contain the most imaginative work ever conceived for a Disney picture, at once existing for the pleasure and ego of the animators, who'd managed the impossible with Snow White and now wanted to prove their mastery, and to enrich the story, which would be terribly lacking without it. Everything strikes the perfect balance between reality and fantasy: Figaro, drawn by Eric Larson into an adorable ball of fluff, looks and walks exactly as a cat should, yet he has the personality of a spoiled child, and without a single word he becomes as human as the living puppet. Bill Tytla, greatest of animators, morphs the villainous Stromboli into a great mound of flesh: so large is he that his fat appears to break out of the lines that confine his character, rolling with every syllable and step. He's such a presence that the room itself appears to quiver along with his folds. Gustaf Tenggren painted the initial storyboards for the backgrounds, which the animators transposed so masterfully that one would never think to insult the tracers of the world after seeing the process (shown in a fairly thorough making-of). Completed with the insertion of the tiniest details by Albert Hunter, made all the more clear by the phenomenal job Disney did with its Blu-Ray restoration and upgrading, the world of Pinocchio is as tangible yet abstract as the characters. The effects animation is just as spectacular: the use of water, drawn to exacting perfection to resemble nature, has a certain look and feel in its movement, realistic as it is, that sets it apart from all future attempts to simply draw water as water is. It's almost as if the water is sentient, capable of moving and reacting to Monstro the whale, a beast so gigantic and fearsome that the water surrounding him attempts to flee along with the sea creatures. No live action effects work approached the level of expertise and seamless integration into the film for decades.

This combination of identifiable animation with bold experimentation carries over into the narrative, which plays out in the typical storybook fashion but finds a fresh presentation through the character of Jiminy Cricket. Voiced by the vaudevillian and character actor Cliff Edwards (the first "name" actor to appear as a voice), Jiminy replaces the usual dry narration in favor of a streetwise, cocky guide who routinely addresses the audience, undercuts a severe moment with levity and offers snide rebuttals. "A very lovely thought," he says when Geppetto wishes upon a star for Pinocchio to be a real boy, "but not at all practical." He is responsible for the film's biggest flaw, however: when Honest John sweeps Pinocchio into Stromboli's puppet show, Jiminy looks upon his ward's success and decides that Pinocchio must not need him any longer, neglecting to consider how Geppetto will feel about losing his boy and how crowd adoration does not equal happiness. At least this misstep ends with a nice punchline: "What does an actor want with a conscience, anyway?"

Even the music in Pinocchio is exemplary. Leigh Harline's score is one of the best in cinematic history: he covers a massive breadth of moods and styles, capturing the first truly maudlin feeling in a Disney work when Geppetto heads out into the rain to look for Pinocchio or the scene where Pinoke and Jiminy return from Pleasure Island to find Geppetto's home empty (a scene no less gut-wrenching than anything found in Dumbo, Disney's most heartbreaking feature). He cascades through cultures in the vamp of Pinocchio's number "I've Got No Strings to Hold Me Down," starting with a cabaret feel before speeding up and flavoring the song with international tones. Complementing Harline's brilliant soundtrack are the lyrics of Ned Washington, who makes "I've Got No Strings to Hold Me Down" so darn catchy and crafted the musical summation of Disney, practically the anthem of the corporation*, "When You Wish Upon a Star." There aren't five better songs written for a film in all of cinema (only "Over the Rainbow"comes to mind**), and never has a song so fully tapped into the mindset not of a single film but the entire ethos of its architect.

If all of these elements are so good, so beautiful and so entertaining, you may ask, how could the film have flopped? Hey, beats me, but there are some indicators. Pinocchio cost twice as much as Snow White, and it came out when Europe was too besieged to give a damn about film distribution, thus limiting foreign intakes to better insure against losses. The likeliest answer, though, is that the film is terrifying: it takes the petulant cad of Collodi's original serials and makes him into a beacon of innocence, and then forces that softened boy to face the same gamut of perils that a far more unsympathetic character endured in the original stories. For the original Pinocchio, such tribulations likely seemed justified or at least peevishly enjoyable, but Disney's version never does anything to deserve such punishment. Each episode leads the boy further into hell: tricked into joining a show run by a man who initially seems amicable -- his roly-poly body communicates geniality -- but he quickly turns into a monster, throwing Pinocchio into a cage and threatening to make firewood of the boy when he outlives his profitability. The lad escapes, only to find himself carted by a sinister Coachman to Pleasure Island, which I must say is far more troubling in its aesthetic than I remember. It's a hedonistic den when all the naughty children of society may play until they turn into donkeys to work in the salt mines below the park. When Pinocchio at last returns home, he finds it empty and receives a note informing him that Geppetto was swallowed by the great whale Monstro. Pinocchio is, simply, a series of downers. (This explanation does little to account for the later success of Dumbo, which was even crueler to a character that managed to be even more innocent than the wooden boy).

Yet Pinocchio also has a sweetness characteristic of all Disney films, and if the cruelty is necessary to prevent the sugary side from becoming saccharine, so be it. The film deals in truisms that are openly stated as well as visually illustrated: "A lie keeps growing and growing until it's as plain as the nose on your face," "Give a bad boy enough rope, and he'll soon make a jackass of himself." As with the best of the studio's pictures, Pinocchio is simple in effect, which is not, naturally, to say that it is simplistic. It's far too technically accomplished for that, and besides, it utilizes its simplicity to widen its appeal. In the wake of the death of silent films, animation became the most universal of film styles, capable of speaking to audience across age and cultural divides. Disney would soon adjust its demographic in order to turn a profit, aggressive targeting children instead of crafting grand cinematic achievements, and Pinocchio, though not the last example of Golden Age animation, stands as the apex of a time when a cartoon about a wooden boy facing challenges could be as staggering and timeless as the most lavish Hollywood production.



*This is almost literally the case now, as "WYWUaS" has been played before every Disney feature since the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie came out in 2006.
**I nearly pitted "Singin' in the Rain" against it, until I realized that the song was written far before the film. Funnily enough, it was sung, small word after all, by Cliff Edwards.