How Disney’s 2000s films helped shape its contemporary classics

Welcome to 2000s Week! We’re exploring the pop culture that shaped us at the turn of the millennium and examining what the films, shows, and games from the era say about us then and now. It’s a little #tbt to the days before #tbt was a thing.

When you think back to Disney’s best animations, what comes to mind? Fantasy staples from 70 years ago like Cinderella and Peter Pan? Or maybe you recall the Disney Renaissance of the ’90s, led by musicals like The Lion King and Aladdin? Do you look to the modern box-office smashers like Frozen and Moana?

While it’s possible for Disney films from any era to enchant your soul, it’s unlikely that the films of the 2000s will be the first to jump out at you. We’re talking about films like Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Chicken Little, Brother Bear, and Dinosaur, to name a few. But why do they get pushed into the background, even by the company that created them?

Some of the films from this decade are decidedly below average, like Home on the Range, which secured itself a 53% critic score and an even lower 29% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes due to its plain animations and forgettable characters. Others, like Treasure Planet, failed to recoup their budgets at the box office. That movie took in only $109 million of the $140 million it cost to make, even though it featured a compelling story and a stunning steampunk setting. But even despite their struggles, both of those films had a hand in shaping Disney’s modern successes.

While you might say that Walt Disney Animation Studios had an identity crisis in the 2000s —in which it struggled to create narratives that were stylistically cohesive, thus attracting modestly sized audiences — this era can alternatively be framed as a time of experimentation and innovation. In fact, without the existence of films like Lilo & Stitch, Meet the Robinsons, or Bolt, it’s unlikely that Disney would have produced its more recent animated entries. If any single thing defined Disney in the 2000s, it was the studio’s willingness to try.

The Decade Disney Mixed Up the Music

Before the 2000s dawned, Disney was stuck in the ’90s. And oh, what a time that was for the studio. The era that roughly began with The Little Mermaid in 1989 and ended with Tarzan in 1999 is formally referred to as the Disney Renaissance. It birthed classics like Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, and Hercules, all of which — in addition to being critically and commercially successful — were adapted from popular legends and fairytales, characterized by rich hand-drawn animations, and supported by Broadway-style soundtracks. But something changed as the new millennium approached.

Stephen Anderson, a director at Walt Disney Television Animation, 
was brought on to Tarzan (2000) — the studio’s first non-musical film since The Rescuers Down Under (1990) — as a story artist in ‘95.

“My first day was the Monday after the Pocahontas wrap party,” said Anderson in an interview with Mashable, “so the studio was really still riding high off The Lion King, which had come out the year before. As I was there, working on Tarzan […] the films stopped doing as well as each preceding film. It seemed very much like it was time for Disney to change up — offer the audience something different and fresh, because it did seem like maybe that tried-and-true formula was getting a little stale.”

The studio began work on a new epic Renaissance-style musical inspired by The Prince and the Pauper entitled Kingdom of the Sun, which was set to premiere in the summer of 2000. But production was plagued with problems.

“I did some storyboards for the screening,” said Anderson. “That turned out to be the screening where everything kind of melted down. What [the executives] ended up doing was taking the two directors of Kingdom of the Sun — Roger Allers and Mark Dindal — and they split them off into two different teams, and they said, ‘Each of you come up with a new version — like an alternate version of Kingdom of the Sun – that solves a lot of the story problems that we feel like the film is having. And then we’ll make a choice, which way we want to go.’”

The executives ended up picking Dindal’s version, a snappy buddy-comedy about a selfish emperor-turned-llama who journeys back to his palace with a village leader (the film now known as The Emperor’s New Groove). It was more lighthearted and less complicated to create than Allers’ dramatic Broadway version of Kingdom of the Sun, which hadn’t been helped by the underwhelming box office performances of Pocahontas (1995) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), both of which were musicals, too.

“I think it made people see how you could use music differently.”

While 2000 saw the arrival of a spunky new comedy set in the Incan Empire, it also saw the death of the Disney musical. The Emperor’s New Groove was not a traditional musical. It features music sung by a minor character literally called the Theme Song Guy, but it’s not loaded with any plot-pushing songs performed by main characters. But just because Disney was moving away from collections of elaborate numbers didn’t mean it was dropping pointed music moments altogether.

According to Anderson, films like Toy Story (1995) — which featured various song-backed scenes, including the opening “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” sequence that establishes Andy’s friendship with Woody — helped lay the groundwork for the animations of the 2000s.

“I think it made people see how you could use music differently,” said Anderson. “It can be a song sung over the action, maybe a character sings, like the ‘Trashin’ the Camp’ sequence in Tarzan, but it’s not a full-on production.”

Tarzan came out a year before The Emperor’s New Groove, and it, too, helped Disney transition between the classic musical and the song-supported story. Tarzan spotlighted many songs, but they weren’t sung by the characters. Instead, characters’ emotions were communicated through rhythmic Phil Collins tunes that would play over spirited jungle sequences. This music format — the idea that songs with lyrics can be used to elevate the emotions of a non-musical animation — became commonplace throughout the following decade.

Treasure Planet, in which an angsty teenager hunts for treasure in space after coming across a map, uses songs from The Goo Goo Dolls frontman John Rzeznik and Brit pop-rock group BBMak to back a montage in which Jim relates memories of his father to his relationship with Silver that leads out to the credits. Meet the Robinsons — a comedy about an orphan inventor who meets an eccentric family in the future after being brought there by a young time-traveler — follows a similar pattern, with “Another Believer” by Rufus Wainwright playing over a montage of Lewis working on his memory scanner device for the science fair, and “Little Wonders” by Rob Thomas aiding the end scene.

Anderson, who directed Robinsons, alongside the film’s executive music producer Chris Montant and supervisor Tom MacDougall, searched extensively for songs that would give the film identifiable moments.

“We’d meet and say, ‘Oh that’s an interesting sound, or that person’s really interesting,’ or ‘I don’t think that’s the right sound for the movie,’ and then we would go from there. They [Montant and MacDougall] were really integral in finding a way to make appropriate music for the story but also something that was again, a little bit of a fresh and unique take on the types of artists we would use in a Disney film.”

Treasure Planet and Meet the Robinsons weren’t the only 2000s films to change it up. Lilo & Stitch mixes a handful of Elvis songs with tropical jams like “Hawaiian Roller Coaster Ride”; Chicken Little took the hits head-on by making its characters clown around to songs like “We Are the Champions” and “Wannabe,” first recorded by Queen and the Spice Girls respectively; and even Emperor’s New Groove opens and closes with “Perfect World,” a vibrant original by Tom Jones that introduces Emperor Kuzco’s exuberant privilege and later confirms his change of heart.

As fun as these experimentations were, Disney is known for its musicals. At the end of the decade, in 2009, the studio returned to its roots via the traditional musical The Princess and the Frog, a New Orleans-based retelling of The Frog Prince. Though it wasn’t as lucrative as the films released during the height of the Disney Renaissance, like The Lion King ($763 million during its original release) or 2008’s CGI Bolt ($309 million), the fairytale still brought in $276 million, outperforming the hand-drawn animations that preceded it including Home on the Range ($145 million) and Brother Bear ($250 million).  And even more importantly, from a creative perspective, it managed to charm critics, scoring a “Certified Fresh” 85% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Disney has continued to introduce new Renaissance-reminiscent musicals in more recent years, like Tangled, Frozen, and Moana. But the 2000s showed Disney it didn’t have to make musicals to create a solid story. And it could heighten its modern, non-musical films with song. This is why we have Fall Out Boy’s rockin’ “Immortals” and Owl City’s “When Can I See You Again?” dip into the spotlights of Big Hero 6 and Wreck-It Ralph respectively. It’s why Shakira’s “Try Everything” gives Zootopia a jolt of spirit. 

The Decade Disney Experimented With Genre

The Disney Renaissance films’ second most-defining element was their embrace of traditional fantasy elements. Some of them fully embodied the genre by incorporating magic into their storylines. The Little Mermaid‘s Ursula is a sea witch who uses her powers to give Ariel legs; Aladdin‘s protagonist makes wishes with a magic lamp. Others, even those loosely based on historical events, feature fantasy in their narratives: Pocahontas’ Grandmother Willow tree swirls to life; The Hunchback of Notre Dame‘s stone gargoyles can communicate with Quasimodo.

The 2000s saw Disney make a clear departure from fairytales and fantasies and entered into a wave of new genres including comedy, action, and even Westerns via Home on the Range.

“What was neat about that time period was that there was experimentation,” said Anderson. “All still very Disney, but different types of stories.” 

The one that most heavily dominated the decade was sci-fi. 

Prior to the 2001 release of Atlantis: The Lost Empire, in which a young cartographer searches for the titular city after coming across an ancient manuscript, Disney hadn’t put any major sci-fi elements into its animations. But soon after, Lilo & Stitch (2002) centered on a mischievous space creature; Treasure Planet (2002) took a trip on a galactic pirate ship; Chicken Little (2005) lead up to an alien invasion; and Meet the Robinsons (2007) created a colorful future. And while most of Disney’s pre-2000s films were set in the past, the new millennium also saw the introduction of features set in the present. The first of these to plant itself in modern times was Lilo & Stitch, which has a young girl adopting an extraterrestrial after he crash-lands in Hawaii.

“I liked the contemporary,” said Anderson. “I like that they allowed the characters to do things that weren’t always appealing or felt like something that a Disney character would always do, that Lilo and Nani could yell at each other, and be very real in terms of a sibling relationship, yet you never questioned how much they loved each other. There’s just a reality to Lilo & Stitch that I thought was really unique and really appealing.”

“What was neat about that time period was that there was experimentation.”

Though Disney made a return to fairytales set in the past in 2009 with the aforementioned The Princess and the Frog, and then again in 2010 with Tangled, it didn’t leave behind the earlier 2000s genres. This is why Wreck-It Ralph (2012) is a zippy arcade adventure, Big Hero 6 (2014) is a heartwarming superhero smash, and Zootopia (2016) is a fast-paced buddy cop comedy. If Disney never pushed the limits of genre in the 2000s, it might not have dared to try out these stories today.

But while 2000s Disney generally paved the way for these modern genre mash-ups, it also specifically brought to the forefront one other big idea: That not every Disney animation has to have a plot-driving romance.

The majority of the films from The Disney Renaissance, from The Little Mermaid to Tarzan, have a heavy focus on the romance between its protagonists. Sure, Lilo & Stitch sees surfer dude David crush hard on Lilo’s sister Nani, but their romance isn’t primary or essential to the plot. What’s far more important than the love story between these two is the sisterly love between Nani and Lilo and the friendship between Lilo and Stitch.

Romance is also unimportant in films like The Emperor’s New Groove, Meet the Robinsons, and Bolt. Though 2000s Disney films aren’t devoid of love stories — Atlantis: The Lost Empire, for example, features a romance between Milo and Kida — they were not limited to them. It’s why Disney was able to explore friendship in Home on the Range (a trio of dairy cows bond together to save their farm) and family relationships in Brother Bear (an Inuit boy seeks revenge against the creature that killed his brother).

The importance of non-romantic relationships in more recent years is best exemplified via 2013’s Frozen. The film sets itself up to be a love story in which Anna falls for Kristoff while journeying to save her sister Elsa from her ice powers that have grown too strong. But after Anna gets injured, she learns that she needs an act of true love, like true love’s kiss, in order to stay alive. The film flips around viewers’ expectations when the act of true love that helps Anna survive comes from her sacrificing herself for Elsa instead of Kristoff’s kiss.

While it’s impossible to say whether any of the 2000s films had a direct effect on this outcome, the time’s willingness to deviate from a traditional romance certainly helped Disney realize the value of other relationships. And because of this, the classic “love story” — such as the one in Frozen — was able to play out differently.

The Decade Disney Became Self-Aware

Disney wasn’t the only animation studio attempting to win over fans in the early 2000s. There was also DreamWorks, which directly competed with Disney by releasing Shrek in 2001.

Shrek wasn’t like a movie from the Disney Renaissance. It was still a fairytale, but the Broadway-style soundtrack was replaced by on-the-nose pop music, the family-friendly fare was traded in for adult humor, and the charming, attractive hero was pushed aside for… an ogre.

Though Shrek’s co-director Andrew Adamson , he did say that it was meant to deconstruct a fairytale. And, since it was produced by former Disney chairman Jeffery Katzenberg and parodied classic Disney tropes (For example, Princess Fiona sings to a bird like Cinderella does, only to make it explode with one bad note), critics definitely speculated.

Interestingly enough, the Disney animations that began development in a post-Shrek world feature a much more heightened sense of self-awareness.

The most obvious example of Disney making fun of itself during this era comes at the very beginning of Chicken Little (2005), which began development just months after Shrek‘s release. The movie begins with “Once upon a time,” followed by an intro that mirrors The Lion King with the opening notes of “Circle of Life” and accompanying sunrise, and then a storybook that flips open in the wind — all of which are scrapped by the narrator for being too cliché. That’s just the beginning of Disney’s self-awareness, both in its animated and live-action departments.

In 2007, Walt Disney Pictures created Enchanted, a musical in which princess Giselle (Amy Adams) is transported out of her fairytale world and into New York City, where she sheds the notion of love at first sight and romances a divorce lawyer instead of her prince. And in 2009, the animated musical The Princess and the Frog has Tiana’s father reassert that wishing on a star won’t get you what you want in life unless you also put in the hard work. 

The company had begun to recognize its stories didn’t always match up with the real world.

While you can’t separate the magic from Disney — that’s part of what makes it special — the company had begun to recognize its stories didn’t always match up with the real world. So it aimed to turn the tables on viewers’ expectations.

This theme continues to permeate modern Disney films. In 2018’s Ralph Breaks the Internet, Vanellope finds all the Disney princesses hanging out together. Rapunzel asks, “Do people assume all your problems got solved because a big strong man showed up?” and after she says yes, the girls scream together, “She is a princess!” Another example of this comes in 2019’s Frozen II, when Elsa walks past a memory of herself performing “Let It Go” and cringes at her own voice — echoing the feelings of thousands of parents who heard their children sing it one too many times. 

Back in the 2000s, Meet the Robinsons didn’t have any moments quite as self-referential as those. Yet its surreal, more subversive sense of humor helped attract older audience members.

Anderson wanted the film to feel distinctly Disney but also different from what the studio had done before. While it still has the heart of a film from the decade before, it has jokes that are more fast-paced and meta, like when the villain’s mind-controlled frog and dinosaur verbally acknowledge that their master’s plan wasn’t thought through — or when 12-year-old Lewis asks Wilbur what his dad looks like, and Wilbur shows him an actual picture of Tom Selleck, who voices the character.

“You’d never do that kind of an acknowledgment of a real person in a Disney movie,” said Anderson. “But when we first screened the movie, it got a huge laugh, and every time we screened it subsequently, it got a laugh as well, because it was so unexpected. So why not? Let’s put it in there. Let’s see what happens.”

Meet the Robinsons‘ sparky sense of humor might not have blown up the box office. The film brought in $169 million, low next to films of the Renaissance era — even the less popular ones like Hercules ($252 million) and Mulan ($304 million). However, its self-awareness helped reach out to audiences that weren’t in the usual Disney family demographic. And eventually, these people showed up.

The studio’s most recent film, Frozen II, scored $1.4 billion and became the highest-grossing animation of all time. Had the film not attracted a wide range of viewers with its bold point of view and humor — qualities that were bred during the eccentric 2000s — this likely wouldn’t have happened.

Perhaps Disney Animation’s upcoming films, Raya and the Last Dragon (set to premiere March 12, 2021) and Encanto (scheduled for November 24, 2021) will win over viewers for the same reason.

The Decade Disney Transitioned to CGI

While the modern music, self-aware humor, and genre experimentation of the 2000s was optional, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ transition to computer-generated imagery was inevitable, especially if it wanted to keep up with Pixar, which released Toy Story in 1995 and DreamWorks, which debuted the computer-animated Antz in 1998.

Disney first  , a fantasy about a swineherd and a princess who must stop the evil Horned King from conquering the world with dark magic. It continued to utilize the possibilities of computer animation through the following years, adding life to the ballroom scene in Beauty and the Beast and the lush backgrounds in Tarzan. But while Pixar’s Toy Story became the first entirely computer-animated film in 1995, it wasn’t until a decade later that Disney Animation caught up.

Ellen Woodbury, Disney’s first female directing animator, was involved in the gradual transition from traditional animation to CGI.

“It was a long process for the entire studio,” Woodbury told Mashable. “There were different productions that used the computer to different degrees. For instance, Dinosaur — [an adventure about an iguanodon who must find a new home after a meteor shower strikes] — was like all computer dinosaurs and all live-action backgrounds. Meanwhile, we were doing traditional [non-CGI] pictures like The Emperor’s New Groove, and Atlantis, and Lilo & Stitch.”

After serving as the directing animator for Silver’s crew of alien pirates on Treasure Planet, Woodbury was taught how to create computer animations and even helped develop a training program to teach Disney’s other traditional animators the new medium. But first, the directing animators had to prove to the executives, including then-president Michael Eisner, that they could adapt to the new technology.

“The question was, ‘Are we going to lay off all the traditional animators and hire computer animators?” said Woodbury. “We told him, ‘The computer is a tool just like the pencil is a tool. And all we need to do is learn the tool, and we can bring all the skills and talents that we already have as animators to this new medium.’ And Michael Eisner goes, ‘OK. Let’s do it.'”

While some animators were given the opportunity to try their hand at the computer, many more didn’t get so lucky. Entire groups of creative talent — like those who worked as animation checkers or clean-up animators — weren’t needed anymore. They were let go in waves.

Those who did stay, like Woodbury, who worked on Disney’s first fully computer-animated film — 2005’s Chicken Little — were forced to deal with ridiculously slow computers. Hers had an around 2-second lagtime.

“It was like you never had the chance to get to your creative head because you were always waiting for something to catch up,” she said.

“I just remember it was like party time.”

Though the computer speed improved slightly over Woodbury’s time on the film, it wasn’t enough to keep her around. She left in 2005 a couple of months into Disney’s second-ever fully CGI-animated film, Meet the Robinsons.

“We had a lot of the big 2D animators from the sort of Renaissance time of films like Beauty and the Beast, Little Mermaid, Aladdin, those films — doing their first CG ever on Meet the Robinsons,” said Anderson. “And some people took to it and did an amazing job. It was also very heartbreaking to see some of them not take to it as well. There was one animator that made the comment, he said, ‘I feel like you’ve cut my hands off and told me to animate.'”

While the mid-2000s saw the departure from traditional animation, it also celebrated it one more time after John Lasseter was hired on as chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios in 2006 and brought back animators Ron Clements and John Musker, who co-directed The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, to take on The Princess and the Frog. 

“I just remember it was like party time,” said Anderson. “Everybody was so excited to be going back to hand-drawn. Everybody felt like it was the right thing to do.”

Disney ultimately moved on from traditional animation in full-length features, returning to it only once more for Winnie the Pooh, which Anderson co-directed, in 2011. However, while the studio pushed this art form into the background — at least for now — it has utilized the full potential of computer animation. It’s why the water in Moana looks fluid and the fall leaves in Frozen II look crisp. Disney would have never been able to create such visually stunning features had it never experimented with the computer animation in the decade before.

The 2000s might not feature Disney’s most beloved films, but it does feature some of their most creative, boundary-pushing works to date. And because the studio was willing to try — and succeed — and try — and fail back then — it was able to dream up the features fans have fallen hard for in recent years.

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