By Alyssa Marler
Animation is a film style that has been around for decades and continues to bring new stories and styles year to year. One major animation company is the internationally known industry Disney; Disney has been around for a century bringing us new stories and animated movies to last a lifetime.1 The relevance of Disney to animation analysis is due to the change in style over time and the quality of their animation styles. If we look back towards the beginning of Disney, we will see Snow White, Popeye the Sailor Man, Roger Rabbit, and The Little Mermaid animation styles known as the “traditional style”.2 This style is all hand drawn, in modern times this animation style can be seen in films such as Spirited Away directed by Hayao Miyazaki.* His animated films are all hand drawn which is rare to see in the modern 3-D digital wave of animation. Paying close attention to the animation styles and differences between 2-D hand-drawn animation and 3-e 3-D digital animation can aid in the tools to help viewers catch those differences in other animated films.2 Some notable features in “traditional” animation in Disney films are watercolors, and detailed backgrounds, and several viewers consider this Disney’s “charm” and say this style of animation is Disney’s signature style that viewers miss. The modern 3-D animation style is revolutionary in the mid-2000s to early 1900s.2
The 3-D animation styles brought the Disney consumers the beloved classics such as Chicken Little, Tangled, and Frozen when hand-drawn studio traditions were cast aside for modern developments in animation at the time. As we dive into the analysis of animations and the evolution of animation with a focus on Disney animation there is an emphasis for Disney consumers to have the Disney “feel” or the classic Disney features.3 The expectations that consumers have for a Disney studio produced film, and without those features there is a huge let down hence Wish’s endless bad reviews. Wish a perfect film to analyze to learn more about animation because of the flaws that can be found within the film. If you have seen Wish then you are familiar with the plot, or lack thereof, and the animation style the studio chose for their 100-year anniversary.
The animation in Wish is disappointing to say the least, and considering this is celebrating the studio's 100-year anniversary it became a huge letdown to the Disney consumer community. After analyzing the film, there is a distinct separation of the characters from the film's background, and this is going into theory. From an analysis of the film that I personally saw I the intention is to combine the old classic hand drawn Disney from the start with the modern 3-D animation we have today.1 Unfortunately, this movie missed the mark. The animation styles do not gel in the intended manner, and it makes the film look cheap. There has been a great deal of film analysis of the use of AI and possible AI generation of the film. This is how negative the film landed with the public and has ruined any hopes of the classic old Disney return. This film has worried Disney lovers that the spark is disappearing, and the studio has become complacent with lukewarm productions to line the pockets of their coats. With that said, there are a couple of perspectives that are playing devil’s advocate for the directors and writers, and hoping the team did not have nearly enough time to produce the product that the public deserved to celebrate 100 years of Disney and they were forces to publish the unfinished product. Regardless of the reasoning this animation fail will stick with Disney for several years and plague the studio with a negative view of the integrity behind their work.2 The future of animation is continuously advancing faster than we can even imagine, but with that said producing animation that is of high quality and intent is going to take more than a movie called Wish that never represented the Disney animation we all knew and loved and hoped to see flourish not become complacent and lazy. 3
1 Jstor Home, accessed March 16, 2024, https://www.jstor.org/.
2 Ebiri, Bilge. “Disney’s Wish Fails on Every Level.” Vulture, November 22, 2023. https://www.vulture.com/article/movie-review-disneys-wish-is-a-disaster.html.
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