The Walt Disney Corporation is very good at some things, and very bad at others. And, personally speaking, the one thing they’ve always been worst at is making me like the Walt Disney Corporation.
I love the movies. I hold them dear to my heart. But whenever I see one of those corporate promotional videos where everyone is wandering around Disneyland in a state of wide-eyed joy like they’re the first good souls to be welcomed into God’s kingdom I come out in hives. You know what I’m talking about.
CHARACTER 1: It’s so incredible that [text from marketing press release announcing newest venture] is finally here!
CHARACTER 2: Woooooooooow…
I hate it when Disney tries to sell itself because it always feels so…the vibes are wrong. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s probably why the Oh My Disney sequence in Ralph Breaks the Internet is still my least favourite few minutes in the entire canon. It’s also probably the reason why I steered clear of Once Upon a Studio for so long, and why it took me two tries to actually watch it all the way through. And that’s because it begins like this:
Hives. Hives all over.
And look, I think it’s awesome that the short is dedicated to and stars the old man on the right. That’s Burny Mattinson, the longest serving Disney employee who died a few months before the short came out. It’s great that he was honoured like this and it’s also impressive that he gives a more believable and nuanced performance than his co-star, an actual professional actor. But yeah, the opening live action sequence just feels wrong to me. Just the worst kind of forced Disney jollity. But then…oh, but then.
The last of the animators leave and the camera comes to rest on a photograph of Mickey and Minnie:
The transition from a still cell of Mickey’s Birthday Party to Mickey coming to life is pulled off so flawlessly that you almost don’t really register just how impressive it is. Which I suppose brings me neatly to the subject of the animation.
And again, it’s not something that hits you immediately. Because it’s not visually spectacular. You’re just watching a load of cartoon characters getting ready for a group photo. It’s only when you stop and realise:
Oh wait, that’s Moana, Flounder, Merlin, Sugar Bowl, Mrs Potts, Chip, Cogsworth, March Hare, Doctor Krunklehorn and the Mad Hatter interacting with each other and a live action background all while flawlessly rendered in their original designs and animation styles.
Holy SHIT that’s impressive.
And yes, the the short’s joys outside of marvelling at the sheer technical wizardry of what’s been achieved are mainly just limited to watching characters interact who’d never normally get to meet. But you know what, so many of the pairings are fun and interesting that it’s more than enough to carry the short. Of course I could quibble. Some characters get short-shrift and some get more screen-time than their importance to the canon might strictly justify.
But many of the pairings are interesting and genuinely clever. Pluto and Joanna? Gaston and the Cheshire Cat? Ursula and fucking Splat from Strange World?!
I never would have thought of that (mostly because that would require thinking about Strange World) but it works!
And there’s a genuinely sweet moment where Micky stands before a portrait of Walt and quietly murmurs. “Gotta go. But thanks. On with the show.”
NO.
And I do love Mickey’s polite, “after you” to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit when they’re getting ready to have the picture taken, that just made me happy.
So, fun fact, there 543 Disney characters in this movie, and the one they gave the job of climbing a ladder and taking the group photo was:
Shit goes wrong (hold the phone, GOOFY FUCKED SOMETHING UP?) and the characters are devastated because they think they’ll have to wait another hundred years to get a photo. But Alan-a-Dale, Scat Cat and Mirabel start playing “When You Wish Upon a Star”, Fix-It Felix fixes the camera and the whole cast sings together
Is it just fan service?
Yes. It is just fan service. From start to finish. Pure indulgent, empty calorie sugar-rush fan service.
But it was made for ME, personally. So that makes it okay.
Disney’s centenary year will not, to put it bluntly, be remembered fondly. It was an absolute dumpster fire, a nadir for the company in terms of both artistic achievement, audience goodwill and even by the metric which should matter least but to them matters most; financial success.
But this short shows that there is still talent, and artistic drive and pure magic to be found there.
As a pure, sincere love-letter to everything that was and still is great about Disney animation, it’s damn near perfect.
NEXT UPDATE: 20th June 2024
NEXT TIME: Do you bleed? You will…
unshavedmouse 
I’m glad you liked it. 🙂
Also, I decided to follow up my calculations on your average scores of Disney movies with your average scores of MCU movies. The results were ….. predictable.
Phase 5: 50.67%
Phase 4: 53.56%
Phase 2: 72.66%
Phase 1: 74.5%
Phase 3: 79.36%
I did not think 2 would be so close to 1.
Ah Phase 3. We ate well, then.
Okay, you know I will die on this hill.
But 2023 was only a bad year for Disney if that is how you want to see it.
Even if you talk about the financial profits?
“Strange World” did worse in the box office in 2022 than “Wish” did in 2023.
But it doesn’t have a toxic hatedom, but it seems to have just passed people by.
And as much as “Elemental” technically is Pixar, it managed to do fine in 2023.
Then there is this short, that is very well-regarded by pretty much everybody.
And we all know this from the history of the Disney company:
Sure, they have to go through “dark periods” now and then.
But they will have a new big hit again before you know it.
And it only was two and a half years ago that “Encanto” was released.
It would have made more money if there still hadn’t been a pandemic.
However, it is very much beloved and well-regarded and won an Oscar.
So we shouldn’t be pessimistic about the Disney company.
Even if you guys hated “Wish”, it is not like it is the last movie that they will do…
Look, I’m just going to be blunt about this; you seem way too eager to defend the honor of a megacorporation worth billions of dollars to the point of invalidating legitimate complaints fans have made. And we ARE fans, believe it or not. It’s the ones who love Disney’s animated films who are being the loudest about their disappointment with the direction the company is going. The details of your arguments do not matter because that’s not the point. The problem we have is that we feel that Disney has broken a promise they made to us. And judging by your other comments (particularly on Wish), it feels like you don’t respect that.
Yes, Disney does have dark periods, and hopefully, it will get better. All we’re asking is for some sympathy, not a life lesson. Please understand that.
I’m not going to lie, the flip at the end from ‘When you wish upon a star’ to ‘Their war, here’ (DUN DUN DUN DUUUUUN) was deeply, deeply amusing.
Also, credit where it’s due, who could possibly look The Goof in those big dark eyes and refuse him? We know he’ll goof it up, but he’s so desperate to be helpful and who could stand to break Goofy’s heart?
Also, it’s good to see that Doctor Arroway not only hasn’t lost her inarticulate sense of wonder, she hasn’t been abducted by that scoundrel the late Lord Byron – my working theory for her long term absence was that he’d got her hooked on ether, locked up in a Turkish prison or caught up in that vampire thing.
In all fairness he might only have introduced her to his daughter Ada, Lady Lovelace (With hardcore maths nerd work IN SPACE to follow) but that would be awfully constructive for old George Gordon (and I’m reasonably sure any friend of Lord Byron’s would be shot at on sight by Lady Ada’s mother).
I had a similar reaction to this cartoon in that the beginning really made me roll my eyes but the rest of it was very fun and technically impressive.
I could quibble that the animation for the realistically designed characters wasn’t as well done as the cartoonier ones. (It’s been so long since Disney animation tried to do realistically drawn human figures that the animators were probably out of practice.) But that wasn’t too annoying.
And I honestly like that there were so many characters included from unpopular movies. It made the short feel more honest somehow and kind of brave like the creators weren’t afraid to risk reminding viewers of something they disliked. (Of course, in the case of some of the more recent unpopular movies, it might be more that Disney is trying to delude themselves into thinking they were popular.) And, of course, it’s nice for the fans of those generally less fondly remembered Disney movies.
P.S.
I couldn’t say how bad a year 2023 was for the Disney company artistically because I think I only saw two of their movies that were released that year, one of them only when it came out on streaming. FWIW, I enjoyed one of them but if I say which it was, I might get a bunch of angry comments deriding my taste and I’m not in the mood for that this week.
I forgot to mention that I thought it was clever that not only did Once Upon a Studio take advantage of there being many great singers in the history of animated Disney movies, but it also utilized the characters who played musical instruments and one who was a conductor.
Speaking of self-congratulatory Disney stuff, I’ve weirdly found myself enjoying watching their various old anniversary specials on YouTube. Yeah, they’re basically giant commercials and, like I said, very self-congratulatory ones but it interests me to see which clips from which movies are featured in which specials. It gives you some idea of what was popular in each special’s decade-or what Disney was trying to sell as popular anyway. The 50th anniversary special prominently features Old Yeller being put down and Bambi realizing his mother had died like those are big selling points for kids’ movies. LOL. Fascinating.
My favorite such special is definitely Once Upon a Mouse from 1981. Instead of having a bunch of celebrities praising Disney or even voiceover narration, it introduces each montage with a thematically related clip of/quote from Walt Disney. (Though in one case, they couldn’t find anything, so they just used a clip of Hans Conried as the Magic Mirror from an old Disney special.) It makes the whole thing feel relatively less like a commercial and more like a fan tribute.
“Once Upon a Studio” feels like a short mostly made up of character crossovers and Easter eggs. And that’s precisely what makes it so enjoyable for me.
Is it rather back-patting and self-congratulatory? Well, yeah. But it’s of an amount that I can put up with for the payoff. So I can’t snarl about it too much.
I have similar feelings, self-congratulations from Disney of all companies feels so…phony. Jenny Nicholson recently covered the absolute train wreck that was the Star Wars Hotel and I had no idea they did this much “Wow! Isn’t this great?!” advertisement that just makes me roll my eyes. Just present your product and let the viewers/customers hype it up. But this corporate mandated pat on the back seems to be the way of things now.
Anyway, I’m glad that you liked the animated sequence though, it’s a good reminder why Disney has endured as long as it has (predatory business practices aside). Animated characters that spoke out to use and captured the imagination, something in these cells of ink and computer imagery have stayed with us in ways we can’t articulate. But we still feel that affection and one hundred years later we can still appreciate it.
But Batman v. Superman? Oh-ho-ho-ho! That’ll be something for sure.
BvS…lord, am I curious how that’s gonna go down here. If nothing else, I’ll say this: taken on its own, it’s not the worst thing to come out of that run of DC movies and there is some good stuff in it. As an adaptation and in terms of the influence it’s had on the film slate, that may be another story…
Okay, I’m curious. What would you consider worse?
Ezra Miller?
I guess I don’t watch much Disney commercials and such because I mostly miss the Disney promoting itself things that can give you hives. But the opening of this short was pretty clunky. And it should have been longer! Personally I did imagine them doing something like this for the 100th birthday about a decade ago so I am proud of myself (but I imagined it to be inside the Disney castle and not animation studio and more grand and longer!).
This really is something that I wish I could have seen as a child, when I could just bask in the glow of freeze-framing it and rewinding to find all the Disney characters. As it is, I don’t have the patience and felt I was doing it a disservice watching it on my phone. And I spent so much time trying to figure out why the black girl chatting with the elderly man who is obviously an esteemed and deceased veteran of Disney Enterprises was that I actually looked up her filmography, and said, “OH RIGHT!” Because she was in the pilot of HBO’s Sex Lives of Colege Girls, of course (and apparently a main character who appeared in all but 4 episodes. Of course!).
But in all honesty, I find it hard to fucking believe the Disney of 2023 could create something this pure and wonderful.