Ask the Critic: How Aladdin changed animation - Entertainment Weekly (blog)
Pixar’s smash hit is the rare summer movie that is thriving at the box office and with critics, and I’ll also suggest additional prescriptions to cure the summer CG blockbuster blues. Let’s get to it…. First, let me try to clarify what I meant about Aladdin. Technically, Disney’s The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast came before Aladdin and were the first two blockbusters in what we now refer to as the Disney Renaissance. The First Golden Age, of course, dates back to the late 1930s, when Walt Disney’s Mouse House began a miraculous run with artisanally hand-drawn masterpieces such as Pinocchio , Dumbo , and Bambi. Then, around the time of Walt’s death in 1966, Disney animation went into a long slump—a sort of artistic Dark Ages when mothball-scented snoozers like The Aristocats failed to capture pint-sized imaginations in the same way that the studio’s best... In the early ‘80s, the top brass at Disney changed, bringing in Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who recognized the potential in the studio’s glorious past, broke out the defibrillator, and shocked new life into the flat-lining genre. Source: www.ew.com
