Tim's Toons: 1995, the year that changed animation
Thursday, July 16, 2015 at 9:11PM 
Tim here. We're celebrating 1995 this month at the Film Experience, and I'm ecstatic to bring the conversation around to that year's animated films. 1995 was, y'see, the most transformational year the animation industry had experienced in a generation, the dividing line between a 60-year-old tradition on one hand and the entirely different landscape of animated features in the twenty years since.
We have to begin even farther back. You can't tell a story about a revolution without looking at the ancien régime, and in '95, Walt Disney Feature Animation was as ancien as it gets. After having spent almost twenty straight years wandering around in the wilderness following namesake Walt Disney's death, the studio finally began righting itself through a painful learning process that started with the 1986 release of The Great Mouse Detective. Beginning with that movie, almost every subsequent Disney feature would improve upon the box-office take of its immediate predecessor.
This was the Disney Renaissance, when the studio just couldn't stop itself from cranking out one new classic after another. There was Beauty and the Beast, the only animated film nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in a field of 5; Aladdin, the first animated film to break $200 million at the U.S. box office; and then, the hit of all hits, 1994's The Lion King, a blockbusting monster that is, for many, the defining film of contemporary American animation. The company was at the all-time height of its influence and prestige. There was nowhere to go but down.
And down things went, with Pocahontas in June, 1995...
It fizzled with audiences, relatively – though a respectable hit, it didn’t even outgross Beauty and the Beast. It fizzled with critics – it's at this writing the only 1990s Disney film with a rotten score on Rotten Tomatoes. This was despite being the basket that the studios was piling all its eggs into. In fact, during their respective productions, Pocahontas was the "prestigious" film to work on, and the people who ended up on The Lion King knew that they were merely the B-Team.
Nostalgia and time have led the film to grow a little cult for itself, but it's not hard to see why Pocahontas thudded. It's monumentally serious, with characters, seemingly designed without the ability to smile, leadenly discussing great big sociological themes.
And, fatally, it entirely fails to make good on those themes: it's one of the most pandering "the Native Americans were very noble and they talked to trees and loved the earth" message movies for white people of the post-Dances with Wolves era, while also trying to act like racism is absolutely not something that ever happened after the 1610s. It's medicinal in every way: there aren't even any memorably peppy songs, a year after The Lion King had virtually its entire soundtrack turn iconic all in one go.
It is, in effect, when Disney's massive success turned into bloat, and it was all downhill from here, only bottoming out a full decade later with the heinous Chicken Little. But even if the studio's short-term demise was a good while in the future, it had suddenly become obvious that there was room in the marketplace for a successor.
And ironically, Disney provided that successor itself by distributing Pixar Animation Studio's Toy Story, the world's first fully CGI animated feature.
Twenty years on, the children of Toy Story have so thoroughly colonized the world that traditional animation in the States is a novelty on par with seeing a Siberian tiger in the wild, but that future didn't unfold just because a new technology happened to come along. It's because Toy Story is everything Pocahontas wasn't: a brightly-paced comedy with fun-looking characters doing funny things, speaking in emotionally blunt terms about childhood and friendship without a trace of morally haranguing the audience.
The proof is still there for anyone to see. Toy Story looks indefensibly primitive, not just next to Pixar's long string of technological game-changers, but even next to the cheapest CGI cartoons that are able to finagle a commercial release, while Pocahontas looks every bit as lush and stately as it did in '95.
But even through its blocky, uncannily smooth surfaces, Toy Story is also still enormously watchable: the jokes land, the feelings land even harder, and the note-perfect voice cast still sounds so perfectly matched to the little plastic figures onscreen that it's hard, when you're watching it, to remember what Tom Hanks actually looks like. Whereas watching Pocahontas is a squirmy exercise in the period in time that Mel Gibson could be called upon to contribute to a family movie.
Toy Story would become the highest-grossing film of 1995, while launching a franchise that Pixar returns to even now when their fortunes look low (who's excited for 2017's Toy Story 4? Sure as hell not me!). Pocahontas is one of the films that sometimes get slapped on as a parenthetical to the Disney Princess line, and is shoved away in some dark, unvisited corner of the Disney theme parks. The difference between the two films is about the essentials: storytelling, characters, basic audience appeal. But to Disney and a host of newly emboldened competitors, the difference was that one was hand-drawn and one was made on computers. And from that interpretation sprang the history all of subsequent theatrical animation in the United States, down to the present day.
Reader Comments (16)
I'd say it was more a peak and valley system, at least qualitatively, after 1992. The Lion King is great, leading into Pocahontas' awkwardness, than into Hunchback's half masterwork (anything with Frollo and NOT THE GARGOYLES), than Hercules as a thud Aladdin knock-off, Mulan (another one which would have worked far better without the sidekick), the gloopiest possible Tarzan, than The Emperor's New Groove, the one time David Spade was even remotely tolerable (thank you John Goodman, for actually making the guy work), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (my pick for their actual 2-D animated nadir, because at least Home on the Range and Brother Bear have, respectively, kinetic comic animation and a decently successful attempt at the D'aww, kids'll love this! that makes even the low, but not lowest, grade Disney fare "work"), Lilo and Stitch and Treasure Planet (a pair that, like Hunchback, have a half that admirably works and a half that pretty clearly doesn't. Lilo and Stitch is very good at the human relationships and refusing to demonize the idea that Nani might not be a fit replacement parent, but it suffers the typical Disney problem of being bad at action. Treasure Planet, meanwhile, is the only Disney movie I've seen with really good action scenes while the character stuff comes off VERY stock, and Ben the robot is just annoying) and we already talked about the issues of Bear and Home on the Range.
Great writing as usual, Tim.
I can't say I've ever thought this two roads diverging line through but thanks for illuminating it. Absolutely agree on the way the films look. I watched both again a year ago in short succession and I was shocked at how poorly the animation in Toy Story has aged. But Pocahontas - what a beauty!
Yeah, "doomsday postmortems of successful studios' rough patches" seems to be the theme. You'd swear this was about the Alamo. "It *was* a kind of celluloid Alamo for Disney, a hill on which animation as we knew it died and nothing would be the same EVER again." Yeesh. There are massive hits, moderate hits, winning streaks, and misfires. Basically, cinema happens.
I'd say "Colors of the Wind" is one of the absolute greatest Disney songs and it sure does look gorgeous, but the film is a dud. It's barely 80-minutes, right? And feels like it, too. Rushed and barely sticking to anything beyond its pandering politics.
Such a great topic. I have thought a lot about these two films releasing in the same year, but mostly because I had a Disney mix tape when I was younger than was arranged chronologically so "Colors of the Wind" went right into "You've Got a Friend in Me." You would think after all the commotion surrounding the 500th "anniversary" of Columbus's "discovery" of the Americas in 1992 that Disney would have known better than to tell a founding story of European colonization in 1995. As I recall, even though Pocahontas didn't gross more than some of these other movies, it did break the record for first-weekend ticket sales or something like that.
Amazing information in the posty
Great article ! Thanks
Why always Pocahontas must be critisiced? I know it has some issues but it is still a great film in my opinion and my favorite as child and I always thought back then that later it would get better reputation but no :(
I put off seeing Pocahontas until a year ago and was pleasantly surprised. I guess it can be dismissed as overly serious awards bait in animated clothes (and it definitely is that, to a degree), but I also saw it as an attempt to do a more mature type of animated film - the kind you routinely see in other countries, but has never had a successful foothold in the US. It's also a film that betrays its own insecurities about that approach - the cutesy animal sidekicks just shriek of trying to keep one foot in the kiddie pool even as they try to dip their toes into the deep end, and that's ultimately too much of a stretch. Still, the beauty of the animation, the epic sweep of the plot, and that stunning ending were enough to leave me impressed. And Color of the Wind really is a lovely song.
Pocahontas has a lot of problems, but the absence of "peppy" songs aint one. If anything, a pop-styled soundtrack like that of The Lion King's would have made Pocahontas even more excruciating. As is, the look and score of Pocahontas are the best things about, and why I can still bring myself to sit through its self-inflated sermonizing.
Volvagia - Hey now, some of us love "Hercules." Yes, it might be trying too hard and not everything works, but some of the songs are fantastic (those gospel singers! Lilias White SLAYING it!), Meg was an interesting female lead and overall it's a lot of fun.
Unpopular opinion time. The Toy Story films are so overrated. The first one isn't too bad, but I don't think it's as good as everyone says. That picture of young Andy creeps me out. As for the other two, they go on far too long, although all the films do have their moments. I'd actually rather watch Mulan and Hunchback to be honest.
As for Pocahontas, I cannot comment as I'm boycotting all Mel Gibson films. Yes, even the animated ones. Chicken Run be damned!
RobMiles, as someone who's only seen the third installment of the Toy Story series, I think the cumulative effect of the movies informs the fans' opinions more than each film's individual merits. From my perspective How to Train Your Dragon is superior to Toy Story 3, but those who grew up with the entire series had much more of an emotional attachment to the latter, having spent 15 years with those characters.
Interesting ideas, but MAN you are so hard on Pocahontas. This article would have been a lot better if your disdain for it wasn't so brutally obvious.
Good analysis. Can't say I totally agree with your opinion on Pocahontas. It's a gorgeous film, it's only rival IMO in the Disney traditional animation canon is Sleeping Beauty. Toy Story was groundbreaking in all the ways you mention, but as a film it's overrated (mostly because of it's extremely overlong 2nd act) and does not stand up well next to the other films in the Pixar "golden age".