The Disney Animated Canonball

The widely praised 2021 Disney movie about generational trauma and Columbian culture has shaken the world and set a new standard for the kind of media it is, coming from a deeply considered authentic place of emotionality in a family from whom we so often hear nothing. And if you can hear this podcast over the sound of Talen's grinding teeth, you'll be able to find out what Fox has to say about it!

Early 2021 saw the release of Raya and the Last Dragon, a Disney movie that was completed in closets, which is ironic, given the way the two leads look at and talk about one another. Come, see Disney once again create an Asian movie (but not really) with a queer protagonist (but not really) and a meaningful message (but not really).

If two princesses and one good song can make a billion dollars, what can two princesses and no good songs do? Well, we check it out with 2019's Frozen 2, the last of a pre-pandemic culture's vision of blockbuster family cinema! Do they do a good job? Will the movie earn Fox and Talen's approval as 'good stuff' or will it have to take its mere billion dollars as a consolation prize?

Oh look, Ralph's back, everyone. Get a load of this, it's Ralph again. Can you believe we get to hang around Ralph again? In 2018, Disney decided to try and take on Internet Culture and it's as vulgar and cringe as when they tried to do videogame culture.

There were TWO Disney movies in 2016? And one was a Musker & Clements joint? Holy macaroni! Oh and it has a joke about tweeting. Fox and Talen talk about Moana, a movie with a beautiful visual scope that nonetheless wants to try and include in its wide spread arms a set of cultures whose territory encircles an ocean larger than the moon. How did they do? Better ask a pair of white people in a settler state!

We get our hands on a lollipop that's all fuzzy, all over, when we look at 2016's extensively badly-handled race metaphor and white feminism metaphor, Zootopia. Remember, Actualising Criticism Articulates Barthesianism! We talk about how policing and capitalism don't work at these scales, or though, maybe they do, and that's... the... point?

Why is it that all the best Disney Animated Canon features are the ones that don't make giant piles of money? We talk about 2014's Big Hero Six, about the alternate history it represents, about how comic book heroes let us examine big ideas in a handleable way, and about the importance of mental health as an affect to your material conditions.

What would it take to make a princess movie that made a billion dollars? Turns out, two princesses and exactly one good song. Fox and Talen talk about 2013's media juggernaut and landscape shaper Frozen. Bonus, this is once again, the last movie Walt Disney ever worked on.

If a Boomer had an opinion on videogames in the forest, would it still be a bore? We talk about the 2012 3d animated feature Wreck-It-Ralph, which made Fox and Talen surprisingly angry. Come along and learn how the story of Wreck-It-Ralph is about Trans Women In Sports, and how reference is not commentary.

Twice now the Disney Animated Canon has included a short story compilation about Winnie the Pooh that just kind of wanders around the house making up a story about whatever random things it finds. Fox and Talen look at the 2011 animated feature called just Winnie the Pooh, and try to stay awake.

Fox and Talen look into the long-form history of the conflicted almost-traditionally-animated 2010 Animated Canon smash Tangled. We talk about an alternate viewing technique, the marketing history of 'four quadrants' storytelling, and inevitably get distracted by the (really quite good) TV series.

Disney returns to traditional animation with 2009's The Princess And The Frog. Swimming through the foggy waters of the bayous, Fox and Talen consider if there's any reason this movie somehow didn't quite hit the same notes as other movies that added to the Princess canon, or if there was some reason audiences missed it (racism). There's a spooky villain, a Lion King tie in and an alligator playing a trumpet, and yet, there's still some uncomfortable Protestant bullshit.

Welcome to Season Six of the Disney Animated Canonball, the era of Centrist Disney Liberal Bullshit! Approaching the now, our recent memories, of these movies that we did not watch as children but instead have been sharing with the children in our lives, we get real mad at realising just how little Disney actually does for all of its importance and power!

Dog movie dog movie dog movie dog movie! And thank goodness for it, as Bolt sets the precedent for Disney's competent 3d storytelling going forward.

An auteur makes a movie about something deeply personal but unfortunately, isn't able to make the actual movie into anything worth watching.

Wow, it's a deep dark well the Disney Studios fall into when they try and make a story that matches Shrek for irreverent and approachable tone.

Do you wanna hear jokes about cows with boobs? Because you're going to hear jokes about cows with boobs.

Walt Disney makes another Phil Collins movie while trying to make The Lion King 2, but King Lear, but with Bears, and it all gets stitched together by people who could finish a project, but not actually make a project.

What if Disney hero boys were like, attractive, and interesting, and not boring cutouts for Disney princess to latch on to? What if their stories were about what it was like to find a surrogate father, and for that love to be complex? What if there were hoverboards and street racing over molten gold? What if?

Talen's favourite Disney animated feature film, Lilo and Stitch is a 2002 escapee of a low budget and low expectations that nonetheless got to reshape the world and of course, etch a place on Talen's heart.

Adventure! Daring! Needlessly racist worldbuilding! Come to Atlantis, we have two halves of two movies to half-give you.

When we talk about the way Disney makes movies, it's a given that these people are good at their jobs and executing on their plan in the best possible way. That is not always the case, as in The Emperor's New Groove, a movie that did not get 'made' as much as it was 'congealed.'

What do Lockheed Martin, Liam Neeson and a eighteen meter tall crane have in common with this movie? Nothing to do with the sex monkey, that's what.

When Disney made Fantasia in 1940 they looked to the future, to the notion of a spectacular world of animation with a million possible futures spinning out in front of them. In 2000, they looked down at their own bellybutton, and deemed it good.

Welcome to Season Five of the Disney Animated Canonball, LOST in the THIRD DIMENSION! Adrift in a sea of mediocrity after the stumbling of the end of the Renaissance, the company proceeded to make some amazing and catastrophic mistakes that only an international media empire can make!

The rare example of a movie that's better if you have literally no audio than if you do, Tarzan takes a classic and extremely racist story and makes it? Less? Bad?

With the help and insight of a friend, Fox and Talen talk about another complex movie that relates to the telling of an Asian story; both in how it views the world, and how that view of the world is moulded and warped around the cultural impositions of the imperial presence.

When this movie was premiered in Greece, the country were so mad they cancelled Disney's promotional events. This episode had some recording problems which we have accommodated as best we can.

Feel the stones around you shiver as you make your way through the vaulted halls of history and experience the kind of dizzying high that only Disney can make, and only Jason Alexander can truly ruin.

A long sharp intake of breath as we gingerly dismantle the legacy of a movie that has definitely got some problems but is also a better movie than its reputation holds it to.

Imagine being the best in the business at what you do and probably the most important film of your type of a generation only for some nerds years later to come back and remark how your whole moral landscape is just kinda monarchist and the world would be better if the lions were dead. Who listens to the Antelope? Fox and Talen do.

The millenial voice lives in this movie, and it is Robin Williams. Come listen to Fox and Talen as they tease out how they love this movie that is DEFINITELY orientalist as hell.

What do the French Aristocracy have to say about love? Well let's check it out in the supposed movie that made the Disney Renaissance, despite being a ho-hum kinda affair.

Speaking of complaining about things for money, we also looked at 1990's The Rescuers Down Under, the first time Disney attempted to tackle sequels and Australia, two things that we, as Australians and sequels, would very much like them to stop doing. Voice acting, wildlife, landscapes and storytelling, try and find a thing in this movie they did that made Fox and Talen happy. You'll be a while!

In 1989, Disney released an animated movie based on Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid, a movie that has since been the bedrock of a host of thinkpieces about how it actually sucks and Ariel is a bad character. But does that hold water? What is actually here in this movie lots of people have preconceived notions about since they watched it when they were kids and now they have youtube channels that complain about things for money?

Welcome to Season Four of the Disney Animated Canonball, the Disney Renaissance! Ah yes, the movies that we (millenials) think of as 'the Disney movies everyone loves' and it's shocking to say that this season has a bunch of movies that actually seem to deserve their reputation!

The most unintentionally 80s thing ever made, Oliver and Company is a movie that sounds like a punchline to a joke about bad animatied movies, featuring Billy Joel as a street-wise singing dog. It's an adaptation of Oliver Twist, and Talen has OPINIONS on that!

Sherlock Holmes is a tricky character to adapt so Disney decided to do it by making him a mouse and hiding all the cocaine. In 1986, we got to see the results of it with Basil the Mouse Detective.

Hey, you want to start an argument? Suggest this was the first Disney movie with CG animation and watch people bicker. After the gut-shot of the animation department in Fox and the Hound, the story of Disney continues with this brutal box office failure and adaptational mess which really has a better idea at the heart of it than it deserves.

The ongoing twisting of Disney in this thrashing period has the apocalyptic title The Fox and the Hound where a whole generation of animators walked out of the studio.

In 1977's The Rescuers, we follow the story of a pair of mice saving a little girl from ocean-side spelunking, something that any good or sensible person would rightly find more terrifying than crocodiles playing the organ. Bonus: Racist turtle.

What? What? We're awake, we didn't totally miss the entire... Season... What happened? Oh yeah, there was a super boring movie for tiny little babies here.

And the furries go wild! It's time for the release of a fun, lively adventure where a handsome fox and his handsome bestie woo a handsome lady for handsome rewards!

Okay, gunna level with you: This one's gunna have some racisms in it. The Aristocats, the 1970 Disney Feature includes a fantastically long lived and old actor, and a box that smells like poop!

Welcome to Season Three of the Disney Animated Canonball, Swaggle Rock! Thus begins the secondary industry period of Walt Disney, which is finding ways to make Furries give them money. An entire generation of animators given the time and space to half all their asses.

Another instance of a classic book being turned into an animated feature, 1967's Jungle Book shows the way the world shakes and changes in Disney's wake, with animators finding new ways to make animation happen in their new workflow and new environment. Oh and they were going to try and get the Beatles in this one.

Beginning the trend of Disney media, it's time to take another important and foundational story of the culture and reprocess it into a sludgey goo full of American ideology to make sure everyone knows the world as Walt Disney shapes it!

Dog movie dog movie dog movie! But in this case it's a boring one. Oh well. A wonderful excursion in animation that just happens to also feature obnoxious characters and a vision of privilege that can be quite sickening.

There's only so much a movie can do with a five minute bedtime story, but once again Disney find a way to do it, with wonderful riotous visual effects that are completely unnecessary and at least one wielded fish.

Dog movie dog movie dog movie dog movie! A new vision of technological development let the Disney company use their animation for one of the things it's the best at - the truly inhuman!

Peter Pan is the most obnoxious character Disney has made so far, taking the crown from Jiminy Cricket, and then there's a whole extra story of how terribly the actor was treated. Content warning for child abuse in 1953's Peter Pan!