After the success of Inside Out 2 (2024), Disney is on a major rebound thanks to its billion-dollar summer smash. However, a predicted new Disney Renaissance might force fan favorites out of the picture.
If you’re anything like this writer, you have a thing about noticing patterns, especially whenever Disney is involved. The recent success of Pixar Animation Studio’s master class in emotional storytelling (pun totally intended) isn’t the first time a massive hit has pulled Disney out of the dredges of oblivion.
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Films like Lightyear (2022), Strange World (2022), and Wish (2023) were part of what fans consider Disney’s “Flop Era,” as deviations from the standard family-friendly formula resulted in a series of box-office blunders, not unlike the film’s of Disneys dark age after Walt Disney’s death. Still, what does this mean for the future of Walt Disney Animation?
Inside Out 2 Begins New Disney Renaissance
The Disney Renaissance was the studio’s heyday as incredible, inspiring, award-winning films hit the screens. Films like Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1994) dominated pop culture well beyond the ’90s and set the gold standard the studio continues to recreate even today.
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As much success as those films had, it didn’t start that way. Between 1970 and 1988, Disney was in a directional crisis in a post-Walt world, similar to the one concerning its creative identity after the COVID-19 pandemic.
WDW Magazine described the era brilliantly with the following quote.
“The Little Mermaid started the Disney Renaissance, but first, some context. The 1970s and 1980s were not kind to Walt Disney Studios. After the deaths of Walt and his brother Roy, box office numbers began a downward slope. While there were some great films buried in here (The Fox and the Hound, anyone?), these were largely considered commercial flops.”
The Disney Renaissance also launched shortly after one of the biggest flops in the studio’s history, The Black Cauldron (1985). A similar phenomenon occurred after the disastrous Strange World nearly crippled the animation studio years later, which only solidifies the similarities between the two eras even further.
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After a season of flops and box office bombs (much like what we’ve recently seen), the canon event that kicked off the Disney Renaissance was The Little Mermaid in 1989. From there, a new era in Disney history was born, and we’re seeing it happen again in real-time.
Interesting Reaction, But What Does It Mean?
Just as Inside Out 2 has made Disney realize that the studio needs to return to family-friendly feature films with wholesome morals and values, so did the Renaissance, which proves that Disney needs to return to the traditional fairytale formula. Disney is taking a similar approach with many upcoming sequel features by taking viewers back to stories proven to work for years.
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On that note, sequels were also part of the era as well, as The Rescuers Down Under (1990) revitalized interest in classic Disney motifs. By that logic, sequels to Moana, Zootopia, and even Toy Story start to make much more sense.
Granted, this is all pure speculation, but the pattern feels too similar to ignore. As Inside Out 2 continues to break records and make history, it sets the stage for subsequent films to do the same.
The big takeaway from all of this is that Disney has seen what works, and the pattern should logically repeat. We might not have visionaries like Howard Ashman, Don Hahn, or Musker and Clements involved anymore, but you know what they say about history repeating itself.
Are we seeing the beginnings of a new Renaissance? Tell us what you think in the comments below!
