As someone with a 2 year old child, I can attest that these movies sucked. Compare them to, say, Ratatouille, which was made using much more primitive rendering/animation, but the story and voice acting are great (and the graphics still very good), and it's no surprise that no one wants to see them. My child would rather watch the older, better movies 10+ times than one of the new ones even once.
My wife and I started Turning Red and Turned it Off halfway through. I haven't even tried the others.
Favorites in our place with the kids are Cars and Planes (though more Cars lately). We're on an old musicals kick lately, and it's just fun watching some of the big budget musicals from the 60s - when they wanted to get a whole street of people dancing, they went out and got a bunch of people trained to dance in the street. They also were a good bit longer, and generally had more room to breathe. The story didn't feel rushed at the end like a lot of the more modern one do (Encanto is a particular offender here, as far as I'm concerned).
Funny, I don't feel this way at all - Encanto is probably one of my favourite recent disney films, I must have seen it 100 times now(partially because of my kid watching it all the time, but that's the funny thing - despite pretty much knowing every single line by heart now, I still like it. The story is good and the songs are great).
Turning Red is equally great - as someone who has also grown up in the 90s the film just gets so much right, it's a delight to watch. The story turns into absolute nonsense by the end but meh, the joy of watching teenagers figure out how to get money for a concert they want to go to is worth it.
Yes I will say my daughter absolutely loves Encanto (and also Moana). Also the Good Dinosaur (but we had to cut back on that because she started growling like the feral child in the movie and that seemed like a bad development!). The music in Encanto is good.
Since you mentioned Cars, there's an interesting thing I noticed when Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was in theatres. At that time, when I try to search the movie on IMDb, typing "three" (and I have to emphasize that I typed "three" not "3"), IMDb's first search suggestion was "Cars 3" instead of that Oscar winning movie that was playing im theatres at the time. I'm pretty convinced that Disney payed IMDb for that placement or something like that.
> We're on an old musicals kick lately, and it's just fun watching some of the big budget musicals from the 60s - when they wanted to get a whole street of people dancing, they went out and got a bunch of people trained to dance in the street.
Oh, for that you have to go back to the 1930s and Busby Berkeley. "Footlight Parade" is probably the best of that genre. At least see "Shanghai Lil".
We keep a DVD-based Netflix account around for a lot of this stuff, and I've purchased quite a bit of physical media on eBay or at local thrift stores over the years. It's rare to pay more than $5 or $6 for a good DVD of stuff we're looking for, and then into Plex it goes. Most of it can ship Media Mail if I'm not in a hurry.
As far as I'm concerned, streaming services are good for "I want to watch something; I don't care what." They tend largely trash for "I want to watch this specific thing."
I enjoyed it much more after reading a bit about the cultural background, but was genuinely confused about its intention before. Probably the case for many folks who grew up similarly (unstructured, low expectations), which is perhaps more common in the US (but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
Going back even further, mine loved Jungle Book more than anything recent. Now that's staying power!
Anymore, we'll just wait for them to hit streaming. As GP mentioned, the latest movies just haven't seemed very good. Not up to par with the likes of Moana and Frozen, at least.
I'm kind of surprised to hear you say that. While my kids certainly like some older movies, a lot of them are incredibly slow and boring. Especially for me! Jungle Book, a movie I loved as a kid, has nothing on most of the newer releases, which are far more entertaining IMO.
Man, I still sing the, "Bear Necessities" song to myself as a 40 y/o and it's been so long that I can't even remember seeing the original movie. Didn't they put out like 2 additional Jungle Book movies? I can't think of a reason to watch them.
Having grown up with Tail Spin also very much helps the staying power of anything Baloo.
Sure, and as an adult I would prefer it over most of the other modern productions. The richness of the backgrounds, the characters, the voice acting, the songs = absolutely top notch. But my kid just finds it boring - and he's right to an extent, it's very slow paced, and many scenes are just of characters walking along and talking with each other. Those scenes obviously make a lot of sense from the story telling perspective, but a kid doesn't find watching the congregation of wolves and their discussion about what to do with the man-cub even slightest bit interesting.
She just loved the singing and dancing, and -loved- the way Baloo talked. Which is interesting because during the movie I was wondering what accent he had, and how that accent doesn't seem to exist anymore.
That's what most mid-southern accents sounded like up until quite recently. A 'southern' accent you hear now is mostly a caricature of an Alabama accent.
>Pending the Disney acquisition of Pixar, the two companies created a distribution deal for the intended 2007 release of Ratatouille, to ensure that if the acquisition failed, this one film would be released through Disney's distribution channels. In contrast to the earlier Pixar deal, Ratatouille was meant to remain a Pixar property and Disney would have received only a distribution fee. The completion of Disney's Pixar acquisition, however, nullified this distribution arrangement.
Ratatouille was a Pixar movie. "Pixar was responsible for creation and production, while Disney handled marketing and distribution." Ratatouille was released after the merger was complete but I'd imagine the story was largely locked in.
I'm a huge fan of the Disney movies that came out when I was growing up (Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast are my favorites). My kids like those movies a lot too.
But I think some wonderful movies have been made in the last ten years, most notably Encanto and Turning Red. They're both massive successes, and I think they are in many ways better than those movies I grew up with.
Not to mention Frozen, Moana, Inside Out, etc. These are all wonderful movies.
(Ratatouille is also great, btw, don't get me wrong!)