20 Disney films that made the studio what it is today

Studio founder and namesake Walt Disney created Mickey Mouse in 1928 on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood when he and his brother Roy's studio were one big project away from bankruptcy. The duo lost control of their first successful cartoon character, Oswald, and needed a surefire hit to rebuild their animation studio. You know the rest. Mickey Mouse became a financial success and an iconic character that's recognized all over the world.

The rubber hose cartoon short "Steamboat Willie" was the third cartoon to star Disney's leading character, but it opened the gates for the Disney Studio's skyrocketing success. According to the Walt Disney Family Museum, the short was one of the first short animated features to use synchronized sound and became such a success that it outshined and received more buzz and press than the films for which it was supposed to open. 

Disney Studios spent the next decade perfecting its animation art with short films series featuring its now iconic characters. A noticeable number of these shorts, such as "The Three Little Pigs," "The Old Mill," "The Tortoise and the Hare," and "Ferdinand the Bull," would even get Oscar nominations — earning Disney 13 Oscar nominations and seven Oscar wins from 1932-38. These were just a way to warm up for the studio's biggest achievement. 

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the first full-length animated feature in cinematic history. The film saw a preview release in 1937 and a wide release the following year to wild acclaim. The film's release wasn't its only achievement. Disney's animators created characters who moved in realistic ways that enhanced their personalities and felt more like realized people than just cartoonish blobs of animated ink. The Academy Awards honored Disney Studios with a special achievement award the following year. 

The release of Snow White transformed Disney Studios into a powerhouse of artistic endeavors, and Fantasia is the clearest example of the standard the mouse house could set even in its infancy. 

That means Disney could pursue artistic endeavors without worrying about the bottom line. Fantasia, however, would become one of the studios' most famous and ambitious works of animation. The scenes are combined with classic compositions like Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker Suite" and Beethoven's "Symphony No. 6" with cartoonish visions that range from delightful to downright dark. The most famous segment is "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," starring Mickey Mouse, set to the tune of Paul Dukas' orchestral masterpiece of the same name, in which Mickey dons a wizard's cap that quickly becomes too powerful for him to handle. 

There are a lot of very good reasons why Disney's live-action remake of this classic animated fairy-tale failed at the box office, but the biggest one is the expectation it would have to live up to set by its predecessor. 

Disney's 1940 retelling of another classic children's story also features its now-trademark mix of cartoonish humor mixed with the deep emotional well of its characters. The scenery is enveloping and feels like worlds that extend beyond the boundaries of the screen. The animators also employed new technology, such as the multiplane camera that could present three dimensions to a scene on a flat screen to get a sense of depth and realism. Characters like Jiminy Cricket, Figaro the Cat, and Cleo the Goldfish also helped develop the formula for future Disney film successors. 

The golden years of Walt Disney Studios weren't smooth sailing. Despite being the first studio to make an animated feature and the studio with the most Oscar nominations, they were still running short on funds. So they rushed this project into production, and it became another Disney classic. 

The touching story of an elephant with abnormally large ears who uses them to fly and glide with the grace of a bird is about as perfect as a classic film can get. The film gave Disney the money it needed to operate and became the studio's first original feature, proving that it could create great animated stories as well as adapted ones in the past. 

The money and critical success of Dumbo paved the way for one of the studio's most beloved and successful films in the history of its medium. 

The story of Bambi comes from a German writer named Felix Salten, who used the story of an innocent baby doe forced to grow up too fast in a cruel world of violence is meant to be an allegorical tale of oppressive regimes. The German Nazi Party noticed the parallels and banned the book in 1935. The Disney-fied version doesn't follow the novel exactly, but it presents some of its chief themes about the power of love and the fragility of life and the Earth. Bambi also received high praise for its animatic achievements, which seemed to get better with every film. Even its use of new Foley sounds paved the way for new sound achievements in movies. 

Disney scores two back-to-back hits, giving them the financial means to take bigger risks. This time, the studio attempts its first anthology film since Fantasia.

This double feature includes two stories based on "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving and "The Wind in the Willows" by Kenneth Grahame. Both meet the high standard of Disney excellence but in very different ways. The Mr. Toad story is more eccentric as the cartoonish main character. The Ichabod Crane story presents some very new territory for Disney as the studio's first attempt at a horror film. Both continue to show Disney's unique ability to capture the spirit of its source material while mining its own identity and legacy. 

The anticipation for Disney's adaptation of this classic tale could not be higher, which meant the pressure could not be more intense. It not only had to live up to the standards set by classics like Snow White and Bambi, but it could also break Disney's studio if it failed. 

The advent of World War II caused economic hardships across the entire film industry in almost every major film production and studio. Disney bet a lot on Cinderella being the film that could pull his company out of the slump. Fortunately for Disney, the bet put his studio back in the green. A tale of adversity balanced with genuine humor was just what audiences needed after a decade of conflict, and the music set a new standard of excellence for Disney's films. The score and the iconic song "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo" both received Academy Award nominations. 

Animated films may have built Disney's studio, but they can be an expensive prospect. Disney knew he needed to move his studio toward live-action productions, and he started with this iconic adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's timeless adventure. 

Another reason the Disney brothers decided to make its first live-action film had to do with the profits their films made in England. Disney's films made over $1 million in profits, but the money they made there could only be spent there. So Disney and RKO Radio Picture commissioned a production of Treasure Island. Stevenson's story was a perfect choice since it presented a rollicking adventure with colorful characters. It also helped establish a studio on British soil that could increase Disney's production and bottom line. 

Disney spent many years trying to adapt Lewis Carroll's whimsical, absurdist story into an animated film. Almost every great writer tried to adapt the story for film for Disney's studio. Aldous Huxley (Brave New World) even tried writing a script for Disney at one point. 

By the time Disney settled on a script he liked, it still took five years and $3 million to produce a feature-length film for theaters. Like every new Disney animated film, the stakes were raised higher and higher, and believe it or not, the final release was considered a critical failure for the studio. So, how does a failure fit into Disney's foundation? For starters, its achievements in character and scene design showed how both could be leveraged to make engaging stories that jumped off the screen. 

The story of Peter Pan is another one of those classic children's tales that seemed destined to become a Disney animated feature. The studio's adaptation of J.M. Barrie's timeless story about a high-flying boy who refuses to grow up in a mystic playland of mermaids and pirates would turn the corner on what animated films could do on a big screen. 

Peter Pan made full use of its colorful settings thanks to breathtaking paintings and ingenious lighting designs. Building on the goofy character designs of Alice in Wonderland, the film's cast featured a mix of lifelike human characters and cartoony creations like the wily Captain Hook and the tick-tocking Croc that ate Hook's hand. The most stunning achievement was the shimmering design of Tinker Bell, animated by prominent artist Marc Davis, who made the character move like a human performer that could make audiences forget they were just looking at a series of ink paintings on celluloid. 

Jules Verne's classic novel is one of those fantastic epics that Hollywood seemingly could not truly replicate on the big screen, but Disney was established and well-funded enough to take on the task. 

Disney's adaptation of 20,000 Leagues Under the Seat was the first live-action film produced entirely under his studio's banner. It was also the first Disney film to use the groundbreaking CinemaScope lens that could capture the film's biggest moments on an even bigger screen. The special effects budget needed to recreate the famed Nautilus submarine and the epic battle with a 40-foot-long giant squid that required two expensive shots made it one of the most anticipated films of the decade. It also became one of the most ambitious cinematic projects of its time that built its own word of mouth and made it a critical and financial juggernaut. 

The successful use of CinemaScope wasn't limited to Disney's live-action pictures. This romantic comedy about two dogs from different sides of the streets was the first of Disney's animated films to bring this massive cinematic technology to the big screen. 

The story for Lady and the Tramp marked a departure from its usual use of fairytales as source material. The original story came from a story called "Happy Dan, the Whistling Dog," written by Ward Greene that ran in Cosmopolitan. The designs for the dogs came from animator Joe Grant, who first drew sketches of his springer spaniel named Lady in the 1930s when Disney was just starting to build his film empire. Both of these sources were combined to create Lady and the Tramp. The emotional depth of its animal characters made it an endearing story that would inspire filmmakers for generations to come. 

P.L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, was notoriously stingy about giving away the rights to her beloved novel about a magical British nanny. Walt Disney himself had to woo the author to prove that he not only understood the material but would do it justice if he made a film based on it. The story of its making is so legendary that it has its own film with 2013's Saving Mr. Banks. 

Disney's Mary Poppins is the definition of a film iconoclast, even if Travers didn't like the film. She's in a very small minority. The film was one of the first to mix live-action with animation as Mary, played by Julie Andrews, and Burt, played by Dıck Van Dyke, travel through one of his chalk paintings. The film became an artistic and technical marvel. It also became the studio's most successful film at the time of its box office release as the year's highest-grossing film. It was a hit among critics — earning 13 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Oscar wins for Andrews for Best Actress, Best Film Editing, Best Effects, and two of the three Best Music categories. 

This classic tale based on the works of Rudyard Kipling may be a masterpiece of storytelling, but it carries a sad distinction as the final film overseen by Walt Disney before his passing in 1966. 

The production behind Disney's Jungle Book feature is one of the most challenging in the studio's history. The scripts went through several rewrites because they had to meet the high bar set by Kipling's work and Disney himself. The struggle to find the right tone between meeting Disney's expectations and paying homage to Kipling's iconic work almost derailed the movie. The music ended up saving the whole project. Songs like "The Bare Necessities" and "I Wanna Be Like You," sung by jazz great Louis Prima, gave the film its sense of whimsy and comedy and breathed life into characters like Baloo the Bear and King Louie while the storyline stuck with Kipling's original vision. It's become one of Disney's most beloved and successful films. 

The loss of Walt Disney, mixed with audiences' changing tastes, created a bit of a slump throughout the '70s and early '80s. There were some notable hits, like Robin Hood, but none of them were big enough to pull them out of its rut. 

Once again, the studio needed to pivot to something new to bring people back into the theaters. So, in 1982, the studio turned to the burgeoning world of computer animation to create a completely original adventure film. Tron starred Jeff Bridges as a renegade computer hacker who gets sucked into the computer of a multinational corporation run by an evil AI hellbent on controlling all of the world's computer systems. The film mixed live-action special effects with awesome-looking computer-generated scenery and action scenes. CGI may be in every other movie, but back then, audiences had never seen anything like it, and they flocked to the theaters to be the first to witness this new transition into cinematic technology. 

The Walt Disney Studios set another huge record with this stunning and timeless classic. 

The Academy Awards granted a Best Picture Oscar to its first animated feature ever in 1992 with Disney's Beauty and the Beast based on the classic 18th-century fairytale. The film worked brilliantly on every level. The animators utilized computer technology to create the stunning ballroom dance scene. The songs written by Oscar-winner Alan Menken make the story pop with vibrant sounds and colors. The characters are voiced by the likes of Angela Lansbury, David Ogden Stiers, and Jerry Orbach, but they get so deep into their characters that you don't recognize them. It is unquestionably the culmination of Disney's vision for his studios and the medium of film. 

Making a feature film entirely on a computer may be commonplace in today's industry, but Pixar's first attempt with Toy Story was no small feet. However, the hundreds of thousands of hours dedicated to making it would launch Pixar and Disney to a status never seen before in the film industry. 

Toy Story was a technological achievement. It was also a trendsetter in storytelling. The tale of Andy's toys is familiar to kids and adults who had a favorite plaything when they were children, and the humor and emotion could reach anyone of any age in the audience. How many kids' movies can say they are just as entertaining to the adults who took them to the theater? Toy Story's success created a whole new medium for animation and storytelling. 

When Disney Studios announced it would start adapting its theme park rides into feature films, a lot of people thought it must've meant the movie idea well had run dry. Instead, the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie turned out to be one of the studios' most successful and beloved films, live-action or otherwise. 

The trailer showed Jerry Bruckheimer's name attached to the project, a filmmaker known for focusing more on special effects than story. The storyline seemed to be repeating the scenes from the iconic boat ride. The film, however, turned out to be a clever, well-written, and fantastic journey into a genre of movie everyone thought had run out of original ideas long ago. It not only spawned a new Disney franchise but one of its most beloved characters, the sly and wily Captain Jack Sparrow, played to perfection by Johnny Depp. Sparrow is so beloved that Disney worked his animatronic character into the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in both parks and built an impressive attraction based on the film franchise in Shanghai Disneyland. 

Even though Disney Studios has been churning out movies for decades, none of its feature films offered proper representation to its viewers until this 2009 Oscar-nominated hit. 

The Princess and the Frog was the first of Disney's animated features to include a person of color as its lead character. It also updated the classic story of "The Frog Princess" to a New Orleans tale that beautifully recreated the iconic town's preserved buildings and signature style and wasn't afraid to take risks by making its lead prince character into an egotistical buffoon who has much growing up to do as other characters. It also paved the way for future roles like Halle Bailey's performance as Ariel in the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid.