And the era have practical aspects. Even Disney occasionally will refer to something as being from the "Golden Age" of animation and so forth. The divisions are undeniably arbitrary - "Fantasia 2000" and "Dinosaur" would fit quite comfortably in the "Disney Renaissance" era, and Disney's rebound into the "Renaissance" era arguably began with the golden success of Vincent Price in "The Great Mouse Detective" (though the cartoony nature of "Mouse" does comport more with the Bronze Age films like "Robin Hood"). Some films within the time frame of one era inarguably do belong in another: "The Rescuers Down Under" is probably the most glaring example, being a quintessentially Bronze Age sequel to another Bronze Age product that only by sheer chance of timing wound up within the Renaissance. However, with eras in place we are only quibbling over individual cases, not looking at a list of 50+ films and scratching our heads in confusion.
There are some oddballs in the film list that are undeniably tough to categorize. "Fantasia 2000" was in production for virtually the entire Disney Renaissance, but took so long to shove out the door after an aimless production and did so relatively poorly after all the deliberation and last-minute revisions that it justifiably drifted into the 2000s "Post-Renaissance" funk period instead. "The Aristocats" in 1970 had the same headline voice actor as "The Jungle Book" and essentially the same creative team. The studio wanted so badly for it to prolong the brilliant Silver Age that it even featured "Jungle Book" characters in the advertising of "The Aristocats," a film in which those characters didn't even appear. However, times had changed, the Silver Age book had closed with Walt's passing and the mounting tragedy of the Vietnam War, and it couldn't be re-opened. The Bronze Age slump had begun, just as surely as the Summer of Love had turned into the Summer of Kent State.
If we could disregard time frames and just look at films' similarities, this would be a completely different list with easy choices to make. "Fantasia 2000" was a sequel to "Fantasia" and thus belongs in the lineage of that film, "Make Mine Music" and "Fun and Fancy Free," which also were "Fantasia" sequels. We also could move the 1991 "The Rescuers Down Under" into the Bronze/Dark Age, since it was a sequel to the best Bronze Age film, "The Rescuers." There are many other similar cases.
However, an era is an era, a finite period of time. That is one rule that must be respected to make any sense of this "era" business at all. Thus, if we did move "The Rescuers Down Under" back to the Bronze Age, we would have to take with it "The Little Mermaid," which preceded it. "Mermaid" initiated the Disney Renaissance's brilliant return to classical fairytales and was a true turning point. Moving it to another era would make no sense at all. If one of those two films must be out of place, it will be "The Rescuers Down Under," which did not break new ground and was kind of an after-thought anyway (but I'm a big Bob Newhart fan, so I'm glad they made it, regardless of when it was released).
These throwbacks and foreshadowers in eras do serve to highlight the organic and sometimes clunky process of change within the larger dynamic. It's not as though somebody throws a light switch or rings a bell when a new direction presents itself. The animators grope their way toward waxing or waning cycles of creativity, storylines and agendas. If the studio had known that "The Little Mermaid" would turn out the lights on the Bronze Age, it never would have made "The Rescuers Down Under" at all. It is trial and error and responding to what the public wants, and that is a messy, imprecise business.
Read more: http://animatedfilmreviews.filminspector.com/p/the-golden-age-snow-white-pinochio.html#ixzz3apsAnOr4
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
Follow us: @jamesjbjorkman on Twitter