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Disney has been the standard for film and animation by continually telling stories that evolve and deeply impact audiences of all ages, exploring a multitude of themes and even serious, real-life issues. Whether it’s Snow White or Moana, Disney sets out to do the impossible: a female lead persevering and evolving in a magical and animated way. As the princesses' characters have evolved, so have the delivery media of 2D animation and live-action retellings of classics.

Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora, also known as Walt’s princesses, helped the studio become the blueprint for storytelling through magical 2D animation and story development. The second generation of princesses, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Mulan, and Pocahontas, mimicked the Broadway musical format that gave each princess their own voice. With the popularity of 3D animation came yet a new generation of princesses who were even more versatile: Elsa, Anna, Moana, and Tiana were...

Milt Kahl, Glen Keane, Marc Davis, and Eric Goldberg are just a handful of artists responsible for some of Disney's best and brightest animated features. Since most of the studio's beloved characters began their lives as sketches on a piece of paper, a bumper crop of artists has found a home at Walt Disney Pictures.

Related: 10 Best Disney Movies Of The Last Decade

In the past, Disney was known to reach out to well-known artists in the hopes of adding some extra visual flair to their productions, and movies like Alice In Wonderland, Fantasia, and Atlantis: The Lost Empire have benefited from the presence and involvement of many famous artists, some even finding their callings while working at the studio.

With “Scoob!,” Warner Bros. Animation launches a new Hanna-Barbera cinematic universe built around the crime-fighting Mystery Inc. teenage gang and its lovable Great Dane. The plan was to release the franchise’s first CG-animated feature theatrically on May 15, but, of course, the pandemic intervened, so it’s going straight to VOD instead.

Whether or not “Scoob!” taps as large an audience as DreamWorks’ “Trolls World Tour” remains to be seen, but, according to director Tony Cervone, a veteran of the Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes home video franchises, it offers nostalgic comfort food for quarantined families. “Sure, I would’ve loved a theater experience, but we’re in a weird time,” he said. “It’s a bummer. But because of that, there’s families at home looking for stuff to watch, and there’s something reaffirming and warm and fuzzy and bright and colorful [about ‘Scoob!’].”

It begins with Scooby and Shaggy...

After five years of combining animated short subjects, and a combo live-action/animation feature, Disney dove into full feature animation fantasy again with the most basic of Fairy Tales. Just because he learned to create animation for a price doesn’t mean that the quality slacked off — the wondrous design and animation is augmented by terrific songs. Yes, half the picture is about cute mice and birds and other critters … which are done so well, the show is worth seeing multiple times. This handsome Signature Collection release follows earlier Diamond and Platinum releases … and don’t ask me to decode that classification system.

Cinderella

Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Code

Walt Disney

1950 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 75 min. / The Signature Collection / Street Date June 25, 2019 / 39.99

Voice Actors: Ilene Woods, Eleanor Audley, Lucille Bliss, Rhoda Williams, Verna Felton.

Songs: Mack David, Al Hoffman, Jerry Livingston

Directing Animators: Les Clark, Marc Davis, Norm Ferguson, Ollie Johnston, Milt Kahl,...

It's not a stretch to say audiences have missed their favorite family of Supers over the past 14 years. Disney/Pixar's Incredibles 2, the sequel to 2004's beloved Oscar&#174-winning The Incredibles, received a mega-strong reaction from critics and audiences - earning a 93 percent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, rocketing atop the list of highest-grossing animated films, and surpassing $1 billion at the global box office. Fans can reunite with this incredible family of Supers instantly on Digital in HD and 4K Ultra HD&#8482 and on Movies Anywhere on Oct. 23, and on Blu-ray 4K Ultra HD,&#8482 Blu-ray,&#8482 DVD and On-Demand on Nov. 6.

Family members of all ages will be hypnotized by hours of delightful entertainment, with never-before-seen Incredibles 2 bonus material highlighting the beloved characters in the film and the filmmakers who bring them to life. When audiences instantly bring home the film two weeks early on Digital, they will receive additional exclusive featurettes,...

Burbank, Calif. — It’s not a stretch to say audiences have missed their favorite family of Supers over the past 14 years. Disney•Pixar’s Incredibles 2, the sequel to 2004’s beloved Oscar®-winning The Incredibles, received a mega-strong reaction from critics and audiences — earning a 93 percent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, rocketing atop the list of highest-grossing animated films, and surpassing $1 billion at the global box office. Fans can reunite with this incredible family of Supers instantly on Digital in HD and 4K Ultra HD and on Movies Anywhere on Oct. 23, and on Blu-ray 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, DVD and On-Demand on Nov. 6.

Family members of all ages will be hypnotized by hours of delightful entertainment, with never-before-seen Incredibles 2, bonus material highlighting the beloved characters in the film and the filmmakers who bring them to life. When audiences instantly bring home the film two weeks early on Digital, they will receive additional exclusive featurettes,...

Pixar's sueprheroic sequel, Incredibles 2, is heading home in the next couple months and coming loaded with a bunch of special features to enjoy. Come inside to check out the full announcement to see what's coming!

If you've been eager to bring the Parr's latest adventure home with you, you'll get the chance pretty soon. Disney/Pixar have announced the details of the 4K Ultra HD and Blu-Ray release of Incredibles 2. The discs will launch on November 6, 2018, but if you can't wait that long, you can get the digital version on October 23rd.

Even better, it's coming loaded with a ridiculous amount of special features, including an all new short film featuring Edna and Jack-Jack:

Family members of all ages will be hypnotized by hours of delightful entertainment, with never-before-seen “Incredibles 2” bonus material highlighting the beloved characters in the film and the filmmakers who bring them to life.

Dave Michener, a veteran Disney animator, story artist, and director from 1956 up until his retirement from The Walt Disney Studios in 1987, has died at 85. He passed away on February 15 at his home in Los Angeles from complications due to a virus, according to his wife.

Over the course of his 31-year career with Disney, Michener contributed his artistic talents to such Disney classics as Sleeping Beauty, One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, The Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Rescuers, The Fox and the Hound, and finally The Great Mouse Detective (for which he received a co-directing credit alongside John Musker and Ron Clements).

Michener was born in Los Angeles on November 5, 1932. His father was a famous architect who helped design many of the iconic buildings in the Miracle Mile district of the city. His uncle was the best-selling author James Michener.

Given how revered Disney's "Pinocchio" is today, it's hard to believe it was a flop when it was first released exactly three quarters of a century ago. Upon its New York City premiere, on February 7, 1940, critics hailed the film as a masterpiece, and even to this day, many prefer it to Disney's pioneering first animated feature, 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Yet it took the film many years and multiple re-releases to make a profit.

Today, of course, the legacy of "Pinocchio" is inescapable. Everyone's image of the puppet-boy with the nose that grows when he lies comes not from Carlo Collodi's original novel but from the kid with the Tyrolean hat and the Mickey Mouse gloves, as drawn by Disney animators. And the opening tune, Jiminy Cricket's "When You Wish Upon a Star," is ubiquitous as the theme music played before every Walt Disney movie and home video release.

For the first time in nearly a decade, Pixar Animation Studios is taking the year off. The Emeryville-Calif.-based company will not be releasing a film in 2014, and it also finds itself in an interesting position, striving to maintain its identity as a haven for bold original visions while at the same time seeing some of its biggest successes inevitably move into franchise and sequel terrain. Wednesday night representatives of the studio took over a theater in West Hollywood's Directors Guild of America (DGA) headquarters to present materials from one such original vision from "Monsters, Inc." and "Up" director Pete Docter: "Inside Out." The film is set for release exactly one year from now, on June 19, 2015. Producer Jonas Rivera quipped that such a seemingly long lead is "dog years" in animation time, where projects typically move at a glacial pace for years on end. When he and Docter finished...

Brad Bird cut his teeth in film in the animation genre and was mentored by one of Disney's "Nine Old Men", Milt Kahl. Bird applied those skills he learned as an animator for Disney before going on to work on the screenplay for *batteries not included as well as consulting on The Simpsons. He got his first big break as a director on the animated classic The Iron Giant and then moved to Pixar where he helped usher in a new era of animated films with The Incredibles. In 2011, Bird made a foray into live-action with Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol which proved to be a commercial and critical success for Paramount Pictures. Currently, Bird is back at Disney working on Tomorrowland starring George Clooney. Below, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the director talks about a possible sequel to The Incredibles and reveals that...

Richard Williams was a pioneer of hand-drawn animation, working on films such as The Pink Panther and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But perhaps his most enduring work is his masterclass, The Animator's Survival Kit

When the animator Richard Williams celebrated his 80th birthday last month he was the subject of widespread and heartfelt acclaim as one of the most important and influential figures in his industry. His career has ranged from tiny TV commercials to the biggest budget Hollywood features, including the 1988 homage to the golden age of animation, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, a film widely credited with single-handedly reinvigorating an art form that had fallen badly out of fashion.

Looking back over his many triumphs – as well as some notable disasters – Williams himself ascribes much of his success to a decision he made in the late 1960s, when he effectively demoted himself within his own, highly profitable and multi-award-winning,...

Richard Williams was a pioneer of hand-drawn animation, working on films such as The Pink Panther and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But perhaps his most enduring work is his masterclass, The Animator's Survival Kit

In the late 1960s the animator Richard Williams was established as one of the leading figures in the industry. He had won a Bafta for his debut film, The Little Island; his London based company had developed a lucrative portfolio of commercial television work and he was providing the animated sequences for classic 60s feature films such as the Woody Allen-scripted What's New Pussycat and Tony Richardson's antiwar epic The Charge of the Light Brigade. So, he acknowledges, it was a strange time for him to engineer a demotion for himself.

"In fact I was still the primary director of the work," he explains today "but I also became an assistant to other animators, and...

The new Blu-ray/DVD/Digital release of Walt Disney’s Peter Pan includes the bonus features from previous DVD releases plus a few additions, including Growing up with Nine Old Men, a short documentary in which Ted Thomas, the filmmaker and son of top Disney animator Frank Thomas, checks in with the children of the other artists who were nicknamed the Nine Old Men. There are no revelations or airing of dirty laundry, but if you’re a diehard Disney buff you’ll enjoy learning about the personal lives, families, and hobbies of such animation titans as Thomas, Ollie Johnston, Ward Kimball, Milt Kahl, Wolfgang Reitherman, Les Clark, and John Lounsbery. (Marc Davis and Eric Larson...

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The Aristocats

Directed by Wolfgang Reitherman

Written by Ken Anderson, Larry Clemmons, Eric Cleworth, Vance Garry, Tom McGowan, Tom Rowe, Julius Svendsen, Frank Thomas, and Ralph Wright

Starring Phil Harris, Eva Gabor, Scatman Crothers

Complacency is always a dangerous tone to strike in filmmaking. Combined with cheapness, it can be a killer. Those two concepts are what stand out most of all from the Wolfgang Reitherman era of Walt Disney Pictures. For various reasons, most of which were beyond Reitherman’s control, most of the films from Walt Disney Pictures between 1959’s Sleeping Beauty and 1989’s The Little Mermaid felt cheap and lazy. (Being fair, Reitherman’s time at the company ended, for the most part, with 1977’s The Rescuers, but the four films between that and Mermaid have varying aspects of laziness on display, I think.) And make no mistake: the word “cheap” does not need to be a criticism.

Andreas Deja is one of the stars of Disney animation. Having worked for the company for nearly thirty years, he has worked on a huge number of their most incredible works, and is responsible for animating many of their iconic characters, including Roger in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Scar in The Lion King and Tigger in Winnie The Pooh, which is released this week.

Deja recently spoke with HeyUGuys to discuss his career to date, his work on Winnie The Pooh and the unique techniques Disney use in developing and animating a story.

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On his early career at Disney, and their technique of assigning one animator per character

Your career at Disney started with The Black Cauldron, didn’t it?

It was my first assignment. They had just finished Fox and the Hound, so I was not involved with that, and I jumped right on to Black Cauldron.

You were doing you own character there,...

Mark uncovers the too-often-overlooked gems in the Disney animated movies catalogue...

Not all Disney feature movies get the same level of appreciation, as they're overshadowed by the better known or more rambunctious siblings.

Here are five that, in my view, deserve better...

Alice In Wonderland (1951)

Part of the impressive fifties animated feature line-up, Alice never quite got the love that was reserved for Sleeping Beauty or The Lady And The Tramp. Yet, it's as technically competent, and uniquely styled.

Disney must bear some of the responsibility, however, as, after a somewhat poor box office (by their standards) outing, they demoted Alice to being the launch vehicle for their TV ambitions in a cut-down form. This choice meant that it didn't get recycled at the cinema and moved it down a notch from its 'cinema only' screened peers.

As they've all now been on TV, I think it's about time Alice In Wonderland...

Films such as Snow White and Pinocchio marked Disney’s golden age. But Mark argues that the animation that came in the decades after was just as good…

Animators, on the whole, are generally in awe of much of the work that Disney animators created during their classic thirties and forties period. Their adulation mostly stems from the attention to detail that was applied to these productions, the time available to work and rework the drawings, and the revolutionary knowledge they acquired in creating those iconic works.

But deep down, they also know that, as amazing as the likes of Dumbo and Pinocchio were and still are, producing films of that visual density using just pencil, ink, acetate and acrylic paint wasn't very practical then, and it certainly isn't now.

It's been said by a number of movie experts that, if Walt had any idea how much time, effort and...

The highlight of the star-studded A.M.P.A.S. tribute to the Bergmans was the surprise appearance of Barbra Streisand. (Photo: Todd Wawrychuk / ©A.M.P.A.S) By Mike Thomas

The Motion Picture Academy has been on a roll as of late, presenting some of the finest exhibits and screenings in its fabled history. The year began with a tribute to Academy founder Douglas Fairbanks featuring legendary film scholar Kevin Brownlow. In April there was a tribute to Milt Kahl, “The Animation Michelangelo,” that featured Brad Bird and others paying tribute to one of Disney’s premier character designers. Currently, there is an excellent display of cells and sketches highlighting the Japanese form of animation, “Anime!” (The Academy is to be commended for their continued celebration of that frequently neglected art of film-making). And last week, there was tribute to Joseph Mankewiecz, one of the finest screenwriters who...