The period from 1970 to 1988 is often referred to as Disney's “Dark Era,” characterized by movies that were darker in tone, design, and subject. “Dark” also refers to the fact that it was seen as a time of decline for the company, with many experimental movies that didn't reach previous highs.

What is Disney's Dark Age?

The term “Dark Age” refers to the drop-off in quality, but the darker feel contributed to that drop off. Looking back, the quality of Disney Dark Age animated movies still varies greatly. Some of the period's titles included The Black Cauldron, Robin Hood, The Fox and the Hound, and The Rescuers.

What is Disney's darkest movie?

Arguably the darkest film in the entire Disney animated canon is the 1996 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame. The movie opens with Frollo killing Quasimodo's mother and attempting to kill an infant Quasimodo before he's forced to stop. He attempts to atone for the sin of murdering Quasimodo's mother by taking the boy in.

What caused the dark age of animation?

Its start coincided with the Fall of the Studio System in Hollywood. The theatrical short slowly died off, and cartoons moved to television. Naturally, this era would leave a lasting impression on American culture, for better or for worse, as the primary target audience for cartoons became children.

Why is it called the Disney Renaissance era?

The Disney Renaissance refers to an era beginning roughly in 1989 and ending in 1999 during which Walt Disney Animation Studios returned to making more musical animated films that were mostly based on well-known stories, and it allowed Disney's animated films to become powerhouse successes at the domestic and foreign ...

Disney's Creative Dark Age

What ended the Disney Renaissance?

The release of Tarzan (1999) is retrospectively seen as the end of the Renaissance era.

What is the scratchy era of Disney?

The Bronze Era (1970 – 1988)

The studio struggled in the absence of its founder and most of this era's films did not resonate much with the audience. With xerography, the films of this period also had a “scratchy” look due to its heavy black lines.

What ended the dark age of animation?

The period came to an end in the late 1980s as many entertainment companies revived their animation franchises and returned to making high-budget, successful works.

Why was Hanna Barbera so cheap?

The story goes that in the late 60s theatrical animation was drying up. There was no work. Hanna-Barbera, two enterprising directors from MGM, decided to find work in the new field of television animation. The budgets were terrible so they made the cartoons as cheaply as possible.

What was the major feature of Dark Age?

One of the main characteristics of the Dark Ages was the collapse of trade networks as a result of this political fragmentation. This led to economic stagnation and the crumbling of the Roman Empire's once vast infrastructure, which included extensive roads and sanitation networks.

What movie almost ruined Disney?

Known as the movie that almost killed Disney animation back in the '80s, The Black Cauldron is just a movie made in the wrong generation.

What movie almost bankrupted Disney?

The Black Cauldron. It was nicknamed “The Movie That Almost Killed Disney” because it was a box office bomb in 1985.

What movie did Disney almost lose?

Back in 1998, when “Toy Story 2″ was in production, all work up to that point was lost because of an erroneous deletion command executed on Pixar's servers, The New Web reported. Susman was on maternity leave, working from home, and had a backup copy of the film on her personal computer, according to Gizmondo.

Did the little mermaid saved Disney?

Along with the major success of both Disney's 1986 animated film The Great Mouse Detective and the 1988 Disney/Amblin live-action/animated film Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Little Mermaid is given credit for breathing life back into the art of Disney animated feature films after some films produced by Disney were ...

What film saved Disney?

The 1950 fantasy yarn of a girl, her wicked stepsisters and evil stepmother, a dashing prince, glass slippers and a gaggle of cute, talking animals was a smashing success, right off the bat. “Disney was on the ropes,” Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz tells Parade. “Cinderella saved Disney.”

Why was Disney so dark?

What's going on? While some social media users have theorised scenes are being made darker to cover up shonky CGI, industry experts say the current trend towards dimmer scenes comes down to two main factors: artistic choice, and the switch from film to digital shooting.

Why did Hanna-Barbera fail?

In a story published by The Saturday Evening Post in 1961, critics stated that Hanna-Barbera was taking on more work than it could handle and was resorting to shortcuts only a television audience would tolerate. An executive who worked for Walt Disney Productions said, "We don't even consider [them] competition".

What was Hanna-Barbera's oldest cartoon?

They created their first cartoon for television, “The Ruff and Reddy Show,” in 1957. “Instead of $45,000 for five minutes like we had at MGM, we got $2,700,” Barbera said in an 1987 interview. “When we first sold 'Ruff and Reddy,' Bill and I were taking in $40 a week for ourselves.

What was the golden age of Animation?

The golden age of American animation was a period in the history of U.S. animation that began with the popularization of sound cartoons in 1928 and gradually ended from 1957 to 1969, where theatrical animated shorts began losing popularity to the newer medium of television animation since in 1957, produced on cheaper ...

What is the oldest cartoon on TV?

Crusader Rabbit, the first animated character created specifically for television.

What was the very first cartoon?

Many film historians consider Émile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908) to be the first animated cartoon.

What was the first cartoon aired?

Fantasmagorie, the world's first fully animated cartoon, was released on Aug 17, 1908: Watch it here - India Today.

Who is the oldest Disney cartoon?

Most films listed below are from Walt Disney Animation Studios, which began as the feature-animation department of Walt Disney Productions, producing its first feature-length animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937; as of November 2023, it has produced a total of 62 feature films.

What is the oldest non animated Disney movie?

Disney's First Fully Live-Action Feature Film is Treasure Island. For the first of four films to be produced in England Walt decided upon a film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's classic novel, Treasure Island, which follows the story of a young boy named Jim Hawkins as he searches for a hidden treasure.

What are the three oldest Disney movie?