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Feb 26, 2024

Disney’s Last 2D Animated Movie Isn’t the One You’re Thinking Of

Contrary to popular belief, 'The Princess and the Frog' didn't bring Disney's traditional style to an end. When referring to Walt Disney Animation Studio's long filmography, most point to 2009's The

Contrary to popular belief, 'The Princess and the Frog' didn't bring Disney's traditional style to an end.

When referring to Walt Disney Animation Studio's long filmography, most point to 2009's The Princess and the Frog as the company's final movie produced in its signature 2D animated style. The New Orleans-set princess musical certainly follows in the aesthetic and narrative footsteps of Snow White, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, and other classic Disney movies, and it arrived right on the cusp of when the company made a definitive switch to the more contemporary 3D animation of Tangled, Frozen, and Moana. Despite its reputation, though, The Princess and the Frog was actually just Disney's second-to-last 2D animated feature. The true final Disney film to endorse the 2D style hit theaters two years later, and although it never became an immense phenomenon, it served as a fitting bookend to the studio's iconic tradition.

Between the release of 2010's Tangled and 2012's Wreck-It-Ralph and amidst larger releases in other Disney divisions such as Marvel's Captain America and Thor, and Pixar's Cars 2, Walt Disney Animation Studios theatrically released just one feature film in 2011— a reboot of one of Disney's oldest licensed intellectual properties, recreated in its original 2D animated style.

That movie was Winnie the Pooh, directed by Stephen Anderson and Don Hall. Based off of characters and stories from A.A. Milne's children's books of the same name, Winnie the Pooh and its imaginative cast of characters in the Hundred Acre Wood had been in the Disney family since 1961, when Walt himself acquired the licensing rights from the Milne estate. The studio first created various featurettes based off of the stories, beginning with 1966's "Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree," which were then pieced together and expanded upon to create the 1977 feature film, The Many Adventures of Winnie The Pooh.

Over the years leading up to 2011, Pooh and his friends starred in various Disney projects, including nine direct-to-video films, four television shows, and ten shorts. Tigger and Piglet even got their own theatrically released features with The Tigger Movie and Piglet's Big Movie, respectively. All of these, with the exception of the Playhouse Disney series My Friends Tigger & Pooh, followed the aesthetic of the original 1971 movie — 2D animations with hard lines and naturalistic designs, as if they are jumping right off the pages of a beautifully illustrated children's book.

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Meant to revive the Pooh franchise for a new generation, 2011's Winnie the Pooh stylistically falls in line with the Disney Pooh projects that came before it. Although slightly more refined, its animation retains the familiar hand drawn look. Simultaneously, unlike most of the Disney Renaissance features such as Beauty and the Beast or The Lion King, Winnie the Pooh rejects grandiosity to endorse a more modest beauty. The same could be said for the 1971 film set against its Silver Era predecessors like Sleeping Beauty or Peter Pan. There are no sublime mountains, castles, or character designs in Winnie the Pooh, but the Hundred Acre Wood appears as comforting and inviting as ever.

This same understatedness applies to Winnie the Pooh's narrative. With a 63-minute runtime, Pooh is short and sweet. Its main plot follows Pooh (Jim Cummings) and his friends naively mistaking Christopher Robin's (Jack Boulter) innocent absence as the doings of a monstrous kidnapper. Little side-quests and misadventures ensue aplenty, mimicking the anthological structure of the original books and movie. All the while, Pooh's desire for honey repeatedly distracts him, but the only thing larger than his stomach is his heart; his appetite can wait if it means doing right by his friends.

Monumental and mythological themes are not needed in Winnie the Pooh. Instead, the movie characteristically focuses on friendship and love in its purest forms.The nostalgic characters pull at our heartstrings with their timeless simplicity, each one flawed in their own ways, but each one committed to the other. It is a refreshingly innocent view of love, earnestly shared through a childlike lens.

All of this makes Winnie the Pooh an endearing movie to conclude Disney's 80-plus years of 2D animation. The film is reminiscent of Disney's earliest projects. Even before Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney was foregrounding anthropomorphism in its animations with the Alice, Mickey Mouse, and Silly Symphony cartoons. Then, in contrast to the Renaissance era movies that blended pop culture references and modern musical styles, Disney's first features had a more fantastical energy, like something out of a fairy tale. In pace and tone, Winnie the Pooh feels more like the Disney films from the 40s and 50s than those from the 90s and 2000s.

Sadly, Winnie the Pooh did not rake in enough money at the box office to save 2D animation for Disney. The film unfortunately shared an opening weekend with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, and its full theatrical run only earned the company $49 million worldwide. Although it did turn a profit against its modest $30 million budget, this was a small gain, even compared to Disney movies released nearly two decades prior. 1992's Aladdin, for example, made $504 million against an even smaller $28 million budget.

More importantly, though, Winnie the Pooh's revenue paled in comparison to Tangled's $592 million box office earnings the year before or Wreck-It Ralph's $471 million a year later. Even though these movies were made for far larger budgets, they still turned greater profits, solidifying 3D animation as the way of the future. Since then, Walt Disney Animation has found a new critical and commercial stride with 3D animated blockbusters like Frozen, Moana, and Encanto, as well as beloved sleeper hits like Big Hero 6 and Zootopia.

Of course, Pooh is not entirely to blame for this change. Most of the 2010s' 3D animated Disney films were already in development by the time Pooh hit theaters, and the definitive switch was more the product of a longer trend where 2D Disney movies were underperforming. In the 2000s, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, The Emperor's New Groove, and Home on the Range made meager profits, while Treasure Planet didn't even earn back its budget. Even successes from this era like Lilo & Stitch, Brother Bear, and The Princess and the Frog failed to crack $300 million at the box office— a threshold that nearly every Disney animated feature from the 1990s remained above. Meanwhile, the 3D animated projects coming out of Pixar (pre and post-Disney's acquisition) were exceeding expectations, and cartoon competition from the likes of DreamWorks and Blue Sky was leaving the once imminent Walt Disney Animation Studios far behind.

Hence, Winnie the Pooh was not the reason Walt Disney Animation Studios left their 2D aesthetic in the past. That process was already well underway come 2011. Pooh is simply a humble, yet pleasant finale to the company's signature tradition. It may not have the princesses, musical numbers, or signature character designs that The Princess and the Frog offered, but instead, it brought a sense of vivacity and warmth, ushering out the storied animation style with quiet dignity, sincerity, and heart.