While I don't like Robin Hood that much, outside of the snappy opening credits scored to a Roger Miller song, I'm aware that lots of people in my age group, as well as some folks in Generation X, are big, big fans. Robin Hood is one of a number of Disney films that uses xerography to its detriment there are enough videos on YouTube showcasing how Robin Hood copies shots from films as early as Snow White and as recent as The Jungle Book. While Reitherman had been at the studio for nearly 40 years by the time of Robin Hood's release, the laid-back style of the films he directed (also including The AristoCats, The Rescuers, and The Sword in the Stone) allowed for less complex artwork, in part because of the xerographic process of essentially photocopying drawings to animation cels. It was released in a period where Wolfgang Reitherman, one of the fabled Nine Old Men of the studio's animation department, directed each WDAS film. For some people (such as myself), Robin Hood is close to the nadir of Disney's feature animation. A good example is Robin Hood, the 1973 adaptation of the British legend, featuring anthropomorphized animals. There are some dark horses in the WDAS canon with enough of a traditionally vocal fanbase as such, I wasn't surprised to see them perform well in the poll. The gauzy memory of watching these films can sometimes be more satisfying than the films themselves now that I'm a parent of a nearly 3-year old, these memories can be compounded by the experience of watching my son watch these films for the first time.
They aren't the only Disney movies I saw in my youth, or rewatched countless times on VHS, but they are touchstones of my childhood, as is the case for many of the respondents. The experience of seeing each of these films is burned in my brain permanently. I'm turning 33 later this year, so these are films I grew up with too. So, what did I learn from the results? My takeaways, or what I choose to take away from the responses to a wildly unscientific survey conducted via Twitter, were fascinating.Ĭonsidering the domination of '90s-era nostalgia on social media, it didn't surprise me that all of the top six films (in order of votes received, The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Mulan, The Little Mermaid, and Hercules) were released during the so-called Disney Renaissance of the 1990s.