The word “Disney” means a lot of things to a lot of different people. For some the studio is synonymous with childhoods spent in the theater and in front of the TV, dazzled by wholesome messages and cheerful imagery. For others it is a stand-in for corporate conformity that sometimes makes good movies despite itself. But whatever your opinions, Disney has been a fact of life for movielovers across the globe for nearly a century, and its movies are part of our shared coexistence as an audience.
Disney films tend to be split into several categories: animated, live-action and acquired franchises like Marvel Superheroes and The Muppets. We’ll respect those categories and try to limit this week’s Best Movie Ever to the Best Live-Action Disney Movie that originated within the company, and ask CraveOnline‘s critics William Bibbiani, Witney Seibold, Fred Topel and Brian Formo to present for their picks before giving you the opportunity to vote for your own favorites at the bottom of the page.
What does Disney mean to you, and what live-action film sums it up best? Let us know.
Brian Formo:
When it comes to picking the best live-action Disney film, I’ll have to go back to that nostalgic two parents, one sibling, home-video stage. While I’d like to revisit The Rocketeer – particularly after William Bibbiani’s impassioned write-up in a previous Best Movie Ever installment – as a child we’re all told not to lie. It’d be a lie if I didn’t choose a different Joe Johnston film. And choose Honey, I Shrunk the Kids I did. Over and over. Every weekend for a solid year.
My parents didn’t buy it outright because they thought I’d grow out of it sooner than I actually did. I cried for Antie every time (the ant the shrunken kids befriend in their backyard; the one that battles a scorpion for them). I didn’t want to eat anything with holes in it (Cheerios may be “good for your heart” but not if there’s a child stuck inside of it). As a small boy I hated walking barefoot on grass because it felt sharp. I had tender feet. So that journey through the backyard for those kids? Man, hats off. They were surrounded by knives!
Watching that film with just my sister, over and over, is a team-building memory I have. There is brother-sister-bonding within the film, but allow me to psychoanalyze myself, please. Our Honey, I Shrunk the Kids phase was the last time that we were both small, equal in size and devoid of sibling jealousy and rivalry. I was less than five feet tall when I started high school. My sister was six feet tall by middle school. I couldn’t compete well in basketball anymore, she made varsity in every sport. I wrote for the school newspaper.
We watched Honey again in our 20s. We both were over six feet tall by then. Equals again. It was fun. If I have a kid, I’d watch it with them. They’d probably think it looked fake. But they’d probably still wish they could ride Antie. And cry over his/her/gender non-specific sacrifice.
Fred Topel:
I thought I was going to have a tough choice for best live-action Disney movie, but then I realized The Air Up There was released by Disney’s Hollywood Pictures arm. Not even Touchstone. I could have sworn it was a Disney movie, Kevin Bacon going to basketball to find a college basketball recruit, but really he found himself there. I was thinking of picking Honey, I Blew Up The Kid because it is both a great inversion of the original and a damn fine spoof of giant monster movies. But then I remembered how a live-action Disney movie hit me when I really needed it to hit me.
I didn’t even like The Mighty Ducks that much. It was the usual underdog sports comedy where a team of losers got good and their selfish coach learned to care. It was junior year of high school for me when the sequel came out. Back then there were few enough movies released every week, and no indie movies in my area to speak of, that I just went to see everything that came out, whether I expected to like it or not. I was shocked how meaningful D2: The Mighty Ducks turned out to be, and how much I needed to hear what it had to say.
After rising to the top, where else is there for the Ducks to go? The Olympics, of course, or at least Junior Goodwill Games. The Ducks have to learn to work with some new players, and the spirit of teamwork was truly inspiring. Like any good sports movie, it’s really a metaphor for life. There are always new people we need to work with, personally or professionally. Frankly, this was a lot more relevant to me, especially as a high schooler trying to pave my way in the world, as a hero’s journey than simply getting good at a sport. Coach Estevez got a little big for his britches too so it’s relevant to remind him where he came from. I walked out of that theater profoundly motivated and it’s stayed with me to this day. Unless I can get a loophole for The Air Up There, in which case we may have a tie, D2: The Mighty Ducks is the best live-action Disney movie ever.
Witney Seibold:
Thinking back to my childhood, I saw an inordinate number of Disney live-action films, mostly from the Golden Era. In the 1960s, Disney’s live-action feature film department exploded with a long, loving string of kid-friendly oddities that are well-remembered to kids my age. These films played on regular rotation on Sunday afternoon TV broadcasts in between the “Tranzor Z” reruns and broadcasts of “Whitney and the Robot.” Films like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, The Cat from Outer Space, Gus, The Parent Trap, The Absent-Minded Professor, and, I dunno, The Gnome-Mobile would frequently play on my TV. I was very fond of the Witch Mountain movies. And who hasn’t seen The Love Bug? But these films are, if we’re honest with ourselves, hardly the studio’s best. While they do have an appealingly earnest corniness, and their square, clean characters represent a certain segment of ultra-safe American entertainment, their enjoyment to the adult mind falls somewhere between nostalgia and camp.
So I select a film from a more recent vintage. David Lynch’s The Straight Story was released in theaters in 1999, and it hardly feels like a Disney film at all… except it kind of does. The Montana native Lynch, known for his dark, surreal head trips and psychosexual odysseys (this is the Blue Velvet guy, remember) always had a streak of the hayseed about him. He’s more likely to yell “golly” than the hard-edged cussing of his screenplays. As such, making a G-rated biographical film about an octogenarian (Oscar nominee Richard Farnsworth) who drives a riding mower hundreds of miles to see his dying estranged brother seems almost natural for Lynch, and oddly enough, a natural for Disney as well; The Venn diagram is slim, but it does overlap. And the result is a quaint, loving, casually paced, deeply emotional journey about the struggles of a big-hearted, pragmatic old tough. Farnsworth embodies his cheerful coot with a great deal of ease and comfort, and Lynch seems to savor the sun-dappled, slow living of the middle states. The Straight Story is a meditative experience. A small piece of leisurely joy in an otherwise fast-paced movie market.
William Bibbiani:
In many ways this may be the most ludicrous Best Movie Ever installment to date, asking us to sift through dozens upon dozens of official (and unofficial) movies produced by a single studio, and singling out just one that happens to be live-action… or at least, mostly live-action. Disney’s output ranges from musicals to serious dramas, from sports flicks to fantasies, from coming-of-age tales to schlock. I suppose I’m supposed to pick Mary Poppins, but screw Mary Poppins: as beautiful as the film is, I will always prefer the book. There are parts of me that cry out in defense of the delightfully malevolent Return to Oz, the superheroic The Rocketeer, and even the golly-gee-whiz-only-Disney-could-make-THAT-work original Air Bud. I even love The Million Dollar Duck, damn it, but if I have to pick just one I’m going to pick a film that represents everything Disney has been and can one day become, and one that is downright enchanting in the process.
Enchanted stars Amy Adams, a remarkable actress who already bears an uncanny resemblance to a Disney princess cartoon, as Giselle, a Disney princess cartoon who falls into the real world of contemporary New York and seduces everyone around her with the promise of innocence and romance. The film’s glorious 2D animated prologue captures the essence of everything right and wrong with that side of Disney’s production history: a captivating fantasy that nevertheless oversimplifies everything about love and morality. But after a wicked witch (Susan Sarandon, having too much fun) sends Giselle to live-action land, her strange ability to talk to animals and break out into heavily choreographed musical numbers clashes with modern notions of complex social interactions and meaningful long-term relationships. Her fiancé Edward (James Marsden, also having too much fun) tracks her down to save their shotgun marriage, but our world has infected her with maturity just as much she has touched it forever with the promise of something more fantastic.
Kevin Lima’s film is metatextual, and at the end at least arguably to a fault (we get it, Susan Sarandon, the princess saving the prince is, like, totally ironic), but like the best satires it captures everything about the source material that still works and infuses it with smart commentary that enhances the material instead of tearing it down. The silliness of Disney is celebrated and also taken down a peg, reaffirming that the positivity this corporation espouses can still be meaningful if it’s dramatically earned. Enchanted gets away with it, and deserves to go down as the best live-action Disney movie ever, if any one film does.
