Disney: Best and Worst

Since 1939 Walt Disney Pictures has built a formidable reputation of producing quality family feature films. But in its legacy of achievement, there have also been failures. Here are my pick of the best and worst Disney movies.

Aladdin earns third place in the Disney greats. What stands out from this film is the sizzling aesthetic vision of Agrabah, with its pungent, oriental essence of the Arabian Nights, mixed with a strong, hilarious screenplay and voice acting. A manifestation of the reasons Disney is so well-regarded today, this movie is a Cave of Wonders to the child in all of us.

Second best in my list is Beauty and the Beast. This won a Golden Globe for Best Film as well as a nomination for Best Film at the Academy Awards – a previously unachieved feat for an animated movie. With its deft characterisation, classic songs and groundbreaking use of CGI in the ballroom scene, it deserves that recognition.

And the greatest Disney film award goes to - of course - The Lion King. Hans Zimmer, Elton John and Tim Rice’s score and soundtrack are standalone exquisite triumphs, from the soaring, Swahili-inspired brilliance of The Circle of Life, to the award-winning, mellifluous Can You Fell the Love Tonight. This is blended with a stirring storyline (a homage to Hamlet) and a bundle of likeable characters, including Jeremy Iron’s sassy love-to-hate villain Scar, Roan Atkinson’s uncanny anthropomorphism in Zazu, and the sensational double act of Timon and Pumba.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: Pocahontas 2 gets the dishonour of third worst Disney movie. I seriously advise anyone to avoid this if you have a smidgeon of respect for the first film. The sheer audacity of Disney to smear Pocahontas with a more realistic and cynical storyline is beyond words. A pop to the proverbial bubble of childhood  - nay, a punch to the face - which Disney so beautifully encapsulates with its essentially escapist fantasies. Why did you do this to us? Why!

Second most abysmal is High School Musical 3. While the whole franchise is pretty terrible, the first two deigned to have catchy songs and a vague stab at ‘plotline’. This third shambles embodies the cheesiness and atrocious ‘acting’ of its predecessors while lacking in any of the wit, intelligence or nuance of previous generation’s Disney films. It seems like the Jedward of movies – so bad you have to watch it just to realise your preconceived expectations of how bad it will be.

And – drumroll - the worst of Disney’s disasters is: Beverly Hills Chihuahua. As if the title isn’t enough to put any sane person off this train-crash slice of cinematic embarrassment, predictably the content is meagre to say the least. It wounds the soul to think that the producer of so many classics conceived an idea so vacuous, so offensive, as a film about the commodification of small dogs as fashion items, not to mention its awkward racial stereotyping of Mexicans. The worst thing about this debacle? They made a second and third.