Movies – Deep Forest Outpost

The DONALD Rankings are scores for Disney animated films that combine personal opinion with a pseudo-scientific veneer of hard data. For a full introduction to the DONALD system, please go here. Contribute your scores in the comments!

Welcome back the top twenty of the Deep Forest Outpost DONALD Rankings. Today we continue our countdown with the Pixar gem Finding Nemo.

"Have you ever thought about the fact that we swim around in our own poop all the time?" — “Have you ever thought about the fact that we swim around in our own poop all the time?”

When Finding Nemo hit the theaters in 2003, Pixar was still an independent studio distributing under the Walt Disney Studios banner. Their films were also a high point in the flagging animation division at Disney*. Both groups threatened to walk away ahead of their merger in 2006, citing massive executive egos and demands for more money and power as the reasons for the divide (more or less).

[*Disney’s animated releases during the Pixar distribution deal included Dinosaur, Treasure Planet, and Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Probably unnecessary spoiler alert here, but none of those films will be included in the DONALD Top 20.]

Pixar knocked another one out of the ballpark with Finding Nemo, which sparkles with amazing animation, great characters, and a clever story. Their streak of success put Disney in an untenable position. The Mouse House eventually caved, put John Lasseter and Ed Catmull in charge of all animation, and kicked off the next/current renaissance of Disney films.

Continue reading “The DONALD Rankings Top 20: #19 Finding Nemo” →

The DONALD Scores are rankings for Disney animated films that combine personal opinion with a pseudo-scientific veneer of hard data. For a full introduction to the DONALD system, please go here. Contribute your scores in the comments!

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Welcome to the best of the best: the top twenty of the Deep Forest Outpost DONALD Rankings. I have been excited about these posts for several years, ever since we finished watching all of the Disney animated movies in a four-month span (and inventing a quackery-filled method of ranking them). Although there is something to love in all the Disney films — even the oddballs — the list from 1-20 is filled with treasures.

cars-image-disney — Lightning McQueen never settles for anything less than first place. Tow Mater is probably fine with twentieth. Image by Disney.

Released in 2006, Cars was the seventh full-length feature film from Pixar, and a passion project of their chief John Lasseter. It was also Pixar’s first movie that was not met with universal acclaim.

Which presents a problem for this list: a couple of the more critically heralded releases are ranked lower than Cars in the DONALD matrix. But, as will be made clear below, the movie scores high in some key points to give it a well-deserved spot in our top quarter of Disney films. Continue reading “The DONALD Rankings Top 20: #20 Cars” →