cars – Deep Forest Outpost

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” →

“Expecting is the greatest impediment to living. In anticipation of tomorrow, it loses today.”

– Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Seneca Mouseketeer — “Can I be banished to Fantasyland, instead?”

Ten long months had passed since we had reserved a hotel room with a few excited clicks of a mouse. The formal opening of our Disneyland adventure was the morning of Friday, October 12, 2012, but as with almost all of our vacations, it had been long in anticipation. In this case, we began negotiating dates with our travel party the better part of a year before. October seemed a long ways off in the cold dark of January.

Dreary old Seneca thought that anticipating the future kept us from appreciating our present, but he never planned a trip to Disneyland – his travel opportunities included banishment to Corsica for sleeping with the emperor’s sister. In my experience, the gathering and staging phase can be every bit as engaging as the trip itself. Continue reading “On The Way There – Disneyland October 2012 Day One” →