Every Disney Animated Film, Ranked Worst to Best
Updated November 2022 to add Strange World
The king of all animation houses, Walt Disney Animation Studios has been releasing feature films for over 80 years. Many of those films are all-time classics of the genre, though some have failed to impress reviewers. In the gallery above, we rank every one of Disney's animated features by Metascore from worst-reviewed to best.
To keep things manageable, films from subsidiaries/related studios are excluded—these are only Walt Disney Animation productions—though you can find films from Disney's Pixar label in a separate gallery. We are also excluding mostly live-action films that also include some animation (Song of the South, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, etc.) as well as Disney's many direct-to-video sequels produced by its Disneytoon subsidiary.
Note that one official Disney animated film (1977 anthology The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh) does not have enough reviews available to calculate a Metascore.
It's the film that launched the Disney Renaissance. Kicking off a decade of wild critical and commercial success for Disney animation following nearly two decades of doldrums, the 28th Disney animated feature very loosely remakes Hans Christian Andersen's story of the same name into a blueprint for the modern Disney animated hit—namely, by returning to the studio's musical roots while also borrowing heavily from the format of a typical Broadway musical. (That formula would come full circle when Disney converted its 1994 hit The Lion King into an actual Broadway musical.) Disney's genius move proved to be enlisting theater veterans Howard Ashman and Alan Menken (of Little Shop of Horrors fame) to provide the music; they would go on to win Oscars for their memorable work on this film and 1991's Beauty and the Beast. (Ashman would die a few years later, but Menken continues to work on Disney animated films to this day.)
Mermaid, needless to say, became an instant, massive, critical and commercial hit—capturing the public's imagination (and wallets) more than any Disney film since at least The Jungle Book more than 20 years prior. And Walt Disney probably would have been proud. The founder himself once wrote a screenplay for an animated Little Mermaid film, at one point intending it to be his follow-up to Snow White, though the script wasn't uncovered until after this Mermaid was already in production.
A live-action adaptation is in the planning stages, possibly with the involvement of Hamilton's Lin-Manuel Miranda.
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