Sailing Into Treasure Planet: A Look on Disney's Experimental Age

Oh My Disney

I would like to talk about something very important… Disney. I may not talk about it that much in my blog, but I happen to be the biggest Disnerd there is. I've seen the Disney classics, I cannot seem to pick to a favorite princess because I personally love them all, I know a majority of their songs (lyrics and voicing), and I watch the same movies over and over… including the ones that are deemed terrible or just 'meh'. Speaking of which, I was born in the nineties. Meaning, I did not get to experience the Disney Renaissance or at least I did not get to experience them in theaters. My childhood flourished during the 2000's and this was a time when Disney did not do so well. There were a lot of factors that contributed to this. There was the rise of 3D animation and the decline of the 2D, and the departure of major people like Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg. As a kid who lived throughout that time, I personally enjoyed the cartoon series shown on television. 

This era for Disney was known as the Experimental Age. It had other names too, like the Post-Renaissance and the Second Dark Age. The latter seemed almost accurate for Disney Animation but I've always thought that the Experimental Age seemed much more fitting with what Disney was doing during the time. This was the era when they decided to buy Pixar, and I personally think the films they put out at the time were infinitely better. But our focus for this blog is just purely Disney and one of my favorite films during this period, which was Treasure Planet.

Today, we see these films like Treasure Planet as absolutely underrated. They have beautiful animation, realistic characters, and compelling stories! Yet they did not earn so much money, nor did they have the greatest reception among critics. What happened?