All 56 Walt Disney Animated Classics: Ranked From Worst To Best

43. The Black Cauldron (1985)

There's something of a fallacy (particularly among keyboard stomping DC fanboys) that to be Disney is to be sweet and light and cheerful. These people clearly weren't paying attention to the earliest days of Disney and the studio's fascination with leaving mental scars with Evil Queens, Dragons and Islands Of Lost Boys.

Those same critics tend to turn their noses up at The Black Cauldron because of its inherent darkness, missing the point that the film's problems are far more simple than that. It's beautifully animated, and wonderfully creative on the surface, but the characters are never given enough to do and it makes the film's aspiration to be a true-blooded dark fantasy tale with swords and magic seem entirely wasted. It seems the agenda to be taken seriously meant leaving a little too much of the magic at the door.

But then it is pretty bloody scary, which is fine on its own terms, but it's not exactly very Magical Kingdom of them.

42. The Great Mouse Detective (1986)

Thanks to advances in animation, Basil felt like a leap forward from films released just years before it. Even now, it feels less like an exercise in cost-cutting and more like the full animation style of the majority of the best classics. backgrounds are richer and actually move, and though these features are all about character, that actually does count for a lot.

The Great Mouse Detective is a very charming affair, full of wit and clever observations on the source it affectionately lampoons: it's just not quite as magical as it is well-observed. Perhaps because it's not based on a fairy tale, there's a darkness here that occasionally feels distinctly unDisney, and while the villain is excellent, he probably left some pretty mean scars on younger viewers.

That's by no means an overt criticism of the film, it's just best considered an aloof, eccentric cousin to the true classics.