There was something different about 90s Disney movies.
And by “different,” I mean somebody at Walt Disney Animation Studios apparently looked at a room full of children and thought, “You know what these kids need? Murder. Betrayal. Religious obsession. War. Dead parents. Existential crises. And maybe a funny meerkat to lighten the mood.”
90s kids were not being gently eased into life with harmless animated movies about sharing.
We watched Simba desperately trying to wake up his dead father.
We watched Quasimodo get publicly humiliated in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
We watched Mulan ride directly into battle.
We watched a villain get tangled in vines and very clearly die in Tarzan.
And then we went downstairs and ate some cereal.
The wildest part is that these movies were beautiful. The music was incredible. The voice acting was ridiculously good. The animation was gorgeous. The characters were unforgettable. And somehow Disney managed to combine all of that with storylines that were occasionally one musical number away from an emotional breakdown.
No wonder so many of our favorite Disney films still hit differently when we watch them as adults.
Welcome to the Disney Renaissance, where the songs were catchy, the villains were terrifying, and absolutely nobody seemed concerned about traumatizing an entire generation.
The Disney Renaissance Was Basically a Fever Dream
When people talk about the Disney Renaissance, they’re generally talking about the extraordinary run of animated films that began with The Little Mermaid in 1989 and continued through Tarzan in 1999.
Yes, The Little Mermaid technically arrived right before the 90s. But if you grew up in the decade, Ariel was absolutely part of the experience.
This was the era when Walt Disney Feature Animation suddenly seemed unstoppable.
Beauty and the Beast became the first animated film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. Aladdin turned Robin Williams into one of the most memorable animated performances ever. The Lion King became a massive box office phenomenon. Alan Menken was casually producing songs that children would still know word for word thirty years later.
This wasn’t Disney’s original golden age with Snow White, the Seven Dwarfs, Peter Pan, Robin Hood or The Jungle Book.
It was something different.
It was bigger, louder, darker and frequently much stranger.
And we loved it.
The Lion King: Our First Introduction to Family Betrayal
The Lion King starts with one of the most iconic sequences in the Disney canon.
The sun rises. Animals gather. “Circle of Life” starts playing. Baby Simba is presented to the kingdom.
Beautiful.
Majestic.
Timeless classic.
And then Disney spends the next hour emotionally destroying you.
Scar doesn’t just want the throne. He orchestrates the death of his own brother, manipulates Simba into believing it was his fault and sends him away to die.
Jeremy Irons gave Scar exactly the right combination of sophistication, sarcasm and menace. He wasn’t some goofy villain causing minor inconvenience. He was plotting murder while surrounded by hyenas.
And then there’s that stampede.
Every 90s kid remembers it.
Simba pushing Mufasa.
“Dad?”
Honestly, Disney could have stopped right there and owed us all compensation.
Thankfully, Timon and Pumbaa turn up before things get completely unbearable.
The Lion King somehow moves between Shakespearean family tragedy, wild animals singing about bugs and one of the best villain songs Disney ever made without feeling remotely strange.
That might be the most 90s Disney thing imaginable.
Beauty and the Beast: There Is a Lot to Unpack Here
Beauty and the Beast is undeniably gorgeous.
The ballroom scene alone is one of Disney’s most beautiful works, and the combination of animation, music and voice acting is basically perfect.
But watching it as an adult does raise some questions.
Belle is imprisoned in a castle by a terrifying giant beast.
The furniture immediately starts trying to make them fall in love.
Everyone is very invested in this relationship progressing because, understandably, they would quite like to stop being household objects.
No pressure, Belle.
Meanwhile Gaston is somehow getting worse every five minutes.
He begins the movie as the annoying handsome guy in town and ends it organizing an angry mob to storm a castle.
That escalated quickly.
Still, there’s a reason Beauty and the Beast remains one of the best Disney movies of the era. Belle is a great character, the animation is stunning, and Alan Menken and Howard Ashman created songs that remain instantly recognizable.
Years later Disney would return to the story with a live-action remake, but for a lot of us, the original film is still the one.
Aladdin: Robin Williams Was Basically Given a Microphone and Told to Go
There are Disney sidekicks.
And then there is Genie.
Robin Williams completely changed what a celebrity voice performance in an animated film could feel like.
Genie talks at approximately twelve times the speed of every other character, does impressions that children definitely didn’t understand and basically hijacks the movie every time he appears.
It’s brilliant.
Meanwhile, Aladdin himself spends most of the story constructing an increasingly complicated web of lies because he thinks Princess Jasmine won’t like him otherwise.
This is clearly an excellent strategy and causes absolutely no problems.
Jafar, on the other hand, is just openly sinister from the beginning.
There’s no gradual reveal.
The man walks around hypnotizing people with a snake staff.
We know.
The whole movie is chaotic in the best possible way, with huge action sequences, magic carpets, giant snakes, flying through collapsing caves and a single song capable of permanently lodging itself in your brain.
Instant classic.
Pocahontas: This One Gets More Complicated the Older You Get
Pocahontas looked absolutely stunning.
The colors. The landscapes. The wind moving through the leaves. “Colors of the Wind.”
Visually, it was completely different from most of the animated movies around it.
But revisiting Pocahontas as an adult is complicated because Disney took real historical people and events and transformed them into a heavily fictionalized romance.
The movie presents Pocahontas as a young adult and pairs her romantically with John Smith, while the historical Pocahontas was a child when the English settlers arrived in Virginia.
That difference matters.
So while the animation and Alan Menken soundtrack remain memorable, the movie is also one of those Disney films where adulthood suddenly introduces a very different conversation from the one you had while watching it as a kid.
And yes, Mel Gibson really did voice John Smith.
The 90s were a time.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame: Who Approved This for Children?
We need to talk about The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Because seriously.
Who approved this?
The opening minutes involve persecution, a death on the steps of Notre Dame and a baby almost being thrown into a well.
Then the movie really gets going.
Judge Frollo is arguably one of the darkest villains Walt Disney Animation Studios ever created.
He doesn’t want a magic lamp.
He doesn’t want to become king.
He is driven by prejudice, control and his obsession with Esmeralda.
Then Disney gives him “Hellfire.”
A song featuring religious imagery, lust, guilt, fire and a man essentially blaming a woman for his own thoughts.
For children.
Meanwhile Quasimodo spends much of the movie isolated in a bell tower because he has been taught that the world will hate him for the way he looks.
Then he finally goes outside and gets publicly humiliated.
Happy Saturday morning, kids.
Whoopi Goldberg voices one of the gargoyles because apparently Disney realized at some point that the movie desperately needed jokes.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame is ambitious, beautiful and genuinely unsettling.
It might also be the strongest evidence that 90s Disney had absolutely no chill.
Hercules: Greek Mythology, But Make It Broadway
Hercules took Greek mythology and basically said, “Okay, but what if this had gospel music?”
And somehow it worked.
Hercules is bright, fast and funny, but once again there are some surprisingly adult ideas underneath everything.
Hercules grows up feeling like he doesn’t belong.
He learns that becoming famous isn’t the same thing as becoming a hero.
Meg has trust issues because she literally sold her soul after a man broke her heart.
And Hades wants to overthrow Olympus.
Normal children’s movie stuff.
James Woods gives Hades one of the funniest villain performances in Disney history, playing him more like an exhausted Hollywood agent than the ruler of the underworld.
Every line sounds like he has somewhere else to be.
It’s fantastic.
And Meg remains one of Disney’s best heroines because she is sarcastic, suspicious and completely uninterested in pretending she doesn’t know exactly what is happening.
Mulan: Still One of Disney’s Coolest Heroines
Mulan is one of those movies that somehow gets better with age.
The story begins with Mulan struggling to fit the expectations placed on young girls in her society.
Then she steals her father’s armor, pretends to be a man, joins the army, survives military training and saves China.
Quite a life change.
And she does it while accompanied by a tiny dragon whose original plan is basically “fake competence until something works.”
Relatable.
The avalanche sequence is still one of the best action sequences Disney animated in the 90s.
Mulan looks at an entire army approaching across the snow and decides her best option is to fire a cannon into a mountain.
And she is correct.
There is something deeply satisfying about that.
Tarzan: Phil Collins Had Absolutely No Reason to Go This Hard
Nobody asked Phil Collins to approach Tarzan like the soundtrack was the most important assignment of his entire career.
But thankfully he did.
“You’ll Be in My Heart.”
“Son of Man.”
“Strangers Like Me.”
The man came prepared.
Tarzan is another Disney movie that starts by casually killing parents before introducing us to the main character.
At this point it was practically tradition.
But the movie itself is surprisingly thoughtful.
Tarzan grows up caught between two worlds and eventually has to decide what family and belonging actually mean to him.
There’s also Clayton, who steadily transforms from irritating hunter to full Disney villain.
His final scene is incredibly dark once you notice what actually happens.
Disney does not show Clayton’s death directly.
Instead, lightning illuminates the shadow of his hanging body.
Again.
This was for children.
A Goofy Movie: Secretly One of Disney’s Most Accurate Parent-Teen Movies
A Goofy Movie sits slightly outside the main Disney Renaissance conversation because it wasn’t produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation.
But try telling 90s kids it doesn’t belong here.
It absolutely does.
The movie is about Goofy desperately trying to reconnect with Max while Max is desperately trying to impress Roxanne and avoid becoming anything like his father.
Which is already painfully accurate.
Then Goofy decides the solution is a surprise father-son road trip.
Max reacts approximately how every teenager in human history would react.
Badly.
What makes A Goofy Movie so good is that neither of them is really the villain.
Goofy loves his son.
Max loves his dad.
They just have completely different ideas about what their relationship should look like.
And somewhere in the middle of all this emotional honesty we get Powerline.
Perfect.
Were We Supposed to Be Watching Toy Story Too?
Yes.
Obviously.
Toy Story came out in 1995 and completely changed animated movies.
But technically it is Pixar rather than part of the Walt Disney Animation Studios canon.
Still, if you grew up in the 90s, that distinction probably meant absolutely nothing to you.
Woody and Buzz Lightyear were Disney.
End of discussion.
Toy Story was the first fully computer-animated feature film, and the fact that the story still works so well underneath that technical achievement is probably why it became such a huge financial success.
Also, Woody spends a surprising amount of the first movie being jealous, insecure and mildly terrible.
Again, Disney was giving children emotional complexity whether they requested it or not.
And Then There Were All the Other Disney Movies We Were Watching
Disney in the 90s was much bigger than the animated film lineup.
There was Hocus Pocus.
There was The Mighty Ducks.
There was The Parent Trap.
There were endless Disney television series, TV shows and VHS tapes being replayed until they barely worked.
There were live-action movies like The Adventures of Huck Finn.
There were older classics being constantly rereleased so that Snow White, Peter Pan, The Jungle Book, Robin Hood and Donald Duck felt just as much a part of childhood as the new releases.
This is why Disney nostalgia for 90s kids is such a strange mix.
The decade didn’t exist in isolation.
We were watching the newest animated film one day and something from Disney’s golden era the next.
And somehow it all blended together.
Disney Before and After the 90s Got Weird Too
It is worth remembering that Disney had already been through some decidedly strange phases before the Renaissance.
The Black Cauldron famously arrived in the 1980s and became one of the darker and more unusual entries in the Disney canon.
Then after the 90s, Disney animation went through another experimental period.
Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
Treasure Planet.
Chicken Little.
Eventually Big Hero 6.
Some became cult favorites. Some had complicated relationships with the box office. Some are still being rediscovered by audiences years later.
But the 90s run feels unusually concentrated.
For roughly a decade, Disney just kept releasing movies that became cultural events.
Why 90s Disney Still Hits So Hard
Maybe the good thing about these movies being so intense is that Disney rarely talked down to its audience.
The filmmakers trusted children to understand grief, jealousy, fear, prejudice, loneliness and identity even when they couldn’t necessarily put those feelings into words yet.
Then they threw in unforgettable characters, huge songs and a comedy sidekick so things didn’t get unbearably depressing.
And somehow it worked.
The best 90s Disney movies could be funny and frightening in the same five minutes.
They gave us villains we genuinely feared.
They gave us songs we still know every word to.
They gave us animation that still looks beautiful.
And they occasionally gave us scenes that made absolutely no sense being shown to eight-year-olds.
Maybe that’s why they stuck with us.
We weren’t just watching cartoons.
We were watching Shakespeare with lions.
Greek mythology with gospel singers.
French Gothic literature with talking gargoyles.
War stories with tiny dragons.
And family trauma set to some of the catchiest music ever written.
90s Disney movies were completely unhinged.
And honestly?
That was part of the magic.
More Disney
Still not over it? Same. If you love looking back at the movies, characters, soundtracks and moments that made Disney feel like such a huge part of childhood, we’ve got plenty more Disney nostalgia to get lost in.
- Disney Smash Or Pass Princes
- Which Disney Villainess Are You Quiz?
- Which Modern Disney Princess Are You?
- What Is the Pixar Theory and Does It Actually Make Sense
- We Matched Toy Story Characters to Taylor Swift Songs and Now We’re Emotional
- The 10 Best Jessie Toy Story Quotes for Anyone Who Has Ever Felt Left Behind
More 90s Nostalgia
The 90s gave us questionable fashion, unforgettable movies, iconic TV, ridiculous toys and enough nostalgia to keep us busy forever. If this article sent you straight back to VHS tapes, sleepovers and rewinding your favorite scenes, there’s plenty more 90s content to come.
- Which 90s Girl Group Are You?
- 90s Candy That Doesn’t Exist Anymore (And Yes, We’re Still Mad About It)
- 25 Things That Made a 90s Summer Absolutely Magical (Kids Today Will Never Understand)
- 13 Chaotic Truths Only Former Neopets Addicts Will Understand
- Care Bear Nails That Are Pure Girly Pop
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Know someone else who grew up on these movies and still has very strong feelings about them? Share this article with your fellow 90s kids and see which movie caused the most emotional damage in your group chat.
