It’s no secret that Disney Animation Studios has been struggling lately outside of sequels. The juggernaut Walt Disney created and Michael Eisner saved has had some giant missteps lately.
After the critical and box office disaster of Wish (2023), which was supposed to ring in the company’s 100th Anniversary, Disney CEO Bob Iger decided to make a change, removing Jennifer Lee from her role as chief creative officer (CCO) and installing Disney veteran Jared Bush in the job.
Bush is best known as the writer/director of Zootopia (2016) and Encanto (2021). He also wrote Moana (2016) and was in the process of writing/directing Moana 2 (2024) when he got the head job at Disney Animation Studios. He would eventually give up directing duties for the billion-dollar sequel.
Now, it’s Bush’s job to turn around a studio struggling to make original content. However, with Disney’s only animated film this year being Zootopia 2 (2025), which Bush wrote, fans will have to wait until 2026 for a new Disney animated film.
Bush promised that Disney would return to basics, a style pioneered initially by Walt: 2D, hand-drawn animation. It’s been almost 15 years since Disney made an entirely hand-drawn film, 2011’s Winnie the Pooh.
I love 2D. Right now we have 2D artists who are doing some bonkers amazing things. I’ll leave it at that. I think continuing to surprise is important.
However, Bush has a delicate balancing act. Fans want new storylines, but aren’t necessarily willing to pay for those new storylines. Disney’s other animation studio, Pixar, is facing that problem this weekend, with Elio (2025) expected to make an underwhelming $30-40 million at the box office.
So, with so many sequels on the horizon, what’s Bush’s plan to bring new characters to audiences and somehow get them to love those characters the way they did the movies of their childhoods?
Bush said:
It’s such a tricky point, because I think the only way to get audiences excited is to take risks. The instinct is to worry, but that worry typically means taking fewer risks. And audiences want to be surprised, they want to feel that they’re watching something that is not typical or easy. They want the thing that is the harder choice.
There is also the elephant in the room. Disney has been accused of being woke for including LGBTQ characters in films like Strange World (2022). Rather than shy away from those storylines, Bush has decided to broaden Disney’s audience and double down on what some might see as “woke.”
Bush said:
It’s really critical that life experiences find their way into the story. I think it’s really important to continue to do that no matter what it is, because our movies have to be global and reach a global audience. That’s a lot of different types of people, so having different types of people lead those stories is crucial.
For now, the future of Walt Disney Animation is in the hands of the man who brought fans Zootopia and Moana; hopefully, he will find more of those stories in the future, and Walt’s studio can once again thrive.
Are you worried about Disney Animation’s slate of films relying too heavily on sequels? Let us know in the comments.
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