In 1995, the first fully computer-animated film, Toy Story, was released, focusing on entertaining mainly younger generations of the time. Created by Pixar, it opened the doors to a completely new style of animated films. 

     In the past, many family-friendly animated films were primarily 2D or stop-motion captured. Studios such as Disney would create films that were hand-drawn by each frame with different softwares, or had poseable puppets that would be moved slowly. This caused Generation Z, born between the 1990s and early 2000s to grow up seeing and watching these installments. 

     “Animation was a big part of my childhood, and is still a big part of my life,” Senior Z Cox said. “It [animated films] was all I watched as a kid.” 

     Studios like Pixar saw overwhelming success from the positive reception from children, earning hundreds millions in the case of movies like Toy Story, the Incredibles, and more. Many companies began to follow the animation style that Pixar pioneered, as shown by various movies deemed the best animated feature within the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences.      

     Of the 18 past movies that received the Best Animated Feature Award, only 3 had followed a different technique of animation from the majority 3D films: 2D animated Spirited Away by Studio Ghibli, stop-motion animated Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit by Aardman Animations, and stylized 3D movie Rango from Nickelodeon Movies. Of those 18 movies, 12 were created by Disney/Pixar. 

      One movie stuck out. The Lego Movie from Warner Bros decided to turn to a different way of using 3D, instead taking inspiration from a section of the online Lego community: BrickFilms. These are stop-motion videos or movies made with legos, giving the movie an extremely unique look. 

     The idea was met with extremely positive reception, grossing 468.1 million in the box office, and scoring a 96% on the Tomatometer. But, other than the Lego Movie, there was a clear lack of variability between styles, partly due to Disney’s hold upon the academy. 

      Perhaps this was why Spiderman: Into the Spider-Verse from Sony Animation was surprising in the best possible way. “The characters feel liberated by animation, and the audience will, too,” said New York Times Critic A.O. Scott in his article ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ Review: A Fresh Take on a Venerable Hero’. 

      Spider-Verse was fresh and new, knocking over dominos that the Lego Movie had painstakingly set up. After 4 years of production and 800 artists, according to NME, it shocked critics and audiences alike. “Obviously the Spider-Verse movies are so good,” said Cox. “They do such a great job of arching older 2D animation and newer 3D animation.” 

     For example, throughout the movie the main character Miles Morales’ thoughts and reactions are emphasized with striking boxes that are reminiscent of the mentioned artwork.

      Along with that, Spider-Verse experimented with new frame rates. Within the industry, the standard fps, or frames per second, runs at 24. This means that every second, there will be 24 drawings to properly capture the feeling of artwork moving across a screen. 

      Audiences seemingly adored the movie, with it landing it in the top-10 of the Tomatometer, a site that shows the percentage of positive professional critiques for a movie. Spider-Verse is also one of two non-Disney to have breached the top-10, with the other being Dreamworks’ How to Train Your Dragon. It made a substantial amount in the box office, making 834 million, and won Best Animated Feature of 2018. 

      Spider-Verse not only represented how far the medium of 3D animation could go, but also proved that it could be just as or more successful than the preconceived industry standard. 

      After Spider-Verse, Sony Animations set to create another stylized film; Mitchells vs The Machines, which was met with extremely positive reception from critics and audiences alike, according to the Tomatometer. 

     Pixar released two movies around that same time that also explored new art styles. “Turning Red was super good in my opinion,” Ramseyer said. “The animation flowed so well, and the backgrounds worked with it. I also really liked Luca… I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite style of animation, but that’s just my own preference.”  

      Dreamworks, one of Disney and Pixar’s main competitors, entered the ring with two new movies, “The Bad Guys” in 2022 and “Puss and Boots: The Last Wish” in 2023. Each of these movies landed a place in the academy nominees in their respective years. 

      Most recently, SpiderMan: Across the Spider-Verse came out in 2023, officially ending the 5 year wait. This movie was extremely advanced in terms of new animation techniques, with one sequence involving hundreds of Spider people taking a full 4 years to animate. “… if you were to line up the hours worked on this film in a straight line, it’s like 792 hours straight … it’s insane,” Co-director of Spiderman: Across the Spider-Verse Dos Santos stated in an interview discussing the scene. 

      Of these newly styled animated movies, only one experimental one has been made by Disney. Their 100th anniversary film, Wish, had a style that was modeled after picture books and older 2D animated movies. “For the watercolor look, which primarily drives the film, [Snow White and Pinocchio] were the two main shows, and Sleeping Beauty was leveraged in a couple of ways, probably in the largest way, which is both Sleeping Beauty and Wish have a very wide screen ratio,” Micheal Giaimo, the production designer of Wish, said to the Walt Disney Company. 

      “I think Wish had potential, but it wasn’t reached whatsoever,” Ramseyer said. “People practically begged them [Disney] to bring back the old hand drawn style, but they can’t because they lost all the resources for it. So they gave us these fluid watercolor backgrounds that look like they are just plastered there.” 

     “Lots of the frames in the movie looked poorly shaded. It felt like the movie was trying to have the people be the focal point, but the people looked boring as hell.” 

      A majority of reviews on IMDb, a movie review site, agreed with this sentiment. “I’ve read several comments about the animation, and plenty seem to applaud the style, quality and colors… Let me be honest, this sucks, the most basic and unimaginative animation I think I’ve seen… to me it looks unfinished,” user Sleepin_dragon said. And within more professional reviews, it tended to also be criticized. 

      “It’s the ultimate cop-out — a lifeless, uninspiring mess of bland brand management,” Bilge Ebiri wrote in an article for the Vulture. 

      Of the movies that experimented more with styles, Wish seemingly received the least positive reviews. Despite being nominated by the academy for Best Animated Feature, it lost to “The Boy and the Heron”, a 2D animated movie from Studio Ghibli. 

     “I think it’s because Disney has a style and it’s getting a bit too comfortable in it. The branching out of Spider-Verse where each character had a unique style brought soul and visual effort,” Cox said. “I think that if we learn new things and we continue to learn and take new steps, we can keep making it a little bit better.”