Over the weekend BuzzFeed published what it called “the definitive ranking” of Disney animation films. All 56 of them.
This is, as my Substandard colleague Sonny Bunch would say, a garbage list. It’s such a garbage list that I’m not even going to link to it, because I want to save you the anger and deny BuzzFeed the clicks.
But I want to talk about the list just this same, because this is kind of my beat.
Buzzfeed argues that Disney’s top five animated films are: Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King, Aladdin, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (in that order).
This is, shall we say, a counterintuitive, view which prizes the creative phase of Disney’s early ’90s renaissance above everything else. I’d argue that this view is also incorrect—that even if you really like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast (which I don’t) the other three are sub-par, even on their own terms.
But Buzzfeed’s top five isn’t what’s crazy. Wrong, yes. But not insane. What’s crazy is what lurks further down the list. Here, for instance, are slots 10 through 14:
#10 The Jungle Book
#11 Frozen
#12 The Lady and the Tramp
#13 Tarzan
#14 Cinderella
I don’t know what the written equivalent of the sudden record-scratch sound effect is, but that’s what played in my brain when I saw Cinderella—one of the all-time classics—ranked below not only the 1970s garbage-version of The Jungle Book but the utterly forgettable Tarzan, too. This is like putting Casablanca behind both Up In Smoke andLegion. There is simply no conceit—no matter how wrong-headed—under which the ranking makes sense.
But it gets worse. Trip further down the list and Buzzfeed has three more ’70s cash-grabs—The Sword in the Stone (#20), The Rescuers Down Under (#30), and The Rescuers (#32)—ranked above Sleeping Beauty. As the kids say on Twitter, I cannot even.
What’s mystifying about BuzzFeed‘s list is that it somehow favors both the ’90s movies that saved Disney and the ’70s movies that nearly killed it–all while disrespecting the classics which built the Mouse House in the first place.
Then again, that’s what listicles like this are engineered to do: It’s not a “definitive ranking” so much as a troll job designed to make readers inordinately frustrated. The irrationality isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.
