Disney

The Walt Disney Company is celebrating its 100th anniversary in many of their theme parks. The company also released a movie and short film in tribute to this milestone.

This year, the Walt Disney Company, commonly referred to as Disney, celebrated its 100th anniversary. Founded on Oct. 16, 1923 by Walt Disney, has been celebrating the anniversary since the start of 2023. 

On Oct. 16, the day of the 100th anniversary, Disney released a short film “Once Upon a Studio” on their streaming service, Disney+. The short film features most of the characters from Disney movies throughout the years. Featuring characters from movies as old as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” to the most recent movies such as “Wish.” 

Watching the 2D animated characters interacting with the 3D animated characters, all on the same background of the Roy E. Disney Animation Building in Calif. was cool to watch. The short film displayed the unique characteristics of each character featured. Starting with Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse rounding up all of the characters to take a family photo, all of the characters interact as they go towards the lobby. The film even features Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which was the first cartoon character that Disney ever created. 

I found the film cute and comical, watching the characters from all of the movies interacting with each other was very entertaining. Capturing the personalities of each character, the film is short yet memorable. 

Disney also re-released eight of its classic movies such as “The Lion King” and “Frozen” in theaters in celebration of its anniversary. Additionally, Disney has also recently announced that they will be releasing “Soul,” “Luca” and “Turning Red,” which were all movies released during the pandemic, in theaters of early 2024. 

As these movies were never released in theaters, I think it’s great that Disney is releasing them in theaters for the first time as the people who don’t subscribe to Disney+ never would’ve gotten to watch them. Additionally, the release of these movies would give them more attention, as it feels like movies such as “Soul” never really got the attention that other movies did. 

Other than re-releasing old movies, Disney has also released a new animated movie “Wish.” In celebration of the studio’s 100th anniversary as well as a tribute to the work done for the past 100 years, Disney released the movie as a way to look forward to the next century. 

Despite its meaning, it didn’t feel as eventful and special as the general public was expecting. Due to the cliché plot combined with the poor story-building, there were many parts about the movie that just didn’t compare to some of Disney’s older movies, such as “Frozen.” However, there were some parts of the movie that were fun to watch. Overall, it wasn’t a terrible film, but it didn’t feel like it was worth a lot of the hype it got from Disney. 

Additionally, Disney has been celebrating its 100th anniversary starting Jan. 27 at Disneyland Resort, and there will be celebrations at Walt Disney World until Dec. 31, 2023. However, these celebrations didn’t really happen on Oct. 16, the actual day of the 100th anniversary. Most critics seemed to be disappointed, as it looked like Disneyland Paris was the only Disney theme park that did a 100 year celebration on the actual day of the anniversary. 

Despite its huge achievement of 100 years, it felt like Disney didn’t do a good job of really celebrating this special moment in the history of the company. While they did re-release movies and a movie in celebration of their anniversary. It felt very uneventful and didn’t feel like they were really doing anything special for this moment.