Every couple of years, Disney gathers its faithful in Anaheim and empties the contents of its future onto a stage, and every couple of years the reveal is the same paradox in a slightly new costume. No company on Earth has a deeper bench of storytellers or a richer vault of characters, and no company leans on that vault more heavily. This year’s D23 showcase was a spectacular, hours-long demonstration of both truths at once. The headlines will go to the tenth trip back to a familiar well. But the story worth telling is what those handful of new ideas, tucked between the sequels, say about where the most powerful entertainment company in history actually stands.
The Sequel Machine, Running at Full Tilt
Let us be honest about the shape of the thing. The overwhelming majority of what Disney showed off is a continuation of something you already love. Pixar alone paraded Incredibles 3, Coco 2, and, fresh off the biggest hit in the franchise’s history, the ongoing life of the Toy Story universe. Walt Disney Animation confirmed Frozen 3 with a splashy Kristen Bell and Idina Menzel performance and quietly revealed that Zootopia 3 is already in development, the ink barely dry on the second one. The live-action remake conveyor kept humming with a starry Tangled and a sequel to last year’s billion-dollar Lilo & Stitch. Over in the other wings of the empire, the herd reassembled for another Ice Age, the Marvel machine teed up Avengers: Doomsday and an entirely recast X-Men, Star Wars lined up a second season of Ahsoka, and even the deep cuts got the legacy treatment, with a Romy and Michele reunion, a third Camp Rock, a Bluey movie, and a long-gestating Simpsons feature.
It is, frankly, a wall of intellectual property, and the framing from the top only underscored it. The company’s chief executive opened the night by boasting of a connection with more than four billion fans, half the population of the planet, a genuinely staggering figure that also happens to be the entire strategic logic of the evening laid bare. When you have four billion people already emotionally invested in your existing stuff, the safest business decision in the world is to give them more of it. None of which means these films will be bad. Coco 2 reuniting its original creative team is cause for real optimism, the recast X-Men has an intriguing young ensemble, and plenty of these will be lovely. But a slate this dominated by continuation is worth noticing, because the interesting question is always what a company chooses to make when it does not have to.
The Originals Are the Whole Ballgame
Which brings us to the good stuff, the announcements that actually made me sit up. Because scattered among the sequels were a precious few genuinely new things, and they were, almost without exception, the most exciting items on the entire card.
Pixar, to its enormous credit, is clearly trying to rediscover its original soul. The studio teased Gatto, a noir about a scrappy black cat tangled up with a feline crime boss in the superstitious canals of Venice, from Enrico Casarosa and Andrea Warren, the team behind the gorgeous Luca. It also unveiled Ghost Market, a supernatural adventure set at a plate-lunch shop on Oahu’s North Shore that quietly serves spirits stuck between worlds, which is exactly the kind of specific, culturally rooted, slightly strange premise that made Pixar Pixar in the first place. Walt Disney Animation countered with Clay, an original fantasy about a misfit voiced by Kieran Culkin mentoring a literal ball of sentient clay, and Hexed, a magical coming-of-age saga that has assembled a genuinely wild voice cast including Hailee Steinfeld, Walton Goggins, and Jodie Foster.
These are the films to watch, and not because the sequels will fail. They are the films to watch because they are where the actual creative risk lives, where the next Coco or Frozen or Zootopia will have to come from once the current ones are exhausted. A company can coast on its back catalog for a very long time, but its future is only ever as healthy as its willingness to make things nobody has seen before. On the evidence of this showcase, that willingness is alive, if outnumbered.
The Lost Rabbit Who Stole the Show
And then there was the single most poetic announcement of the night, the one that fused Disney’s past and its future into one perfect image. Jon Favreau took the stage to reveal Oswald, a series built around Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and if you do not know that name, its story is one of the most important and least remembered in all of Hollywood.
Oswald was Walt Disney’s first real star, created in 1927, a full year before a certain mouse. Then in 1928 Walt lost the rights to the character in a brutal contract dispute that also poached most of his animators, a catastrophe that forced him to go home and invent a scrappy replacement named Mickey Mouse. In other words, the loss of Oswald is the reason Mickey exists at all. The rabbit then vanished into obscurity for the better part of eighty years, until Disney finally clawed him back in 2006 in one of the strangest transactions the industry has ever seen, trading the rights to a sportscaster to get him home.
Now look at what Favreau is doing with him. The series concerns Oswald, hidden away since the 1920s, suddenly loosed into the bewildering modern world, which is not just a plot but a near-literal retelling of the character’s own real history. Better still, Favreau is animating the rabbit entirely by hand, in traditional 2D, at the Spanish studio of the great Sergio Pablos, with former Disney artists returning to the drawing table and sequences shot inside Walt’s actual preserved office. A company that spent the whole night proving it can strip-mine its own vault forever chose, in one corner of the stage, to reach all the way back to its origin point and revive its lost first creation in the very medium that born it. If you want proof that Disney still understands the difference between exploiting its history and honoring it, that hand-drawn rabbit is it.
What It All Adds Up To
So here is the takeaway from a very long night in Anaheim. Yes, the sequels will come, and they will make oceans of money, and some of them will even be great, and the four billion fans will show up for every one. That part was never in doubt. We have happily celebrated plenty of these characters ourselves, right down to the deluxe disc editions of the Pixar classics that started it all. But the health of Disney’s next quarter-century will not be measured by the fifth Frozen. It will be measured by whether a Gatto or a Ghost Market can become the thing the fifth version of gets made, and by whether the company still has the nerve to send a hand-drawn rabbit out into the world to see if anyone remembers him. On the evidence of this D23, the answer is a cautious, hopeful yes. Watch the new stuff. That is where the soul is.
