So… I did another thing. Exactly five years ago, I launched a YouTube channel as a companion piece to this blog. The first video was a ranking of all the Pixar films that had been released at that point. It was just me sitting in front of my webcam and riffing for about 90 minutes. No script, no frills, no idea what I was doing. Five years on, I’ve sort of gone back to my roots, celebrating the wooden anniversary with another ranked list, this one even longer and more ambitious, with my skills (hopefully) more developed.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you, my definitive ranking of every Disney animated feature film… so far!
Let me walk you through my process. I’ve done a few ranked list videos on the channel over the years. I started with Pixar, then did my favorite Christmas movies later that year for the holidays. The next year I did my favorite horror films for Halloween, a video that did pretty well, especially for a young channel with an audience growing purely on word of mouth and the randomness of the YouTube algorithm.
But apart from those, I haven’t really been able to go back to that well. I’ve wanted to do more lists, but there were too many variables that I couldn’t really account for. Also, given how involved the edit was for the Halloween video, I just didn’t feel like I had the time to devote to such a project.
A little more than three years ago, as Disney was celebrating its centennial, the idea came to me to do a ranking of all the animated films. I thought to myself that if I got locked in and really committed to knocking it out, I could get it done in time for either the actual 100th birthday in October, or at the latest, by the time Wish was released in November. These movies have played a significant role in every stage of my life, and while I have a lot of issues with the modern actions of the larger Disney corporation, the vast majority of the actual films have left an indelible mark on my existence.
Then my mom died. Everything got put on hold while I began my mourning and went home to handle her final arrangements. Given how much she loved Disney – I took her and my sister to Disneyland to celebrate her 60th birthday a few years prior because she hadn’t been since she was five – I resolved to one day complete the project, but any illusions I had about 2023 deadlines were completely obliterated. The only thing I was able to accomplish was to watch the seven entries in the studio canon that I hadn’t seen to that point. Originally I was going to marathon those pictures in the span of a week. Instead, I spread them out over the rest of the year, keeping mom’s ashes by the TV so she could “watch” with me. I put the thought in my head to aim for October 2024 to catch the tail end of the centennial celebrations, which meant I could include Wish as the anniversary film in the list, terrible though it was.
The next year was basically a tale of extremes. For the first half of the year, I was extremely busy. For a few months I worked two jobs at once while still maintaining my regular schedule of “Worst Trailer in the World” videos every month and the Oscar Blitz. It all became too much to handle at times, especially when toxic fanboys would dive into the comments of my Godzilla x Kong video to suggest that I kill myself for daring to poke fun at a CGI ape. By the time I was done with my gigs, I took a well-earned and much-needed vacation – my first in over a decade – and then got to work on scripting the video. Again, my self-proposed deadline had to be defenestrated, but I knew I could get this idea over the finish line at some point.
Then I spent a full year unemployed. As the months dragged on, I got increasingly panicked that my career, and my time in Los Angeles, was coming to an end. Even my basic trips to the movies and reviews on this blog were on the chopping block, to say nothing of whatever piddly shit I was doing on YouTube. And then, just for good measure, my brother-in-law also died, and I had to go home and help my sister and nephew begin the next phase of their lives. I still haven’t fully recovered – evidenced by the fact that I haven’t done a trailer video in a year or a TFINYW post in months. During this extended hiatus, I still had the desire to do the Disney video, but I was stymied by my mental health issues. I kept myself slightly sane by sporadically working on the script, which actually retroactively affected the rankings themselves. In addition to the handful of movies I had never seen before, I found myself needing to rewatch several entries I hadn’t seen in a long while, just to come up with something to say about them, and in some cases, it made me reevaluate where I placed them. One film ended up jumping some 20-odd spots into the top 10 as a result because in the years since I had last seen it, I had forgotten just how special it was to me.
There was still one major issue to overcome: How do I get the necessary footage to illustrate my points/jokes? Up until this point, all of my videos were created using clips and trailers that were already on YouTube, using various online conversion tools to turn them into downloadable mp4 files. Even then, I have to be careful about how much footage I use at a given time, as after a certain point (10 seconds consecutively or 12 in a given 15), the YouTube content ID would trigger, putting a copyright claim on the video and risking it being blocked or removed entirely, and almost completely at the whim of the respective studios I was critiquing/mocking.
There was no reasonable way I could leave this to chance, as some of the things I wanted to highlight were in specific, almost esoteric scenes, so what was I to do? I mean, so many other movie channels find a way. Surely I could, too. Well, it took a while, but I found out how to capture footage directly off my computer. That was the last missing piece of the puzzle. Once that was worked out, it was all a matter of time budgeting. By this point I was mired in a survival job I didn’t care for, one that exhausted me mentally and physically, and even resulted in a muscle injury from which I’m still healing. I also realized the true scope of what I was attempting. Given the sheer amount of films to discuss, I came to understand that the final product would be at least two hours long, making it my lengthiest project by a considerable margin, and that it would take a ton of time to put together once I had all the elements in place. I mean, Zootopia 2 had just come out, bringing the total to 64 films, enough to fill out a March Madness bracket. Even if I limited myself to a minute per segment (while also adding an introduction and a tag), the video would be well over an hour (and obviously some entries had far more to talk about than others), and if I found the time to edit a segment per day, it would take a minimum of two months to put it all together.
From there, the work began in earnest. After seeing the Zootopia sequel, I finalized the script. One of the side effects of taking so long on this is that I got to fine-tune my commentary and comedy bits as I went (though several were cut after the fact, including a very ill-advised rant about Congressman Jim Jordan as a contrast to the voice actor of the same name). For the vast majority of my videos, especially the “Worst Trailer” series, I basically just write it the day before I record it. Occasionally I do a rewrite if I think of something funnier in the brief interim, but mostly I just go with my first idea, as I feel it makes the project feel like a legitimate reaction to what I’m seeing in the previews. Then I started capturing the films, usually one per day, though sometimes two or three on weekends or any other days I had off. I could literally set up a record, go to the movies or run errands, and then come back and finalize the files without issue. Once I was fired from that sales job, I got over my anger by spending the next four days recording my voiceover. It took that long because after about 15-20 blocks, my voice would just give out and my throat would be in agony. I did my first professional vocal assignment a few weeks ago, and I’ll get back in the habit of properly training my cords so that I can do that job properly, assuming I can get more work. But for these purposes, I was just pushing myself as much as I could to get some part of this project done and locked down. It was a huge morale boost to know that a major hurdle had finally been cleared.
That was January of this year. Over the next couple of months, I finished gathering all the films and organizing my various folders (including buying and downloading a truncated version of Make Mine Music that omitted The Martins and the Coys off of YouTube VOD because the various shorts and the full feature are not available on Disney+, the only feature not included in the streaming library), then set to work editing the introductory segment as a proof of concept. This taught me that a) I would still have to rely on YT clips and usage rules, b) it would take, on average, about three hours to edit each individual section, and c) I would have to create a separate edit project for the timeline that would constitute the final product. Microsoft Clipchamp is an absolutely shit editing program, but it’s the only one my system can handle. When I can afford a new machine, I’ll get Avid or Adobe Premiere, but for now, I’m limited to what Clipchamp can process. This includes the knowledge that the longer a project is, and the more clips being used, the more it decides to buffer during playback, and I can’t do frame-by-frame editing, so I often missed a flash frame because I could only snip off three frames at a time, and I wanted each shot I used to last as long as possible/appropriate for what I was saying. Trying to edit the entire video on one giant timeline would be impossible (the program also crashes when zooming in on longer timelines).
This set up what became my workflow for the last phase. I would edit a segment in its own project. I would then export the video and upload it to YouTube privately as a test, to see if the footage would get copyright claimed, as I had no idea if capturing my screen would also capture the content ID. Assuming it cleared (because I was also using other media and clips), I would then load it into the master timeline and insert the “page turn” transition that I decided on to break everything up. This meant that I would watch the segment three times: once on its own timeline, once as a video file, and one more time in the final assembly. This was a triple check to make sure there were no shot changes or blips where the video of my voiceover (easier to record on Zoom and edit the video than just have an audio file) was visible for a few frames. Lather, rinse, repeat until complete. This system was even compatible with my work schedule once I got an actual TV gig again, because I could work during the day and then casually devote a couple hours to editing in the evening without missing out on the rest of life. I had to scale back my movie viewing and blogging, but that was a small price to pay. The only unforeseen obstacle was that, after a while, my “local storage” in Clipchamp filled up, and the program started deleting the timelines of the lower-ranked segments. Thankfully I had already fixed any issues in the first export and had the final file in the master timeline, or things could have gotten mighty hairy towards the end.
Once I started editing, it occurred to me that the anniversary of my channel wasn’t far off. The intro segment was done in March, and the channel would turn over on July 5. As a means to motivate myself, I imposed one more soft deadline of getting the video done in time for the occasion. I certainly had enough time to get it all done, and I could even give myself a few days off here and there if I got burnt out, or if there was a particularly involved segment that required a lot of outside sources, and therefore more time to complete. If I didn’t make the date, no biggie, but at least it would finally be done, and again, just having the mental drive to finally finish the thing was a dopamine rush I hadn’t felt in a while. It even got me thinking about what the next insane project I could attempt.
I finished it about two weeks ago. I enlisted my sister as an outside viewer, mostly to just get another pair of eyeballs on it. When you spend so much time on any project, you inevitably get entrenched in it, forming your own little bubble where you’re either your biggest cheerleader or harshest critic, sometimes both. Having an objective party looking at it with fresh eyes would give me a needed perspective on the technicalities and practicalities of the overall product. Did I miss a flash frame? Do the individual music beds properly mesh with the themes of each movie, and is the audio balanced? Do the jokes land, or are they too cringe? These were all questions that needed answering, and not by me. I had already shown her the first few segments when I started putting it all together, mostly so I could decide if there should be different music for each section or an overall looping track for the entire thing, kind of like what I did for the Halloween video. The idea was that I would upload the file to YouTube privately, invite her to view, and make any last-minute changes and re-upload once she watched it.
But then the copyright claims came in.
Again, I uploaded every single segment to test YT’s content screening process. Not a single one got flagged. Sixty-six attempts, 66 clears. I figured I was golden. I started watching the mp4 as it processed online, as at 139 minutes, I knew it would take a while. I paused once to monitor the progress, and the check mark I had gotten 66 times before was there. Awesome, no worries. About 45 minutes later, I got an email that the video had been blocked on YouTube because of a copyright claim by Disney.
Well shit. What did I miss? Did one of the trailers I used have too many consecutive seconds in one segment that the site just didn’t notice before? I’m sure it would be an easy fix, and even though re-uploading would be time-consuming, it wouldn’t be that bad.
There were 54 separate claims.
Yeah, nearly every segment got flagged. I guess when I did my test upload, I didn’t leave it up long enough for Disney to scan for IDs and notice my work. I would always delete each section once it cleared, because I didn’t want to clog up my channel dashboard with videos that would never see the light of day. Apparently I should have done exactly that. I had only had a video blocked once before, my Best Picture breakdown from a few years ago, and it was quickly resolved because the claimed footage was from the Everything Everywhere All At Once trailer, but it wasn’t A24 making the claim, rather a Russian movie review show that quickly let it go when I disputed it, because if they tried to embargo me, I could easily send this up the ladder to the actual studio, who could shut that entire channel down for fraudulently trying to claim ownership of the footage.
I’ve never had a claim like this, and no studio has ever tried to outright stop me from making my video public (remember what I said about hating their modern corporate bullshit). There was nothing else for it. I had to take over an hour and individually dispute each claim. That would make the video viewable in 48 hours (this is why I upload my Oscar Blitz videos on Wednesday and have them “premiere” on Friday when they’re scheduled), but it also put the kibosh on any plans for 11th hour retouches. I wasn’t going to go through this rigmarole again.
What infuriates me about this is that a) I know that the law is on my side when it comes to using this footage, and b) YouTube is terrible when it comes to sorting these issues out. For those unaware, here’s how the process works. Copyright claims are almost always automatic. If you’re using a previously published YouTube video, the duration rules I mentioned above will trigger an instant claim from the original publisher if you exceed those limitations (including a pitiful five seconds of grace for commercial music – I sidestepped that by only using music from YouTube’s audio library, with an emphasis on tracks that didn’t require an attribution in the video’s description). For something like my video, apparently, the algorithm has to scan more deeply (which is why the initial check mark I get on uploading is just that – initial), constantly searching for something that would run afoul of non-YT media that various outlets still lay claim to. In this case, because Disney makes most of its films available on the site for VOD purposes, that’s likely where the ID was located.
When there’s a claim, you have two options if you want to remove it. Sometimes you can just leave the claim there if it doesn’t affect the visibility of the video. It just means that if I were to ever monetize the channel (a benchmark I’m nowhere close to reaching), I’d have to reevaluate at that time or just let Disney have a share – or all – of the ad revenue it would generate. But when the video is blocked, you basically have to fight it or delete the video (or edit out the claimed segments, but that would defeat the entire purpose, and even if I did, more claims tend to pop up after the fact), which after literally years of work and six months of pedal-to-the-metal, I was never going to do. The two choices are to “dispute” the claim or “appeal” it. If you dispute, usually because you either have a license to use the footage or your usage falls under Fair Use laws and guidelines, you have to fill out a short form, explain your rationale for taking the clips, and submit it for review. The video becomes available after two days, and the copyright owner has 30 days to respond. If they don’t, the claim is automatically dropped.
There are two problems with this system. The first is that the interface doesn’t allow you to make a full case for yourself, especially when it comes to Fair Use. The subject has been litigated in court many times in several landmark decisions, but the long and short of it is that you can use copyrighted material for any number of legitimate reasons, such as parody, commentary, criticism, documentaries, and news pieces. All of these rationales are listed as options in the dispute form, but it’s a drop-down menu where you can only select one. If it was a list of check boxes where you could tick all that applied, it would likely strengthen your case. It certainly would for me. My video is a combination of direct commentary on certain clips, indirect commentary in a visual montage, jokes, researched history, and a general critique of each film, which is bolstered by the fact that under the law and the First Amendment, I could say that every single movie was garbage, and that wouldn’t be relevant. They can’t silence my opinion. Copyright claims are usually an end-around to silence views they don’t like by saying something tant amount to, “You’re entitled to your opinion, but you don’t get to use our footage to make it,” which is legally dubious at best. My usage falls under several of these categories, but I can’t highlight them all. I just have to go with the “most accurate” term, which is “Commentary,” but even then, I could be in trouble, because someone could interpret that as, “Well, you’re not doing a live commentary while viewing the footage like a DVD feature, so it doesn’t count.” That’s not a reasonable definition of the term, but this leads us into the next core issue.
YouTube itself doesn’t decide the outcome, the copyright holder does. It’s up to Disney itself to look at my reasoning, and decide, pretty much entirely on whatever altruistic whims they might have in the moment, whether or not to agree with me and release the claim. In most cases, this does happen, likely because my channel is very small and they can’t actually make any money off me. Still, it’s completely their call. They can just assign an intern (or more likely these days, program an AI bot) to automatically reject all disputes before the deadline, and there’s little I can do about it.
The second option of appeal is still available after a dispute is rejected, and for a while it was a standard progression, but recently YouTube has allowed users to jump straight to this point. If you appeal, the video is unblocked immediately, which is a plus, and the copyright holder only has a week to respond before the claim is auto-cleared. But there are two really big catches. The first is that the form is much more involved. You have to provide even more detailed information about why you’re entitled to use their footage, including explaining how you used it and if you altered it in any way, and if your usage has the potential to financially damage the copyright owner. Again, this is almost impossible to apply to me, because even when I’m making fun of a trailer, if the movie goes on to make hundreds of millions at the box office, then surely I didn’t damage their earning potential. You also have to provide full contact information, including address, email, and phone number (when you dispute you just digitally sign your name), so that the owners can contact you directly and attempt to pursue legal action against you if you really get on their nerves. The second is that, if the appeal is denied – again at the sole discretion of the owners with no involvement from actual YouTube staff (the biggest channels with more than a million subscribers do get an assigned liaison to handle this stuff, but the little guys like me have no such resource) – then a copyright strike is initiated. This is when someone at YT finally looks at the video and the dispute history, but there’s no set standard for how they make their determinations. If they rule in the claimant’s favor, the video is taken down and a strike is placed on your channel. Three strikes and the channel is taken down entirely.
I’ve only dealt with this possibility once. When I made my “Worst Trailer” video for the god-awful 80 for Brady, one of the clips had a catalog music track underneath it, and the scene I was making fun of lasted for seven seconds. Universal Music Group made the copyright claim (though notably not Universal Studios, who put out the flick). I disputed. On Day 29 of 30, the dispute was rejected. I appealed, knowing I was 100% within my rights. On Day 7, literally four hours from the deadline, they denied the appeal, and a removal request was filed. My only recourse was to either drop my appeal or let the YouTube gods decide my fate. I decided King Deflator wasn’t worth it, so I let it go. If I ever monetize, Universal will get my penny per 100 views. I don’t care.
But for a project of this magnitude? I’m genuinely worried. Relying on the largesse of the company that nearly fired Jimmy Kimmel because right-wing trolls got angry about a factual statement is not a gamble I’m likely to win, especially when I have to win it 54 fucking times! But what can I honestly do? I don’t want this to die on the vine after putting so much work in, so I have to play ball. Again, I know the law in this regard. There is no case to be made against me, but the system by which I have to exonerate and validate my efforts is, by design, totally disadvantageous to me and every other content creator on the platform, regardless of the size of our audience or our individual profitability. Hell, even CinemaSins has resorted to mirroring footage in their videos of late to avoid copyright claims. When one of the most successful channels in YouTube history is reduced to this, you know the game is rigged. So I play along and wait. I’ve got three more weeks until the dispute deadline. Fingers crossed.
In the meantime, I did always have a distribution model in mind. When I finished the video, secure in the knowledge that I would make the channel’s anniversary as hoped, I quickly tacked on an additional VO and end slate to the intro segment and published that last Sunday, with the intent being to drive some potential traffic to the BTRP Media Patreon page. We have a few paid subscribers, and if I could generate a few more, so much the better. I had to upload the video to Patreon directly, rather than linking from YouTube (when there’s a copyright dispute, the ability for external viewing is limited; hell, you may not even be able to watch the embedded link I put in this post), and put it behind the paywall for one week of exclusivity. It did get a few views, but no new buyers. Oh well, I tried. The strategy now that the video is fully public is to release a few of the individual sections as YouTube Shorts to tease the full video for those interested. If my disputes/future appeals fail and the video is permanently blocked, I’ll direct people to watch on Patreon, where it’s now fully available for all members, paid or otherwise. and Disney can’t do shit.
This has been one of the most massive undertakings of my adult life, a passion project from beginning to end that may ultimately fail, rendering the vast majority of the time spent on it wasted. But even if that comes to pass, I’m still happy with it. I basically wrote, recorded, and edited a feature-length film completely on my own, with no expectations of making any money off of it, but also spending no money in the process, so it all balances out. I’ve been in a funk for so long over the past three years thanks to family tragedies and ever-creeping financial and professional doom, but this became my escape, the reason I got up in the morning some days, and I want to keep doing stuff like this.
I genuinely hope you enjoy the video, even if it turns out I rated your favorite film dead last. As I say in the preamble, there are so, so many fans out there, that I know I’ll piss some people off, but given the community that these movies has helped foster over the course of a century, even the worst ones (in my opinion) are part of the journey of what is still a company capable of pure magic, in more ways than one. I hope you liked this sort of behind-the-scenes look at how the biggest sausage I’ve ever conceived was made, and now that it’s done, hopefully I can get fully back into the swing of things for more content.
And yes, I do actually have some mad ideas for how I’m going to top this.
P.S. Here are some fun stats for the video:
Duration – 2:19:10
Average Segment Length – 2:12
Shortest Segment – Outro (:50)
Longest Segment – #1 (4:30)
Average Edit Time Per Segment – 3.5 hours
Largest Range of Rankings Per Decade – 1990s (Highest is #2, Lowest is #63)
Shortest Range of Rankings Per Decade – 1960s (Highest is #11, Lowest is #18)
Best Average of Rankings Per Decade – 1960s (3 Movies, Average Ranking of 14.3)
Worst Average of Rankings Per Decade – 2000s (11 Movies, Average Ranking of 48.5)
Highest Ranking for Each Decade – 1930s/40s (4), 1950s (10), 1960s (11), 1970s (29), 1980s (5), 1990s (2), 2000s (15), 2010s (1), 2020s (28)
Lowest Ranking for Each Decade – 1930s/40s (58), 1950s (23), 1960s (18), 1970s (59), 1980s (32), 1990s (63), 2000s (64), 2010s (46), 2020s (57)
Number of Rants/Tangents I Eventually Cut Out for Time or Other Reasons – 7
Number of Pot Shots at Donald Trump – 3… I think (any praise of Disney could be construed as another insult)
Number of Bleeped Swear Words – Lost count
Number of Times I Comedically “Outed” Myself as a Perv/Furry – I don’t dare try to count
Join the conversation in the comments below! What’s your favorite Disney film? How familiar are you with YouTube’s algorithm, and can you give me any tips to hack it? Were you able to recognize all the real and fictional redheads in my montage? Let me know! And remember, you can follow me on Twitter (fuck “X”) as well as Bluesky, subscribe to my YouTube channel for even more content, and check out the entire BTRP Media Network at btrpmedia.com!
I Actually Paid To See This 