7 Disney+ Movies That Are Diamonds In The Rough

Disney is boasting that it has over ten million subscribers within 24 hours of the launch of their Disney+ streaming service. And while there are caveats to be noted, like seven-day trials and folks with Verizon who get the service for free, that’s a ridiculously impressive start. So now that you have the service, what should you watch on it? Well, aside from indulging in childhood TV nostalgia from one era (Chip N’ Dale), another era (Gargoyles) or yet another time (Kim Possible), I wanted to highlight five comparatively under-the-radar offerings, all relatively recent movies, that deserve your time and attention. I wouldn’t necessarily say that these are “underrated,” but they deserve a wider audience or, in a few cases, a reappreciation. So, with the sad caveat that The Lone Ranger won’t be available on the service until 2021, here we go…

Meet the Robinsons (2007)

Global Box Office: $169 million

A bright light during a dark time for Disney Animation

The origin of the oft repeated “Keep Moving Forward” motto provides a lovely grace note, one that is oddly fitting for the time in which it was made. 2007 was right in the middle of a dark period for Disney, when Pixar was king, DreamWorks was nipping at Disney's heels, and the death of 2D animation had left Disney somewhat at a loss at how to distinguish itself. Meet the Robinsons stands out not just a wonderful film but another example of a Disney cartoon that doesn't really resemble any other Disney cartoon you can think of. Its tale of a young orphan scientist is at its core a human drama, rooted in the need to be loved by someone... anyone, and the need to belong. It spins a dizzying time-travel adventure and introduces a futuristic family of pointedly wacky but utterly grounded human beings. If the middle act contains most of the frantic action, the first act unblinkingly looks at the pain of orphan-hood and the third act is all about the therapeutic power of forgiveness.

A Christmas Carol (2009)

Global Box Office: $323.5 million

Either the end of the past or the beginning of the future

This was Robert Zemeckis’ third and final “motion-capture” animated feature before this film’s relative failure (it cost $200 million to produce) and the blow-out success of Avatar rendered Zemeckis’ interesting and ambitious animated features relatively redundant. It’s not the best of the three (The Polar Express in IMAX 3-D was a game changer and Beowulf is a ripping action drama), but it’s pretty damn good and happens to be a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the classic Charles Dickens tale. Jim Carrey gives another all-in performance as the title character, and the film doesn’t hold back in terms of darkness, pathos and self-pitying loneliness. I’m not enough of an expert to say whether it’s the best version of this story (most folks pick Muppet Christmas Carol, Bill Murray’s Scrooged or the 1951 adaptation starring Alastair Sim), but it’s a fascinating time capsule at essentially the beginning of “the future” and a pretty darn good toon to boot.

Iron Man 3 (2013)

Global Box Office: $1.215 billion

Still one of the very best MCU movies and most representative of what we say we want from the franchise.

This Shane Black sequel featured the best plot twist of any mainstream blockbuster since The Sixth Sense, one rife with powerful political subtexts, one that contrasts with the MCU’s role as occasional military propaganda, and offers a grounded and empathetic Tony Stark solving a compelling mystery that leads back to old skeletons. This is a comic book movie as 1980’s action comedy, complete with pithy henchmen and gratuitous violence. Even the damsel-in-distress trope gets used as an ahead-of-its-time commentary on geek sexism and “women as trophies” objectification. The film gets better as it goes along, contains my favorite action sequence in the entire MCU and ends on a note of such pleasing closure that it’s a shame that it kept being ignored out of financial necessity. Iron Man 3 is the best Iron Man movie, but it has become oddly underrated over the last five 6.5 years, to the point where we now almost forget the initial wave of rave reviews and mostly positive post-debut feedback. But, like The Last Jedi, it's better for its transgressions and deconstructive elements.

The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Global Box Office: $332 million

A decent toon tarred by its fate as Pixar’s first flop

The retooled and delayed “problem child” project went from a May 2014 release to a November 2015 release, also becoming Pixar’s first November offering since The Incredibles back in 2004. The picture is perfectly okay, one of their photo-real triumphs and a solid coming-of-age tale alongside it. But sandwiched between Spectre, Hunger Games: Mockingjay part 2 and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, it was lost in the shuffle and became Pixar’s first outright flop. It earned $332 million worldwide on a $200 million budget, but its delay meant that the success of that summer’s Inside Out and next summer’s Finding Dory shielded Pixar from too much blowback. Four years later, it is still one of Pixar’s most visually scrumptious films, with enough character work and pathos to qualify as a genuinely good movie. Its status as a trivia question notwithstanding, it deserves a slight reevaluation. Of course, it was also the start of Disney’s domination, when their hits became so big that even super-flops like Good Dinosaur and Tomorrowland were treated like glorified flesh wounds.

Pete’s Dragon (2016)

Global Box Office: $143.6 million

Disney’s best (recent) live-action remake/revamp of one of their toons.

The summer of 2016, fueled by unrequested sequels (Independence Day: Resurgence), mediocre reboots (Legend of Tarzan) and doomed franchise starters (Warcraft), was almost as bad for big movies as 2010. The endless summer of dreck ended on a weirdly high note, with August giving way to Don’t Breathe, Sausage Party and (the superb) Kubo and the Two Strings. The real miracle was Walt Disney’s live-action remake of Pete’s Dragon. David Lowery’s redo of the 1977 animated/live-action hybrid was a smaller scale movie ($65 million) than made small-scale money. Yet its quality still provided a major (if temporary) boost for the street cred of Disney’s “live action fairy tale adaptation” sub-genre. This Bryce Dallas-Howard/Robert Redford/Oakes Fegley drama tells the grim story of a young man orphaned and stranded in the woods with only a mysterious dragon to care for him. It remains a heartwarming and authentic character drama that just happens to have a special effect at its center. It’s still the best of Disney’s “live action redos.” 

Noelle (2019) and Dumbo (2019)

Global Box Office: NA

Global Box Office: $350 million

Two artistic misses that are both watchable and surprisingly self-critical.

Neither of these very recent films are aggressively “good.” The Anna Kendrick/Bill Hader Christmas story, about Santa’s underappreciated daughter who ventures into the big city to track down her “I don’t want to take over dad’s job” brother, is a pleasant “while you empty the dishes or fold the laundry” time waster, which isn’t exactly high praise but at least feels like a real movie more often than not. Dumbo is halfway decent $75 million period piece character drama that cost $170 million and thus was a huge financial miss for Tim Burton and friends. Both films stand out as unexpectedly self-critical looks at their parent company. Noelle makes the villain a guy who wants to automate the North Pole and whose algorithm ends up declaring almost every child to be “naughty” (shades of The Good Place) and thus threatening all of Christmas. Dumbo is a thinly veiled parable for Disney buying and then destroying Fox. Both films are either painfully lacking in self-awareness or painfully self-critical. Either way, they are fascinating in that broader context.