Walt’s Art History: Late Style, Digital Aesthetics and the ‘Disney Baroque’

Abstract

This article examines the critical and cultural framing of the Walt Disney Studio’s cel- and computer-animated feature films according to an enduring art-historical narrative. It traces the critical evolution and historical periodization of Disney animation from the 1930s and 1940s to the post-millennial period, arguing that the studio has often been understood according to ‘early, middle and late’ phases of production that are typically held as both complementary and in tension with each other. Supported by the well-established art-history vernacular that has defined discrete Disney eras, this article then argues for post-2012 Disney Feature Animation as an example of the studio’s ‘late style’ – a later phase not of transgression or alienation, but one that adheres to a more positivist mode that signals pleasurable formal dissidence, confident deformation, and artistic creativity. This article subsequently advances the term ‘Disney Baroque’ to describe such playful transformations of digital aesthetics and effects present across the studio’s nine features released between Wreck-It Ralph (Rich Moore, 2012) and Encanto (Jared Bush and Byron Howard, 2021), its longest run of computer-animated films. By sharpening contemporary Disney’s connections to the ahistorical or atemporal logic of Baroque theatricality, this article identifies how contemporary Disney animation engineers spectacular moments of upheaval that rest on specific Neo-Baroque qualities (concealment, illusionism, representationalism, polycentricism, seriality, the labyrinthine) in ways that further contribute to an understanding of Disney’s own internal history and critical periodicity.