The 20 best Disney movies, ranked

These are the closest thing we have to truly common cultural properties

'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,' 1937
(Image credit: Illustrated | Image courtesy AF archive / Alamy Stock Photo)

Like all parents of small children, my wife and I are now up to Ph.D. level in our understanding and appreciation of the Disney animated canon. Only when you have seen The Aristocats roughly 75 times can you begin to understand why it is such a terrible film. The essence of Disney is awe and wonder and swords and old-fashioned morality, not minor domestic crises. At their best though, Disney films, like The Canterbury Tales and Shakespearean drama, effortlessly straddle the supposed gap between high and low culture, the sublime and beautiful and the merely goofy. This is why even more so than Star Wars or Peanuts, they are the closest thing we have to truly common cultural properties and why they will be remembered and appreciated long after everyone has forgotten about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Taxi Driver.

Not all of them, of course. The Whig historiography of Disney is false. The best films were made under the personal supervision of Walt himself; the period between his death and the so-called "Renaissance" of the 1990s, which gave us empty Oscar-bait with thin plots and glitzy animation and Boomer rock scores, is full of unfairly maligned masterpieces. Here are the 20 best Disney films and the single most overrated.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.