Disney Filmmaking Process
disneyanimation.com
disneyanimation.com
I was quite surprised to see that after writing the script they had stand-in actors do the entire script, which they then did animatics (storyboards times to the recorded audio) to, after which they edited the story. Only then did final actors record. Then redo animatics and editing before doing final animation.
Imagine my surprise watching the documentary on Hayao Miyazaki, where he has a 100 animators working on final animation, while he is still storyboarding, undecided on the ending of the movie and hasn’t even casted the voice actors!
I have no experience in animation, however that process is not unlike the common process in music production: a song is written, a demo is cut by the songwriter, a "scratch track" is cut by the chosen lead vocalist and an instrument or two, then the arrangement is recorded by the band (to the scratch track), then final vocals are cut to the band's backing track, and often after that tweaks to the accompaniment are still made.
Hayao seems to doing continuous refactoring, so as long as you don't need to edit too many scenes already drawn you can potentially come out with a good final product while giving production as much time as possible.
https://www.gamespot.com/articles/why-batman-ninja-in-englis...
>"My first exposure to the anime process was working with [Hayao] Miyazaki on Spirited Away," Chu said. "It was just very interesting watching him do the story. Like, he kind of thinks up the story, and then you don't really write it, you start sort of thumb-nailing out like, what key visual moments might be, and then you start storyboarding and then you start animating.
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>"And I was like, 'OK, but what are you animated to?' He's like, 'Oh, we just make the mouths move.' And then I was like, 'But is there dialogue?" And he's like, 'No, no. We add the dialogue at the end.' And you're like, 'Oh, that's really weird.' And people always complain about, 'Oh, I'm going to watch the original Japanese version with English sub, not the English dub version,' but the truth is the Japanese version is dubbed as well."
At least personally, the voice acting seems just so different. My preference is not related to the differences there may be between dubbed or not.
I also wonder if 3d animation changes anything about this approach. I enjoy watching Japanese anime but 3d productions can be hard to watch with an English dub because it's very apparent that mouth movements don't match, whereas with more traditional 2d-style animation the mouth flaps match more easily in the mind. Video games made by Japanese studios for Japanese audiences can be particularly hard to watch with an English dub.
At least at the time, the situation you find so weird was common enough to be satirized, based on dubs of live-action movies.
There is a middle ground, seen in 2D western animation made on a lower budget than your typical Disney fare. Artists will create a mouth chart which includes drawings for a wide range of English phonemes. They are then used as a guide for drawing. There are software tools that assist in this process, making it a lot easier to do in a short amount of time. This is probably how South Park manages to do real accurate lip syncing while working on a 6 day production cycle.
If all this seems chaotic, it is. It leads to untold stress as the release date looms closer and closer and the ending still isn't figured out, which compresses the schedule for each department to deliver a finished product. Very very rarely, the release date is allowed to slip (see "The Good Dinosaur" for example) but that's really the nuclear option, as it involves shuffling the release schedule and incurs a ton of cost. This is a big part of why these movies cost so much: compressing the schedule means hiring tons of people and paying them tons of overtime.
Source: I worked the better part of a decade at WDAS.
I found it fascinating how the team was still developing key plot points (let alone dialog/animation) down to the final few weeks/days before the film needed to be completed!
It completely kills your employees though: all those crunches to scrap tons of good work and replace it with new ideas; tons of stressful overtime. Ugh.
Working on the new service, everything is involving independently while product is figuring out what they want to sell in reality. This out-of-order execution seems like a feature of modern production, while consistency is left behind and only synchronize when they absolutely has to.
I have no opinion on this however, can't think of a better way myself.
Plot twist: 6 months prior to the final release date, they are still rewriting the biggest reveal of the entire movie ...
The "Welcome to the Family Madrigal" sequence at the begging of the film is absolutely jaw dropping, if you don't watch the whole film at least watch that sequence to see what is now possible. The fabric simulation for her dress while dancing is so incredible.
And given all the magic in it it's so highly unimaginative with it.
Isabella's lament was the best part of the movie (filled with emotion, meaning and imagination), but it's literally just a "meaningless stepping stone to discover Bruno" within the movie.
Just take a look at the UK top 10, three Encanto songs with "We don't talk about Bruno" at number one for last three weeks:
https://www.officialcharts.com/charts/uk-top-40-singles-char...
Literal definition of a hit.
Somewhere I read that Disney had to make submissions to the Academy Awards before finishing screenings of Encanto and weren't sure which song to submit (if they submit multiple songs it risks splitting the vote), so they submitted "Dos Oruguitas" and haven't had it nominated. Clearly picked the wrong song, should have gone with "We don't talk about Bruno", would have had a very good chance of getting an Oscar.
As a fun fact, every single voice actor is famous in Colombia because of their singing, for example Maribel is the leader of a popular girl band. The Spanish dub is incredible, one of the few movies I would recommend seeing in Spanish instead of English if you are bilingual.
Opinions of Encanto aside, I think it's fair to say "We don't talk about Bruno" is a legitimate earworm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm)
But we are talking about a children movie.
Frozen, Up, and many others accomplish it well. I personally found Encanto completely boring.
Of course my daughter is watching it over and over, and the songs are playing constantly. The music is fine, I'm a Lin-Manuel Miranda fan but I don't think this is his best work.
But the movie?!? There's no growth in any character, even the catharsis with the grandmother is "look how much I suffered, have sympathy that I ended up a tyrant". It's just eye/ear candy, fine for kids.
I genuinely don't get it, there are tons of relatively recent Pixar and Disney movies that I think are just better in all respects.
IMHO it is an eye candy for everyone, not only kids. I mean there is a reason why romantic comedies just work telling the same kind of stories all over again with different actors.
> I mean there is a reason why romantic comedies just work telling the same kind of stories all over again with different actors.
As someone who loves romantic comedies, I don't think of them as the "same kinds of stories" any more than I think of my ex-girlfriends as the same experience even though they were all romantic relationships that ended.
Would you think of a travel documentary to Brazil and one to Spain to be the same because they are both travel docs with similar structures? Probably not, because the details of the place itself are what the doc is about and those differ. With romantic movies, it's about the details of the character's individual psychologies that make the movie.
1. Protagonist has problem and character flaw.
2. Tries to solve problem without fixing character flaw.
3. Solution blows up.
4. With help from friend, protagonist realizes flaw and fixes it.
5. Now able to solve problem.
But with Encanto, I really disliked how the plot undermined its own theme. The movie sets up an important moral statement that Mirabel doesn't need to be magically special to be valuable and valued. She can have worth because of who she is as a person. Then it throws that out at the climax by giving her some magic anyway because fuck it.
Well, I thought Encanto had good music and animation at the same time that the writing and plotting was a train wreck, and this is one of the best examples why.
Luisa sings a song about how she's stressed by all the responsibilities she has. Except that she doesn't have any responsibilities - they are not depicted before or after her song. She's not a leader and no one follows her. She doesn't run anything in the family or in the village. All she ever does is lift things and put them down at the direction of someone else. Her song makes no sense and her character has no arc.
The movie takes this same approach to the much more plot-central relationship between Mirabel and Isabela - we're told that they hate each other, and then they have to make up, so there's a song that accomplishes that by hand-waving. This level of writing makes the song worse so that the movie can also be worse.
The sister that can hear everything is especially bad for the internal consistency of the story. Perhaps with a different personality it could have been pulled off, but it made no sense that she couldn't contain her excitement over the Bruno vision gossip, then later on casually mentions she always knew Bruno was living in the walls of the house.
There is a home run in "how the powers would work in the setting" (though not the story - neither character matters to that) in the character of Felix. He's Pepa's husband, and a person with her "powers" (inadvertent influence over the weather) would, in reality, end up with a husband exactly like him. He sees the positive side of everything. If there is no positive side, he talks about something else that is positive. He never, ever contradicts her. This is exactly what the local countryside needs!
But this only shows up in one verse of "We Don't Talk About Bruno". And I'm surprised it happened at all - Pepa and Felix are so insignificant within the movie that nobody needed to think about either of them one way or the other.
Strong disagree on all three. IMO this group of songs are some of the most memorable Disney animation tunes since Frozen, and maybe even since the mid-90s— don't ask me, look at how they're exploding all over Tiktok right now. For characters, I felt the movie does a pretty decent job of giving depth and personality to most members of a really large ensemble cast, particularly those closest to Mirabel. And even those with a lighter presence (Dolores, Camilo) still get their little moments that endeared them to me.
And as to the story, it's unique within the Disney canon in a number of ways; chief among them is that it doesn't have a conventional villain. Yes there is a character who is the "main" problem, but the real antagonist is the family dynamics and the grandmother's trauma. These are issues that are super relatable for a lot of people/families, much moreso than the over-the-topness of a clearly antagonistic and unredeemable character like Mother Gothel (Tangled) or Prince Hans (Frozen). The comparison is even more stark if you go back further to classic villains like Scar, Gaston, or Ursula.
Isabella's song ("What Else Can I Do") is pretty much the opposite of a lament and takes place after Mirabel has found Bruno. I don't know what "lament" you could be talking about, maybe "Waiting On a Miracle" which is Mirabel's classic Disney "I Want" song, in the same vein as "Part of Your World" or "Let It Go".
My kids have basically listened to the soundtrack on repeat for two months now and I assure you the songs are anything but "forgettable".
And for weeks, sung every song, played along with it on the piano while the instrumental versions play, etc.
I wonder what it would be like to work on something that takes 5 years to make, the longest I have ever worked on 1.0 apps (since the 80s when I started) is 14-16 months. Just coordinating thousands of people for 5 years is mind boggling.
In software, automotive projects can come quite close to this. Building a modern high-end headunit ECU with software can take a couple of years, 100-150 dev teams, 2k engineers and coordinating with many other groups/departments around it.
frozen moana frozen 2 encanto
during that time there were also traditional "villain" types: big hero 6 zootopia ralph breaks the internet raya and the last drago
agree or disagree, it's an interesting read: https://screenrant.com/encanto-movie-villain-disney-pixar-co...
Frozen 2 has a villain -- King Runeard
Moana has a villain -- Te Kā
Really only Encanto doesn't.
But yes no villain for a child to anchor too.
hand and runeard were essentially "living" props and if anyone one moana was a villain, it was maui. again, i see your point, but i think the point of the article and how i parsed it was that the pure good v evil villain motif has gotten significantly more nuanced recently.
> and te ka was actually a good being who acted negatively because of maui's actions.
Darth Vader is a good being who acts negatively because of the Emperor's actions, but he's still the villain. Just because the villain is redeemed doesn't make them not the villain.
Yes, they've moved away from the idea of establishing the villain in the first act and defeating them in the third, but that's just better storytelling, not removing the villain. Just ask a child who the "bad guy" is in each movie and they will tell you without hesitation. It's only more subtle to you because you're an adult.
Elsa is treated more like the primary antagonist (Anna is the protagonist.) Elsa is redeemed rather than defeated, but that's more a matter of ending than overall structural role.
> Really only Encanto doesn't.
Sure it does (at least, it has an antagonist responsible for the crisis that the story addresses and resolves.) Their identity is even announced at the climax of the film, just in case the viewer hasn't recognized it. (Like Frozen, and Moana—whether, in the latter case, you consider Te Kā or Maui the ultimate antagonist—the antagonist is redeemed and reconciled with the protagonist and the broader community rather than defeated.)
Neither, come to think of it was Frozen; both are redemptive—where the antagonist is reformed—rather than irreconcilable—where the antagonist is defeated— intrafamilial conflicts, not internal conflicts.
This is really an interesting callout, because I also found it interesting that there is no "bad guy" for kids to anchor on, but yet seems to have no problem with it.
<spoiler>
I saw the villain as the grandmother's pride.
Organic is the best way I can put it. At least for software.
The largest project I've been on started in 1998 with a software team of 3 people (me and two others) and shipped V1.0 in 2003 with a team that varied in size over the years. Max was probably about 10 or 15 people. Total team size including electrical, mechanical, manufacturing, systems, technical writers, field service, training and QA was probably 70+.
It's like watching a child or a plant grow: you have this tiny kernel of functionality where you just need something to get started, not knowing how it's going to change and then guiding it in the right direction, growing all the time, as you figure out how to get where you need to go. Pruning the dead branches and rotten fruit and fertilizing it where it's growing right. Then finally it's good enough to take to market. Then ship two major updates each year for 10 years.
It's fun in its own way, but I prefer shorter projects. I get bored easily.
The active departments and the size scale a lot along those 5 years. The first few are usually a very small group of people. The weirdest part is that if you're targeting 5 year olds, they are just being born when you start the project.
I remember watching the making-of videos for the Lion King when I was little and being blown away that the artists went and watched actual lions and live-sketched them to try and capture the physical motions and emotions of the animal.
These kinds of steps are obvious to an adult but as a little kid it really helped me understand that movies like that are made through more or less obvious steps (want to draw a lion well? go look at a lion!) vs. magically coming into being.
I think I know what you mean. As a kid I sometimes felt really intimidated and dispirited by things that appeared to be overwhelmingly hard or seemed to require rare talent to accomplish. Kind adults breaking down how it's done and how many people or what level of preparation it takes made a huge difference then. Understanding how an average person in the normal range of abilities can do it, and that an accomplished professional has worked hard but is only "cooking with water", too.
An example: As a young kid I took guitar lessons. I was struggling with keeping time, I was very frustrated and I concluded I'm just no good at this and gave up. Later on I told this story to a professional orchestra musician and he told me that keeping time is simply hard for humans, and he still has to practice it every day and will practice for the rest of his career. It's just something he accepts as a part of what he likes to do. This completely reset my expectations of what playing music should be like, and allowed me to work on the skill and progress further.
Unfortunately I think a lot of professionals try to shroud what they do in a certain level of mystery instead, because they enjoy being looked up to and consider it the reward for their toils and hardships. Programmers are frequently guilty of this - when non-IT people naively assume every programmer is a math wizard and programmers do nothing to correct this idea, for example. I tell people that if you wake up in the morning and sketch out the steps of an algorithm for how you get from there to your cup of morning coffee, you're essentially doing what programmers do. You could do it too if you choose to dedicate the time. It's fun to see how this sometimes makes people's level of genuine interest bloom.
The 3D animated film Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) has a refreshing 3D/2D hybrid visual look that breaks away from the 3D aesthetic common across the industry. I suspect in the future we'll see more animated films with a 2D aesthetic but created with 3D software.
Aside: Disney produced lots of behind-the-scenes for their 2D animated films in the 50s and 60s. Here's one on the MultiPlane Camera - a camera setup that gave 2D animation greater depth:
Walt Disney's MultiPlane Camera (1957): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHTlUGN1zw
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_Animation:_The_Illusi...
Disney's last was The Princess and The Frog (which is a very good one that predates the story-in-a-box Pixar plots), which of course was still partially made in the same animation software used by others at the time.
If Disney made another traditional animation movie I suspect it would be a lot like spiderverse: mostly an aesthetic change to the existing process.
The Arcane series has that look too and it's gorgeous.
It's really interesting and I recommend it (but also make sure you watch Frozen 2 before you watch it if you aren't already familiar because it's more interesting if you can recall the scenes they are talking about).
https://www.disneyplus.com/series/into-the-unknown-making-fr...
It would be like when Doom was open sourced (I pick Doom because it's one of the first major video games that I can remember being open sourced, and the creative results have been vast)
I'd like to see Toy Story 1 re-rendered using the Toy Story 4 models (assuming Disney also made those available). Imagine all the technical challenges you'd face to do that: Write code to convert the models, sets, skeletons, animations. Upscale/create new textures, etc.
One thing I hear Netflix is doing right now is focusing on making better studio tools so that creatives prefer to work for Netflix because they have better tools.
If you had wanted to sabotage our process, the set of shelves that held all the scene folders would have been a great place to go. Every scene lived there when it wasn't being worked on by someone.
If you want a glimpse at the modern process for 2D animation, have a look at Toon Boom's suite of software. https://www.toonboom.com - not everyone uses it but it's pretty widespread.
Though realistically? I'm not in the industry any more but the bits I see of the process from my friends who are directors lead me to believe that it's still not uncommon to have a checklist that lives on a wall in the director's office, tracking the journey of every scene from storyboard to finished shot.
> There are 24 frames in one second of animation.
Why don't they target 60fps now?
2) 60fps looks uncanny to viewers. we’re culturally accustomed to associating 24fps with feature films
That's maybe a bit native, but for an animated movie, I think that the intermediate frames could be computed automatically, for a small additional cost.
I don't dispute that there might be a bit more work (I guess some frames might need to be adjusted manually), but I am not convinced that it is that much expensive to do 60fps rather of 24fps.
And then you have films like Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse where they did a mix of 24fps and 12fps for a more punchy and cartoony effect. In the end it’s not about realism but emotion and artistic representation
For real things like sports and esports, more FPS is used because instead of hiding things you want to show things.
But for purely animated films I don't think this is the case; there's no makeup or SFX to hide. The bigger issue would be budget I think, and tradition.
Your question is very analogous to asking “Van Gogh’s work is great and all but it needs more (spatial) detail. I can’t believe he’s still using those broad brushes when now days you can buy fine brushes. His work would have much more detail and would look more realistic!”
Once you seriously ponder how naive such a statement is, you’ll understand why filmmakers stick with 24fps. It’s not reality. It’s not what our eyes see. Just like an impressionistic painting is not what our eyes see. And that’s a good thing.
24fps wasn’t chosen by animators, and wasn’t decided on for it’s Impressionism, right? If you want Impressionism, 1fps is better than 24, no? Disney used to animate on 1s, 2s, 3s for both economy and style reasons, and no longer do. Live action films are also 24fps, because all films are 24 by default, and many people complain about live action in higher frame rates. Suggesting that Disney consciously chose 24 for it’s impressionism seems revisionist and inaccurate.
Kids watching modern TVs, however, don’t seem as bothered by 60fps video, because they’re much more used to it.
BTW I used to prefer 24 fps categorically, back when I worked in film. Personally, 60fps looks weird to me, but it’s becoming better. I’ve started really disliking 24fps when there are horizontal pans, that kind of shot is now unwatchable for me, it’s awful. I don’t know why it used to seem tolerable.
And animation is a fuckton of work. Anything you can do to not have to do a new drawing for every single frame is welcomed, unless you are Richard Williams endlessly iterating on The Thief And The Cobbler and sneaking around your studio at night slipping extra drawings into your animators' shots to put everything on ones, regardless of whether or not it works best for the shot. If you can make a computer inbetween it for you then it's easier to fuck around with much higher framerates than is sustainable with an all-human production, but there's still gonna be times when you just want to hold the heck out of an image to make damn sure it reads.
(hell, when I was doing stuff in Flash, we regularly made a practice of taking the ultra-smooth tweens it made and putting it back on twos, because it just Looked Weird and we preferred to save going on ones for fast motion with a semi-hand-crafted smear.)
> we regularly made a practice of taking the ultra-smooth tweens it made a putting it back on twos
There’s something interesting here, and maybe this does relate to @matt-attack’s point. In your case, I wonder if too smooth is a real thing, an actual animation quality problem with too much mushy motion and not enough detail. Like crappy CG has this problem a lot, it’s too smooth, which makes it ugly / fake looking. Reducing it to twos ironically does help sometimes because it hides the lack of motion detail, but it also helps
I do not have any studies to point to but my experience is also that a stylized cartoon drawing takes more time for the viewer's brain to process. There's fewer cues for the brain to grab, and the abstracted shapes don't help either. Going slower gives the brain more time to register what the hell's going on.
Originally the frame rate choice was largely from technical and budgetary considerations but now that the medium's a hundred years old and has had waves of inspiration and influence cross the entire world multiple times, frame rate is definitely something an animator can make deliberate aesthetic choices about. Budget's still a concern though!
1: the Buzzfeed article about John K is 100% true, I was a confused kid working under him during the time it covers. He's a horrible person who did some work that influenced a significant chunk of a generation.
It’d be more accurate to describe it as a Happy Accident. I might even argue that had the founders not been concerned with film stock costs and that 60fps became the de facto standard, I’d wager film as a medium would not have been as successful. And at some point creatives would have discovered the eerie otherworldly, impressionistic feeling if slightly reduced capture rates.
I disagree with tue contention that “we’re just used to 24”. To reran my analogy, it’s like all those painters who, after photography because widespread as a means of reproducing portraits, began to experiment with forms beyond simply realism. I’m certain that it just struck them immediately as a compelling format. Honestly can you imagine witnessing the first impressionistic painting after a lifetime of consuming only realism? I think it’s impact would be significant.
Being used to realism wouldn’t change that.
Like many people, I experience some negative reaction to high frames; watching LOTR in 48fps was like watching BBC. But I’m just not convinced that this is something true or fundamental about frame rates, it does feel like the preference might be learned.
And like I said, there seems to be real evidence for this learned association that your argument is completely ignoring. People growing up now who’ve watched 60fps TV and YouTube a lot don’t seem to have the same reaction. How do Brits feel about high frame rates? I’m going to ask a few, I’m not sure I ever have, and it might be informative here. Personally, the strangeness of 60fps has been waning over time, and that seems to support the idea that I was biased to 24 by years of moving watching.
The reason viewers prefer 24 FPS is that film is traditionally 24 FPS and video is 30 FPS (60 half-frame fields per second in NTSC). That has trained a generation of viewers to associate higher framerates with "cheap". The aesthetic carries an association that is counter to its actual quality.
Sort of like how people prefer "rustic" furniture because that implies "handmade" which implies "expensive" even though roughly-made things can often be mass produced more cheaply.
If it wasn't for the historical quirk that video was based on halving the AC rate which ended up being a few FPS faster than film, we'd all prefer higher framerates.
I suspect that thanks to the rise of gaming, that association will fade and eventually we will use higher framerates for movies. You already see trends in that direction: YouTube will stream 60 FPS because a lot of what people are watching on YouTube is gaming. But because of that, people get used to it, and I now see more non-gaming videos at 60 FPS too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sweatbox
https://archive.org/details/SweatboxDocumentaryUneditedVersi...
With the GPU and ML revolution, this entire industry is ripe for automation and disruption. Everything from scripting, camera work, location scouting, set dec, editing, and effects. 2D animation, 3D animation, and live action.
In the future, kids will be making their own Star Wars films in their basement over the weekend. This will put a big dent into IP as well.
(I'm working on this.)
could AI help reduce the costs in the future ? imagine making a movie in a short time and also x0.1-0.001% costs
here's a good read too: http://web.archive.org/web/20201121143218/https://arr.am/202...
Naive calculation says that princess and the frog (disneys last 2D) was 100mill for 97 minutes, while Up (released same year) was 175mill for 96 minutes.
I don’t think either movie had particularly bigger stars than the other, so i think the overall budget ratio gives an okay idea of how far your estimate is off for cinema animation.
This was true for 2d in the past, but Princess and the Frog was made in more or less off the shelf 2d animation software.
The biggest challenge to doing 2d though is finding the talent and the justification. Take a look at what most art school are offering as far as animation goes...
> The biggest challenge to doing 2d though is finding the talent and the justification.
I disagree. There is a lot of great 2D cinema animation coming out of the East. It’s not just Ghibli that makes beautiful, well-told cartoons.
Also regarding 2d cinema animation, I'm speaking through a very American lens (considering the link points to Disney) so take what I say with a grain of salt.
But could be a "grass is always greener" thing.
EDIT: I don't think people presume Disney to be immune, more like the presumption is probably "they are on our side"
Disney is like any other BigCo. They have a million stakeholders pulling things a million different ways and they need to chart a course.
Finding Nemo could have been a hilarious comedy or it could have been a drama that criticizes modern society (depending on which way you want to spin it). Replace the clownfish with disabled vets. Replace the turtles with some hippies in a bus. Replace Dory with a stripper. Replace the sharks with a biker gang. Replace the whale with a rent-seeking small town police department. Replace the dentist's boat with a greyhound bus across the country. Etc, etc.
But they didn't, they chose to stick a kid's movie with what is a fairly heavy adult plot line at its core (and they distanced it even further by using animals). Why? That decision making process is its own story.
Not that I agree with certain Disney choices, but they are for-profit just like everybody else and if one doesn't like their production, voting with wallet is as usually the best course of action.
What are you trying to say exactly? We also don't know why Chopin and Bach wrote their music the way they did. Why Picasso, Vincent, Da Vinci and others chose the motives they did, and painted the exact way they did. Are you bothered by that too?
The answer you're looking for is "artistic freedoms", but I get the feeling you're looking for "ulterior motives" instead.
State sponsored movies in dictatorships are different because viewers have no other choices but to view what’s made by the government and has no goal of making a profit.
- Obsession with royalty
- Obsession with absolute power
- Excuses for exceptionalism
- Binary morals (good / evil)
You might see it as simple entertainment, but seeing there is nothing to learn about in Disney stories, any worldview carried over to the real world _is_ propaganda.
The writers have ideas for characters and stories, they share them with each other, they refine them, change them a lot, and eventually try to get to a point where it's a cohesive story.
That's it -- that's the process. And if you ever get to work in an animation studio, you'll see just how much the story changes from the first pitch to the final product.
In the case of movies, motives are purely to maximise the appreciation by the broadest audience.
It's not good or evil, it's just whatever the people want to watch.
Disney has a history of promoting socially conscious narratives and trying to promote peace and harmony. It's kitsch, but look at the message of 'It's a small world'. This is what Disney has always been about, from promoting animal welfare and an appreciation of the natural world, to telling stories of people from a variety of races and cultures and focusing on what should unite us.
The other thing that Disney is (and has always been) about, is pushing the boundaries of the visual arts. You might not see Disney films as art, but one goal of Disney from the very earliest days has been to change your mind.