Once Upon a Studio (2023) Movie Review

 Hey everyone, how's it going? Happy Friday! I'm back for my first movie review of the year where I will be briefly talking about the animated/live-action short that Disney put out to celebrate its 100th anniversary last year, Once Upon a Studio. There won't much to talk about, and there will be spoilers, so this'll be a short review. Let's get into it!

I've been a fan of Disney animation since the day I was born. Or, at least since the day I was old enough to watch movies on VHS with things like Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree and Disney Sing-Along Songs: The Bare Necessities. So when I found out this short had been released, I immediately put it on to watch on Disney+. That was a couple of months ago now. As I mentioned in a previous post, Disney uploaded the short to the official Walt Disney Animation Studios YouTube channel a few weeks ago, and that's where I rewatched it for this review. The story is that all of the characters from the animated Disney movies meet together at the Walt Disney Animation Studios for the 100th year group picture. And when I say all of the Disney animated characters, I mean ALL of them.

Some of the characters who appear in this short haven't been seen since their original movie came out twenty, thirty, or even forty, years ago. Others are ones from the most recent films such as Encanto, Wish, and Strange World. And then we have all of the characters we love from the classics we grew up with whether you're four years old or 100 years old. There's a total of 543 characters in this short. Because this is a celebration of Walt Disney Animation Studios, known as Walt Disney Feature Animation in the '90s, there aren't any Pixar characters in this short. However, when needed they use archive voice recordings from the movies themselves for the characters they didn't want to recast like the Genie from Aladdin. For the rest they brought back as many of the original voice actors as they could. Which was cool.

The short blends traditional 2-D cel animation, 3-D CG animation, and live action similar to how movies like Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Pete's Dragon, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit blended animation and live action together. Which was awesome to see.

Overall, this was a fun little short. If you're a fan of Disney, or spent your childhood watching Disney movies, I recommend checking out this short. It's fun, nostalgic (in a good way), and neat way to see the evolution of Disney Animation over the last 100 years. 

Alright my friends, that's it for me for this week, but I'll be back next week with more posts and reviews. So until then, have a great weekend and I will talk to you all soon. Take care.