The 20 Most Underrated Disney Movies You Need To See

To some degree, "underrated Disney movie" is an oxymoron; no other movie studio in history has been so successful at positioning virtually all of its production into the epicenter of mainstream visibility. But there are still those Disney films that haven't been given as much recognition as they deserve, whether as a result of critical mistreatment, audience rejection, or mere underestimation.

This list ranks the 20 most underrated Disney movies ever based on a combination of criteria: Box office success, critical reception, cultural footprint, mainstream popularity. To be considered "underrated," movies listed here must have a lower reputation than they would merit — whether that means they're good and considered bad, great and considered OK, or masterpieces and considered just good. The bigger the discrepancy, the higher it is on the ranking, all the way up to a #1 pick that should be held as one of the studio's totemic masterpieces, yet remains merely well-liked.

Adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" have been a Hollywood fixture since the 1910s. Unique spins on the quintessential pirate story have ranged from casting a woman as Jim Hawkins, to casting Orson Welles as Long John Silver, to casting the Muppets in several major roles. There have even been multiple animated adaptations, and a 1950 adaptation that made history as Disney's first fully live-action fiction feature. But no version yet has been quite as unique as "Treasure Planet."

The writer-director duo of Ron Clements and John Musker had been pitching a sci-fi "Treasure Island" to Disney since the mid-'80s, giving it a complicated history before becoming a box office flop. In the end, the booming CGI tech of the early 2000s allowed them to make "Treasure Planet" the cel-animated Disney film with the most complex — and most expensive — visuals yet. Although "Treasure Planet" ultimately faced box office woes that tainted its reputation for years, it remains one of Disney's most unique, passionate, and grandiose romps — a go-for-broke space adventure that's only not as underrated as the next films on this list because an entire generation has since adopted it as a favorite.

Of all the Disney animated films released in the final years of Walt Disney's tenure as ship captain, "The Sword in the Stone" is the one to have fallen through the cracks most conspicuously. More modest, pared-down, and comedic in tone than era favorites like "Sleeping Beauty," "One Hundred and One Dalmatians," and "The Jungle Book," this charming reimagining of the Arthur Pendragon mythos has also had its cultural stature impaired by its episodic nature; to a greater degree than any non-anthology Disney classic, it feels very much like a series of individual mini-stories strung together.

It's a shame, because the Wolfgang Reitherman-directed film is actually among Disney's most creative and endearing ever. The student-tutor dynamic between Arthur and Merlin is tremendously entertaining, and then there's the duel between Merlin and Madam Mim — arguably the most impressive piece of animation in Disney's entire Walt era. While the film's animated nature gives it automatic canonical status, it's somehow even more under-discussed and underestimated than a live-action classic like "The Parent Trap."

Jon Turteltaub's "Cool Runnings" is a roundly well-liked film, especially among the '80s and '90s kids who grew up with it. We think it's also one of the best sports movies ever made. But it rarely ever seems to get cited in discussions of the best live-action Disney films, which just doesn't track. What more could you want out of a Disney movie than this?

Like many of the greatest family-friendly American films, "Cool Runnings" is an inspirational sports tale drawn from real life. But several elements set it apart in that beloved yet — let's be honest — endemically formulaic genre: the comedic slant, the focus on process and procedure, the camaraderie and charisma of the main ensemble, the irresistibly boppy soundtrack. Following the story of how Jamaica formed a national bobsled team and beat the odds to get into the 1988 Winter Olympics, the film takes relatively few historical liberties and hits every mark it possibly could, offering up a culturally specific crowd-pleaser that should be taken a lot more seriously as the perfect feat of four-quadrant entertainment that it is.

It's easy to think about specific stretches of the Disney animated canon when considering the studio's most underrated films — the post-Walt slump, the "dark age" of the '80s, the inconsistent experimental period of the late '90s and early 2000s. Indeed, this list features three movies from that last era alone. But even the most inveterate Disney flop rehabilitators tend to completely ignore the "package film" age that the studio was all but forced into in the '40s, following early financial troubles and the United States' entry into World War II.

At least one Disney anthology film, however, truly deserves to be cited among the studio's high marks, and that's 1949's "The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad." Although the two medium-length segments are basically nothing alike — the first is an adorable adaptation of Kenneth Grahame's "The Wind in the Willows" starring an incorrigible talking toad, while the second is a genuinely terrifying rendition of Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow" with the darkest ending in all Disney history. They're both must-sees in their own way, and ultimately, their tonal mismatch makes for the most interesting Disney bundle of the '40s — two great, sturdy cartoons sewn together into a jolting whole for no reason other than production expediency.

Here is where clarification about the meaning of "underrated" becomes increasingly necessary: 2011's "Winnie the Pooh" was near-universally acclaimed by critics, but it's still all but forgotten in discussions of the best Disney animated films of the 21st century. Maybe it's because of its ultra-short length (just 63 minutes, and it was still released in theaters), maybe audiences default to thinking of Pooh and company as toddler business, maybe traditional animation is out of fashion, maybe Disney just didn't market it well. But the fact is, "Winnie the Pooh" underperformed at the box office, and it didn't spark the hand-drawn animation revival it by all accounts should have.

Really, in a just world, this movie would have been a phenomenon. Even with just over an hour to present their vision, directors Stephen Anderson and Don Hall manage to concoct one of the most carefully measured, visually textured, and emotionally affecting films in the studio's history. The plot follows the usual Winnie the Pooh template, plopping us right into Christopher Robin's imagination as Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Eyeore, and the rest of the Hundred Acre Wood gang go on a whimsical adventure to find Eyeore's missing tail. But as usual in the franchise, what matters is the acute sense of childhood nostalgia — the evocation of an emotional reality where small things feel big, big things feel manageable, and everything feels special.

"Mary Poppins" gets all the fame, but "Bedknobs and Broomsticks is an equally essential Robert Stevenson musical romp-slash-magical caretaker adventure-slash-star vehicle for a legendary British actress. The incomparable Angela Lansbury stars as Miss Eglantine Price, a Dorset woman who agrees to take in three orphan children evacuated from London during the Blitz. The kids soon find out that Miss Price is training via correspondence to become a witch and fight Nazis, but, before she can complete her education, her school closes — prompting the quartet to embark on a search for Miss Price's final spell using her transporting bed.

The ingenuous literality of the central conceit — a bed that can travel anywhere in the world, as though whisking occupants away on real-life daydreams — is merely the starting point for a fantasy adventure story with all the hallmarks of a classic, from great music to endearing VFX to scrumptious costumes, to say nothing of what it adds to the elusive persona of Lansbury. It's revoltingly little-known among the Disney live-action canon, but stands easily among its finest entries.

In his legendary four-decade career, Richard Fleischer directed exactly one film for Disney, and "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" is infused with the same grandeur, intensity, and world-building panache of all his best work. Yet it remains curiously underseen even by Disney fans, many of whom seem to make light of the fact that the studio was responsible for one of the great Technicolor sci-fi adventures.

If you consider yourself a fan of the genre and the blockbuster films of that era, you absolutely owe it to yourself to watch "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea." Shot with expansive anamorphic lenses, the film is among the great visual spectacles that cinema has given us, and its take on the classic Jules Verne maritime tale is surprisingly pungent and faithful to the novel's darker themes. And that's not even getting into James Mason's gloriously hard-boiled performance as Captain Nemo, which makes for a spectacle of its own.

The "dark age" into which Disney Animation plunged in the '70s and '80s before being revitalized by "The Little Mermaid" in 1989 gave us its fair share of hidden gems, from the low-key charm of "Robin Hood" to the emotional intensity of "The Fox and the Hound" to the zaniness of "Oliver & Company." But if there's one great film from that period that truly deserves to transcend the reputation of "minor Disney," it's "The Great Mouse Detective."

Adapted from Eve Titus and Paul Galdone's "Basil of Baker Street" book series, the film is essentially a "Sherlock Holmes" reimagining for kids, set amid London's varied population of mice and rats. It moves like a sleek, efficient procedural, full of urban cool and charismatic minor characters, with animation and designs that manage to be consistently impressive without straining for showiness. And the duel between Barrie Ingham's Basil and Vincent Price's Professor Ratigan is one for the ages — voice acting at its full-bodied best.

The original "Fantasia" was once underrated — for decades, its disastrous commercial performance was a thorn in the side of Walt Disney himself, and it wasn't until the "box office bomb" stigma wore off that "Fantasia" could be properly and widely appreciated as the artistic revolution that it was. 59 years later, "Fantasia 2000" turned out to be a similar box office disappointment and the final gasp of the Disney renaissance, which is why it's been pushed into the footnotes of Disney Animation history. But it really shouldn't be so, not when the film is nearly as stunning an artistic achievement as the 1940 original.

Aside from a draggy "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" adaptation, every single segment in "Fantasia 2000" is an absolute winner, marrying animation to music in ways ranging from haunting to hilarious to mind-blowing to tear-jerking, always on the cutting edge of expressionism in the medium. The "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Firebird Suite" sections, in particular, are self-evident high points in Disney history. At its best, it's the kind of movie that leaves you in awe at the sheer, overwhelming power of cinema.

And to think that the funniest, most original, most gloriously anarchic Disney movie of all time was nearly a conventional Renaissance-era epic musical. The production troubles of "The Emperor's New Groove" are well-documented, complete with a rare behind-the-scenes documentary called "The Sweatbox," and they even eclipsed the movie itself to some extent at the time of its original theatrical release. 

As the years have revealed, however, the Mark Dindal film is so much more special in its final form than a conventional Disney film would have been. All that's left now is for the world to acknowledge that "The Emperor's New Groove" isn't just a fun little curiosity in Disney's tier of also-rans. It's a top 5 Disney movie at minimum.

The story of the humbling of Emperor Kuzco after being turned into a llama by his evil scientist former advisor (who accidentally fed him extract of llama instead of poison), "Emperor" is essentially a sequence of increasingly zany, clever, and perfectly-timed gags, tied together by a farcical fantasy plot mostly untethered from the rules of logic. Unspeakably hilarious and surprising even after tens of viewings, featuring career-best performances from Eartha Kitt, Patrick Warburton, John Goodman, and David Spade alike, it's simply an all-time great animated film. Disney should consider itself lucky to call it its own.