[23] Working in secret while the rest of the staff finished the remaining Oswalds on contract, Disney and his head animator Ub Iwerks led a small handful of loyal staffers in producing cartoons starring a new character named Mickey Mouse.

[41] With well-developed characters and an interesting story, the 1933 Technicolor Silly Symphony cartoon Three Little Pigs became a major box office and pop culture success,[34][42] with its theme song "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?"

[55] Fantasia, an experimental film produced to an accompanying orchestral arrangement conducted by Leopold Stokowski, was released in November 1940 by Disney itself in a series of limited-seating roadshow engagements.

[67] Following the United States' entry into World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the studio housed over 500 U.S. Army soldiers who were responsible for protecting nearby aircraft factories from enemy bombers.

In addition, an ambitious new project, an adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale "Sleeping Beauty" set to Tchaikovsky's classic score, was begun but took much of the rest of the decade to complete.

At $6 million,[82] it was Disney's most expensive film to date, produced in a heavily stylised art style devised by artist Eyvind Earle[82] and presented in large-format Super Technirama 70 with six-track stereophonic sound.

[102] The production of The Rescuers signaled the beginning of a changing of the guard process in the personnel at the Disney animation studio,[99] as veterans such as Milt Kahl and Les Clark retired; they were gradually replaced by new talents such as Don Bluth, Ron Clements, John Musker and Glen Keane.

The film was considered a financial success by the studio, and development continued on The Black Cauldron, a long-gestating adaptation of the Chronicles of Prydain series of novels by Lloyd Alexander[103] produced in Super Technirama 70.

Besides Keane, Musker and Clements, this new group of artists included other promising animators such as Andreas Deja, Mike Gabriel, John Lasseter, Brad Bird and Tim Burton.

[103] Later the same year, however, Universal Pictures and Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment released Don Bluth's An American Tail, which outgrossed The Great Mouse Detective at the box office and became the highest-grossing first-issue animated film to that point.

[103] The first of the releases on the accelerated production schedule was Oliver & Company (1988), which featured an all-star cast including Billy Joel and Bette Midler and an emphasis on a modern pop soundtrack.

Directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, who had been co-directors on The Great Mouse Detective, The Little Mermaid earned $84 million at the North American box office, a record for the studio.

[100] Accompanied in theaters by the Mickey Mouse featurette The Prince and the Pauper, The Rescuers Down Under (1990) was Disney's first animated feature sequel and the studio's first film to be fully colored and composited via computer using the CAPS/ink-and-paint system.

[134] The successes of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast established the template for future Disney releases during the 1990s: a musical-comedy format with Broadway-styled songs and tentpole action sequences, buoyed by cross-promotional marketing and merchandising, all carefully designed to pull audiences of all ages and types into theatres.

[134] In addition to John Musker, Ron Clements, Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale, the new guard of Disney artists creating these films included story artists/directors Roger Allers, Rob Minkoff, Chris Sanders and Brenda Chapman, and lead animators Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, Eric Goldberg, Nik Ranieri, Will Finn and many others.

[134] Aladdin, released in November 1992, continued the upward trend in Disney's animation success, earning $504 million worldwide at the box office,[135] and two more Oscars for Best Song and Best Score.

An all-animal story set in Africa, The Lion King featured an all-star voice cast which included James Earl Jones, Matthew Broderick and Jeremy Irons, with songs written by Tim Rice and pop star Elton John.

A Dinosaur's Story (1993), Thumbelina (1994), The Swan Princess (1994), A Troll in Central Park (1994), The Pebble and the Penguin (1995), Cats Don't Dance (1997), Anastasia (1997), Quest for Camelot (1998), and The King and I (1999).

[166] Fantasia 2000, a sequel to the 1940 film that had been a pet project of Roy E. Disney's since 1990,[167][168] premiered on December 17, 1999, at Carnegie Hall in New York City as part of a concert tour that also visited London, Paris, Tokyo and Pasadena, California.

He described its history since the early 1990s as "dotted by a slew of expensive failures" like Hercules and Chicken Little; the "modest successes" like Mulan and Lilo & Stitch were still critically and commercially unsuccessful compared to the earlier films of the Disney Renaissance.

[217] To maintain the separation of Walt Disney Feature Animation and Pixar despite their now common ownership and management, Catmull and Lasseter "drew a hard line" that each studio was solely responsible for its own projects and would not be allowed to borrow personnel from or lend tasks out to the other.

"[218][219] Catmull and Lasseter also brought to Disney Feature Animation the Pixar model of a "filmmaker-driven studio" as opposed to an "executive-driven studio"; they abolished Disney's prior system of requiring directors to respond to "mandatory" notes from development executives ranking above the producers in favor of a system roughly analogous to peer review, in which non-mandatory notes come primarily from fellow producers, directors and writers.

[214][220][221] Most of the layers of "gatekeepers" (midlevel executives) were stripped away, and Lasseter established a routine of personally meeting weekly with filmmakers on all projects in the last year of production and delivering feedback on the spot.

[215][235][236][237] In 2014, former Disney animator Tom Sito compared the box office performance of The Princess and the Frog to that of The Great Mouse Detective (1986), which was a step-up from the theatrical run of the 1985 film The Black Cauldron.

[239] After The Princess and the Frog, the studio released Tangled, a musical CGI adaptation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale "Rapunzel" with songs by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater.

In active development since 2002 under Glen Keane,[200] Tangled, directed by Byron Howard and Nathan Greno, was released in 2010 and became a significant critical and commercial success[240][241] and was nominated for several accolades.

[249][250] Directed by John Kahrs, Paperman utilized new software developed in-house at the studio called Meander, which merges hand-drawn and computer animation techniques within the same character to create a unique "hybrid".

[252] Later that same year, in November, Frozen, a CGI musical film inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale "The Snow Queen", was released to widespread acclaim and became a blockbuster hit.

Directed by Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee with songs by the Broadway team of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez,[253] it was the first Disney animated film to earn over $1 billion in worldwide box office revenue.

The 12,000-square-foot ARL is home to over 64 million items of animation artwork dating back to 1924; because of its importance to the company, visitors are required to agree not to disclose its exact location within Glendale.