When Disney movies are good, they’re award-winningly good. When they’re bad, they’re confined to the Disney vault and quickly never spoken about again. Aside from those two categories though, there’s also the elusive and rare “weird movie”, a film that’s neither good or bad and is mostly strange or unnecessary.
These are almost always straight to DVD sequels, so you have to make an effort to find them, but once you do you are seriously rewarded. With what? Well, with a weird blend of time travel, historical revisionism, Tim Curry and country singing dogs of course!
10. An Extremely Goofy Movie
The plot of An Extremely Goofy Movie isn’t actually that unusual, it just follows Goofy and his son Max adjusting to the change in their relationship when Max goes out to college. However, because this movie is super nineties, it’s also super surreal.
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Not only does Max single-handedly unravel the entire Disney universe by questioning why they all wear gloves, but there’s also a skateboarding Mafia serial killer for a villain, and a beat generation hot girl cliche who looks so little like a dog that it’s almost as if they’re different species’.
9. The Fox and The Hound 2
The Fox and The Hound is a quintessential story, that of a hunting dog and fox who become best friends as kids, before discovering that society wants them to be mortal enemies. It’s a self-contained story with no need for a prequel, so of course there’s a prequel.
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The fact that it’s unnecessary doesn’t need to ruin it, but the fact that the plot follows a band of singing dogs who work at a country fair but are apparently world-wide celebrities (and the friendship between the fox and hound is ruined by the dog joining the band) kind of does.
8. Lion King 1 1/2
There are far too many Lion King movies. Even when you count out the not-at-all live action, live-action remake – there’s still a Romeo and Juliet style sequel and some prequels chronicling the rise of Scar and the life of Timone and Pumba.
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All that aside, the weirdest one is definitely the midquel, which has no conflict, no villain, and has nothing at all happen except the characters watching themselves in the movie in a cinema, surrounded by the rest of the Disney family. Basically, breaking the universe.
7. Leroy and Stitch
Lilo and Stitch is another movie that spawned more than one sequel, and launched an empire spanning everything from a sci-fi TV show and a horrific Disney World ride in which Stitch burps in your face in the dark. They’re all fairly surreal, and some are better than others, but the most over the top is Leroy and Stitch.
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This movie was created to close out the TV show, and sees hundreds of escaped alien experiments run away from an evil scientist and go to war with him in space. The weirdest but also most adorable thing about this movie is that each alien has a separate speciality, and they range from being able to control the weather to always making the perfect sandwich.
6. Brother Bear 2
Brother Bear is already a weird concept for a movie. Person turning into animal films aren’t rare, in fact, Disney even has another person-turning-into-bear movie in Brave. However, Brother Bear’s plot involves the god’s cursing a guy to be a bear in order to embrace love after accidentally causing his brother’s death – weird.
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As if that wasn’t strange enough, the sequel sees the titular bear enjoying his new life, before falling in love with his childhood sweetheart, while the gods conspire to make them get married in the background. It’s weird, probably illegal, and disturbing to think about what would happen in this scenario in real life.
5. Kronk’s New Groove
Since Emperor’s New Grove is already one of the most surreal Disney films ever made, the sequel can get away with a lot of wackiness, but Kronk’s New Grove still manages to push the boundaries of what’s acceptable. Just as an example, the least weird thing about this movie is that Yzma has a cat tail for some reason.
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The rest of the movie revolves around Kronk running a scout camp and accidentally making people commit crimes just by being a really nice dude. If you think that sounds like it needs more explanation, it doesn’t, that’s just exactly how strange this movie is.
4. Pocahontas II: Journey To A New World
It should be obvious to anyone who knows even basic history that making a Pocahontas movie full stop is a bad idea, and making a sequel wherein Pocahontas journeys to the UK to be with her English husband is an even worse one. However, that of course didn’t stop Disney.
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Not only that, but they manage to make the sequel worse and weirder by introducing a love triangle, in which Pocahontas is trapped between her husband and another man, also named John, who helps her to appeal to the king of England to stop Native American people being killed. Yikes.
3. Cinderella III: A Twist In Time
When you think of classic Disney princess movies, you probably don’t think of time travel. For some reason though, the writers in the straight-to-VHS-sequel team at Disney decided that a time travel/heist movie was the best way to go when it came to Cinderella.
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This surreal movie is kickstarted when the two evil stepsisters steal the Fairy Godmother’s magic wand and go back in time, attempting to make it so that one of them marries the prince instead. Cinderella and the prince, both happily married, have to go on quests to reunite themselves in the correct timeline, and it’s actually totally awesome.
2. The Hunchback of Notre Dame II
This movie is on this list for the same reason that the Pocahontas movie is – the events are just way too dark for a light-hearted sequel to ever make sense. This one feels even more out of character because the whole point of the first movie is that Quasimodo doesn’t need to find love to be valued and happy.
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Of course, the second movie gives him a clumsy blonde love interest, and it would be sweet and harmless if it wasn’t for the fact that it looks like total garbage. Also, he’s literally still living in the Notre Dame cathedral attic – even though he’s supposedly not a secret outcast anymore.
1. Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas
Disney movies are always adorably wholesome, and Christmas movies are maybe the only thing with the potential to be even more so. That means that when it comes to Disney Christmas movies, you should be in the most wholesome territory of all, right?
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Wrong. This may be a Christmas Beauty and the Beast movie, and half of it might be dedicated to ice-skating, trading presents and making snow angels – but it’s mostly weirdly dark. Belle nearly dies of exposure and/or wolf attack when trying to chop down a Christmas tree in the woods, Beast is furious that she’s celebrating, and the villain is a sexy organ voiced by Tim Curry who wants to stay an organ forever so he can keep composing emo symphonies and being sad. Yeah.
