Please Make a New Animated Movie Before the Number Four Develops Feelings
Remake. Reimagining. Legacy sequel. Part II. Part III. Live-action version. Streaming spin-off. Villain origin story. At this point the only unexplored Disney kingdom is the one where an executive sees a blank page and does not immediately suffer a medical emergency.
A complete story is not abandoned intellectual property
Some stories end. The villain is defeated. The family heals. The toys accept change. The heroine finds her way home. That emotional completion is not a production problem requiring another film.
A sequel earns its existence when the original ending creates a new question. It does not earn it because the first movie sold pajamas.
Too many franchise continuations reverse completed growth so the character can relearn a familiar lesson, introduce a secret relative, expand a mythology that was elegant because it was small, or move the cast into a louder version of the same conflict. We learn more facts and care less. That is a bad trade.
Live action is the strangest sequel of all
A shot-for-shot or near-identical remake is effectively a sequel to the brand rather than the story. Its narrative contribution is often “remember this, but with pores.” Animation’s shapes, colors, timing, and impossible movement are replaced by a realism filter, while enormous amounts of digital animation hide beneath the label “live action.”
The 2026 Moana arrived only ten years after the original, while that original remained the most-watched movie on Disney+. The audience had not forgotten it. Children had not lost access to it. The remake was competing with a living movie and asking familiarity to impersonate demand.
Its weak opening was not an audience failing to understand Moana. It may have been the audience understanding perfectly that it already had Moana.
Nostalgia has become development
Nostalgia used to be one ingredient. Now studios build the whole meal around it. The business logic is obvious, and I am still bored.
Studios know how to price recognition. A familiar silhouette lowers promotional risk. A known song can sell a trailer before anyone explains the plot. Merchandising already has shelf space. Investors can model the audience using yesterday’s receipts.
An original story offers none of that comfort. It must teach us its rules, introduce a face we do not already love, and survive the possibility that people will take time to discover it. That is also how every “safe” classic began.
Original does not mean culturally vague
The answer is not another generic princess floating in a context-free fantasy blender. New stories can be more specific, not less. Let artists tell stories rooted in Vietnamese, Ghanaian, Filipino, Māori, Mexican, Indian, Appalachian, Arab, Korean, Caribbean, and Indigenous worlds without first attaching them to a seventy-year-old European title.
Hire the consultants, musicians, historians, language experts, designers, and community artists currently being used to authenticate remakes. Then give them authorship, authority, and a blank page.
If audiences can learn the rules of superheroes, multiverses, Jedi orders, elemental kingdoms, and twelve versions of time travel, they can learn a new myth.
Children deserve their own nostalgia
Every generation deserves the movie adults initially do not recognize. The weird one. The risky one. The box-office disappointment that becomes beloved ten years later. The visual experiment that changes animation. The heroine whose dress has not already been manufactured in six previous fabrics.
When corporations endlessly recycle our childhoods, children lose room to form their own. That bothers me more than another bad remake review ever could.
I want to walk into a theater without knowing which chorus will arrive. I want concept art that is not solving how to make a cartoon animal’s face obey mammalian anatomy. I want a villain with no discourse inherited from 1959. I want animators asked what they can invent instead of how faithfully they can reproduce a scene another crew already perfected.
My extremely reasonable demand
For every remake, fund an original animated feature at the same level. For every third sequel, finance two first films. Let successful directors graduate into new worlds instead of becoming permanent caretakers of old ones. Market original animation like an event, not a charitable side project placed between franchise quarters.
I am not asking the castle to burn down. I am asking somebody inside it to open a blank sketchbook.