So "disney recommendations" is absolutely running hot on TikTok search right now, and look, I did not see myself becoming someone who posts about this. My brand is dive bars and theological arguments. But the day after Christmas I am sitting here with leftover holiday cookies from my neighbor (her dog Biscuit got one too, don't tell her), Lazarus the pothos doing his seasonal sulk by the window, and apparently a lot of Disney opinions that have been aging quietly in my brain for years. So here we are.
Here's what you need to know about me and Disney: I grew up in an evangelical household that was genuinely mixed on the subject. Some families in our church banned it entirely, too much magic, too much witchcraft, too many values that didn't align with Sunday school. My parents were more relaxed than that, mostly because my dad loved The Lion King and wasn't giving it up for anyone. So I watched it. I watched a lot of it. And the thing that got its hooks into me deepest, the thing I have thought about more than any adult probably should, was the villain songs.
The villain songs were my first real music education. Not the hero songs. Not the love duets. The songs where the bad guy explains their whole deal with full theatrical commitment and zero apology. those songs taught me something that took years to fully articulate: a great song doesn't require you to agree with the singer. It requires you to understand them. And understanding a perspective (fully, from the inside) is not the same as endorsing it. It's the opposite of being afraid of it.
So here are my actual Disney recommendations, filtered through that lens.
The Films I'd Actually Rewatch
The Hunchback of Notre Dame is the answer, every time, and I will die on this hill. This movie is astonishing and it is deeply underseen and underrated, partly because it is genuinely dark (we're talking genocide, religious hypocrisy, desire weaponized by someone who believes his sin is someone else's fault) and partly because it was sandwiched between movies that were poppier and more commercially legible. But "Hellfire" is one of the greatest Disney songs ever written. Full stop. Judge Frollo's song is a man rationalizing his own lust and violence by blaming the woman he's targeting for making him feel things. It is a precise and devastating portrait of a specific kind of self-deception. I was eight or nine the first time I saw it and I didn't have the vocabulary for what I was watching, but something in me recognized it as true. As something that happens, that adults do, that the world I was growing up in contained. That movie reached me.
I'm going to write songs until I'm old, and I will never not be trying to do what "Hellfire" does. Give you the character's full interiority, make you understand the logic from inside the logic, and then let you feel the horror of that understanding. It's not a trick. It's the hardest thing in songwriting.
Mulan (the 1998 original, not the 2020 whatever-that-was). The reason Mulan holds up is that its central emotional conflict is completely genuine. She's not trying to be someone she's not so she can find herself. She already knows who she is. The journey is about whether the world will make room for that person. "Reflection" is a more sophisticated piece of songwriting than most people give it credit for, the verse and the chorus are in productive conflict, the verse articulating the performance of self and the chorus articulating the true self, and that tension is what makes it land.
Also: Shan Yu is a great villain specifically because he has almost no lines and almost no song. His menace is entirely physical and functional. He wants to prove a point. He's almost refreshingly uncomplicated, which is a kind of counter-programming to the ornate villainy surrounding him.
Lilo & Stitch because it is an honest film about grief and dysfunction and the specifically brutal love of a family that's been broken and is trying to hold on anyway. Lilo is one of the only child protagonists in the Disney catalogue who feels like a real kid. One who is strange and difficult and hurting and whose strangeness and difficulty are directly caused by the hurt. The fact that the solution to loneliness is not "find the right friends" but "love something weird and broken and mean until it learns that family means nobody gets left behind," that's not a child's lesson. That's an adult lesson given to a child character, and it hits accordingly.
The Villain Songs, Ranked in My Heart
Let's be precise, since this is where my actual education happened.
"Hellfire" from Hunchback: already covered. Non-negotiable top tier. The orchestration has a literal Dies Irae motif in it (that's the medieval chant used to describe the Day of Judgment) and the choir sings Latin throughout. This was a mainstream animated children's film. In 1996. I think about this constantly.
"Be Prepared" from The Lion King: a master class in charismatic authoritarianism. The song works because it flatters its audience. The hyenas are being told they're special, they're chosen, they just need the right leader to unlock their potential. Sound familiar? It should. It maps onto every cult of personality that has ever existed, including several I watched unfold in megachurches growing up. The scariest thing about this song is how good it sounds. You understand why it's persuasive because you can hear the persuasion working in real time.
"Poor Unfortunate Souls" from The Little Mermaid: a contract negotiation scene dressed as a power ballad. Ursula is a predatory lender who's come to collect on a bad-faith contract with someone too young to know what she's agreeing to. She never explicitly lies (she's careful about this) she just arranges the truth in a way that makes the mark unable to see the trap. Again: this is a thing that happens in real life, not just in animated films. The song is useful.
"Friends on the Other Side" from Princess and the Frog: criminally underrated. The choreography, the imagery, the voice performance, it's all just extraordinary. Dr. Facilier is the rare Disney villain who's also being manipulated by something larger and darker than himself, and that complicates him in interesting ways. This movie deserved better than it got at the time.
What They Taught Me About Songwriting
The best writing doesn't moralize at you. It gives you a character's fully-realized point of view and trusts you to have a reaction. The song doesn't need to tell you that Frollo is wrong. You know he's wrong. But the song wants you to UNDERSTAND him, because only when you understand him do you understand the mechanism (the self-deception, the externalized blame, the religious cover for cruelty) and only then can you recognize it in the world.
That's what I want from the record I'm making right now. Not to tell anyone what to think or how to feel about the things I went through. I want to put the experience in the room fully enough that whoever's listening can feel their way around it in the dark and maybe find something that matches a shape they've been carrying. That's the only version of this that interests me.
I learned that from a Disney villain at age eight. Weird origin story. But here we are.
Films That Are Technically Fine But I Can't Forgive Them
Okay, look. I will say one thing about films I'd skip, and then I'll stop because this is supposed to be recommendations, not grievances. Brave is a movie about a mother-daughter relationship that is fundamentally less interested in the mother than it needed to be. The problem is presented almost entirely from the daughter's perspective, and then the resolution requires the daughter to grow (which: fine) but it required very little growth from the mother, and the mother was more interesting. That's a structural problem. I wanted the movie about the mother.
If they had given the mother one villain song explaining her entire internalized-performance-of-femininity deal, I would have been satisfied. But they didn't. So here we are.
Anyway, if you're doing a Disney rewatch over the holiday break and you've already done the classics, go find The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Specifically find the version where the Hellfire sequence isn't edited or shortened. Sit with it. Let it be uncomfortable. You're allowed to feel complicated things about a children's movie. That discomfort is the point, and it's kind of the whole curriculum.
Your goth aunt has spoken.
A Note on the Remake Question
Since this is a recommendations post and I want it to be actually useful: people ask me constantly whether the live-action remakes are worth it. In most cases: no, and here's the specific reason. The animated films work because animation allows a stylization of reality that tells you immediately "we are in a heightened space where things can be operatically felt." A live-action Scar doing "Be Prepared" with photorealistic lions removes the operatic quality and makes the thing feel like a nature documentary that has become confused about its genre. The music loses its theatrical scale. The emotional permission to feel big feelings decreases.
The exceptions, in my opinion, are films where the original animation wasn't carrying much of the weight to begin with, or where the live-action version found something genuinely new to do with the material. Most of them don't. Most of them are capitalizing on nostalgia while inadvertently demonstrating why the original worked and the remake doesn't.
The one I keep hearing people say is actually worth watching is Cinderella (2015). Not because it surpasses the original but because it took the material and did something deliberate and intentional with it rather than just tracing it. It has a specific point of view about kindness as a conscious practice rather than a passive disposition, and that makes it a different film rather than a lesser copy. That's the standard I'd apply to all remakes: does it have a reason to exist, a thing it's trying to do that the original couldn't or didn't? If yes, maybe. If it's just the same movie with different rendering, spend those two hours on the original.
Okay, that's all I've got. The holiday cookies are gone and Biscuit next door has been suspiciously quiet and I'm going to go check on both situations. Happy rewatching.