Sleeping Beauty

These beloved heroes of fiction are available for any writer.

Okay, this is the ultimate Disney proposal.

Over nearly 80 years, the 56 feature films from Walt Disney Animation Studios have become beloved and instantly recognizable their iconic fairy tales, memorable comic-relief sidekicks, terrifying villains, and some of the greatest songs in cinema history. This week heralds the release of Disney’s latest animated film, Moana, which boasts songs co-written by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda. So there’s no better time to compile a list of the 25 best songs in animated Disney history — with a couple of important pre-list caveats. First, to avoid overloading the list with songs from only a few films, each movie here could only be represented by a maximum of two songs. Second, this list has films in the official Disney animation canon only, so nothing from Pixar or even The Nightmare Before Christmas. With that in mind, here’s the list!

We're knee-deep in the summer movie season and the hits just keep on coming. Despite mixed buzz, 'Maleficent' opened very strong, not coming close to the massive numbers of the past few weekends, but certainly holding its own. However, the success of Disney's latest live action effort meant that the weekend's other big release, Seth MacFarlane's 'A Million Ways to Die in the West,' fared less well.