Tangled and Frozen get more attention, but for me, Frog is the strongest of Disney’s princess stories from the 21st century. It did well with critics and moviegoers too – unfortunately, not well enough to make Disney’s promise to revive 2D animation stick, or to keep future fairy tale films from being saddled with obnoxious generic titles on the spurious logic that they’d otherwise be taken as “ fairy tale for girls” (because lord knows those never make money). The Jazz Age New Orleans setting only does so much to shake up a thoroughly traditional tale, but there’s nothing wrong with a little old-fashioned romance and magic.
![shrek game house shrek game house](https://static.planetminecraft.com/files/resource_media/screenshot/1149/Shrek2_960258.jpg)
Controversy dogged initial development, but the finished film is a beautiful last bow for the style of Disney film begun by Musker and Clements’ The Little Mermaid twenty years before. Its immediate predecessors had done better at the box office, Disney legends John Musker and Ron Clements were back in the director’s chair, and Frog represented a return to 2D animation after the Michael Eisner regime had vowed to retire the form. But there was a sense by the time The Princess and the Frog premiered that the ship was starting to right. Whether they were traditional or digital, most (not all) of the Disney cartoons of the 2000s couldn’t muster more than a lukewarm reception, and sometimes bombed out on a massive scale. Here are ten of the best animated films of the 2000s not produced by Pixar: And so impactful were their films that work from other studios, even the majors, can end up overlooked in public recollections of the decade. Such was Pixar’s success that they displaced Disney as the big game in town for animation. The films they released in those years remain among the most beloved animated pictures ever made and cemented the studio’s stellar reputation with audiences and critics.
![shrek game house shrek game house](https://pics.awwmemes.com/tame-of-lie-sponge-after-seeing-bee-shrek-in-the-53977388.png)
Shrek’s DreamWorks Animation may have come into its own during the 2000s, but the decade belonged to Pixar. And there was a near-total displacement of any form of animation other than CGI by the decade’s end – another trend that has yet to subside.
![shrek game house shrek game house](https://clownaroundpartyrental.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/shrek.jpg)
But the success of Shrek and related titles encouraged a cynical, self-aware, and celebrity-led sense of humor that’s become persistent in American animation. While the notion that animation is “just” for kids persists to this day, films like Shrek helped to weaken that stigma. There was a proliferation of companies owned or partnered with major studios, offering more feature-length cartoon content than mainstream cinema had ever seen. There’s a bittersweet quality to the history of animation once you reach the 2000s.