The year is 1999. Perhaps you were plagued with fears regarding Y2K, or maybe you were partying the way Prince instructed years earlier. Very few, however, were looking at the changing scope of animation in the film industry. Only in hindsight is it clear to see that the animated films of 1999 reflected the past, grounded themselves in the present, and indicated the medium’s future. Five notable films, varied in style and content, were released over the course of the year: Toy Story 2, Tarzan, Princess Mononoke, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and The Iron Giant. If The Lion King (1994) and Toy Story (1995) pushed the envelope, then these five films sent said envelope into the new millennium.

Walt Disney had mainly dominated the terrain of feature-length animated films during his lifetime, and he left large shoes to fill after his death in 1966. While Hanna-Barbera Productions, Ralph Bakshi, Don Bluth, and others continued with theatrical releases, animation only began to regain its luster with large mainstream audiences in the late 1980s, when Disney got its groove back. As a result, massive theatrical market for the medium reopened, culminating in the emergence of many different studios clamoring to capitalize on the popularity of the animated film.

Four years after Toy Story took the world by storm, Pixar Animation Studios released a sequel (a rarity in animation, as most studios released their animated sequels directly to video). Computer animation was still a relatively new tool, but by God, Toy Story 2 is beautifully rendered.¹ Toy Story 2 also set the bar for a different, darker type of pathos in an animated film, appealing to audiences by using unlikely characters as totems for complex emotions. What happens when my kid doesn’t need me anymore? is the question at the heart of the film. In the highly acclaimed second entry, cowboy doll Woody and action figure Buzz Lightyear have learned to see eye to eye, but when Woody’s arm breaks, Woody fears that Andy will no longer play with him. He is inadvertently sold to a toy collector, whose impressive assemblage of toys includes the other characters from Woody’s Howdy Doody-esque franchise. At first, Woody wants to return to Andy, but his decisions are complicated further when cowgirl doll Jessie recounts her own heartbreak when her owner abandoned her.

Nevertheless, the balance of poignancy and humor is masterfully directed by John Lasseter. The sequel improves on its predecessor thanks to a heightened sense of emotion, a trend that Pixar would continue in its side-business of harvesting the tears of grown men. The world as encountered from a toy’s point of view involves a sense of adventure, one in which any menial object or situation presents dramatic possibilities of danger. The film’s layered screenplay is such that we as an audience are never truly out of boiling water until the last minute of the film. Thematically, its darkest points are never too dark, but with this sequel comes a nail-biting suspense of “how are they going to get out of this one?”

The film plays with visual and dialogic humor in ways that enchant children and adults alike. After all, these are toys, and the essence of wondering if one’s toys are alive is not a thought limited to a single generation. Marketed as a buddy comedy, Toy Story 2 made a massive $485 million at the box office and received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Song.² Money talks, of course, and animated films of the early 2000s were undeniably influenced by the computer-animated comedy.

Others were hesitant to jump aboard the “fully computer animated” train. Certain elements of Tarzan and The Iron Giant contain computer-generated imagery, but for the most part, they use traditional hand-drawn animation. Disney Animation’s Tarzan was the most recent of Disney’s edgy-love-story-based-on-a-popular-character series, following Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), and Mulan (1998). None of those four films had been as profitable as The Lion King, but Tarzan hoped to change that pattern. The vine-swinging ape man had gotten his fair share of film adaptations, almost fifty accounts existed prior to Disney’s effort.³. Would they Beauty and the Beast-ify this one?

Yes and no. Orphaned by his human parents and raised by gorillas, young Tarzan aims to please his foster family despite his different species. A cast of quirky supporting characters provide the comic relief in our hero’s journey, in which he meets the first human he has ever seen: a British woman named Jane studying gorillas with her father. He is entranced by her, and becomes torn between the human world and the jungle of his youth. The film’s human villain, Clayton, is driven by greed and his own success and attempts to thwart the budding romance between Tarzan and Jane at every turn. But Tarzan fundamentally diverges from “the Disney formula” in surprising ways.

Partly due to audience fatigue of the musical theater style incorporated in Hunchback and Mulan, Tarzan jettisons the traditional Broadway musical format of previous Disney films, putting in its place five narrative songs all sung by Phil Collins. Tarzan never sings about his desire to belong, nor does he express his feelings for Jane with melodic metaphors. The non-diegetic song approach works well for some films, but it is specifically Phil Collins that sinks the ship on this one. Gone are the lyrical treasures of “The seaweed is always greener/ in somebody else’s lake” from The Little Mermaid. Collins’s pop songs simply do not fit the story, and provide shallow subtext to the film as a whole. “I wanna know, can you show me / I wanna know about these strangers like me” Collins sings plainly. (Don’t even get me started on “Put your faith in what you most believe in.”) Even worse? Phil Collins received an Oscar for Best Original Song for “You’ll Be In My Heart,” edging out songs from both Toy Story 2 and South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.

Nevertheless, Tarzan would shape the beginning of the end of the 2-D animated musical. It served a fitting swan song for the triumphs of Disney Animation in the 1990s, with an emotional core centered on love and acceptance, no matter the attributes and distinctions that make us different. The stunningly animated African jungle is a delight to watch unfold on screen, and despite the story’s clunky pacing and an ill-suited soundtrack, the film is enjoyable. Its success—roughly $448 million at the worldwide box office⁴—gave way to male-heavy adventure animated movies in the early 2000s, most of which struggled to connect with audiences despite their visually pleasing production design (The Road to El Dorado, The Emperor’s New Groove, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas, just to name a few).⁵

Toy Story 2 and Tarzan were the high-profile animated releases of 1999, partially because they had the most commercial appeal. The Iron Giant, South Park, and Princess Mononoke were hardly household names upon their releases, but all three use the medium of animation to make incredibly pointed social commentary.

If Tarzan cleared the path for the medium to become increasingly male-centric demographically, director Hayao Miyazaki was paving the way for incredibly tough heroines in Japan. Though the tide did not hit the shores of the Western hemisphere until 1999, Princess Mononoke was making waves in 1997, when it was a Titanic-level hit at the Japanese box office. Set in fifteenth-century Japan, the violent fantasy epic depicts Ashitaka, a prince cursed by a possessed boar, on a quest for a remedy in a forest isolated from civilization. Upon reaching a village where the main export is iron weaponry, he prevents San, a girl raised by wolves, from killing the town’s leader, Lady Eboshi, and becomes injured. Wandering back into the forest, Ashitaka is healed by the Forest Spirit, and learns of the brutal war between the forest habitat and human civilization. Princess Mononoke is a tense but fast-paced 133 minutes that contrasts nature’s beauty with the voracious attitudes of Lady Eboshi’s people.

Miyazaki’s film is neither lighthearted nor funny, and its depiction of war is one of the bloodiest affairs ever seen in an animated film. It is wholeheartedly anti-gun, anti-war, and pro-environment, and undoubtedly his magnum opus. It became the first animated film to win the Japanese Academy Award for Best Picture, and Miramax distributed the film in the United States as a limited release, suspicious of its appeal outside of New York and Los Angeles.

No wide-release animated film has veered into such unmistakably dark territory, and it remains unlikely that the United States will ever produce one (that is, until Tarantino jumps into the animation foray). That being said, Princess Mononoke certainly brought Mr. Miyazaki into the American public consciousness (well, at least in cosmopolitan, film-savvy circles). His subsequent films, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, Ponyo, and The Wind Rises have clutched onto the idea of fantasy, infusing magic into realism. His insistence on hand-drawn animation for a production of Mononoke’s scale is admirable, but then again, he has the auteur’s leverage of which American animators can only dream.

Perhaps the lavish praise that the Western hemisphere heaped upon Princess Mononoke is a result of the film being refreshing to our eyes and ears, compared to the more familiar Toy Story 2 and Tarzan. However, without the backing of an animation titan like Hayao Miyazaki, other seemingly “refreshing” narratives and styles, such as The Iron Giant and South Park, did not fare as well, despite expanding the frontier of topics on which American animated films could tread.

South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut emerged as a result of the TV show’s enduring popularity. Perhaps enduring is the wrong word—the show had only premiered in 1997, but its crass humor and crude cut-out animation attracted an unlikely audience of adults—yes, adults—who rather enjoyed the show’s ability to often satirize large concepts through the eyes of children. Think Rugrats, eight years later, in Middle America, and without a filter. South Park recently wrapped up a highly acclaimed nineteenth season on Comedy Central, but creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone truly hit their peak back in 1999 with the theatrical South Park movie. Bigger, Longer, and Uncut refers to the film’s runtime, of course.

In the film, fourth-grade protagonists Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny, who live in the eponymous “redneck, podunk, white trash” town, are enamored with a vulgar Canadian TV show titled Terrence and Phillip, and sneak into the R-rated film adaptation. As a result of the film, the four boys begin cursing constantly and performing some of the obscene stunts, one of which gets Kenny killed. (A popular trope in the television show involved Kenny dying in almost every early episode.) The parents of South Park, outraged by their children’s behavior and concerned for their futures, wage war against Canada (Terrence and Phillip’s homeland). They convince the United States militia to help them serve justice, and the boys try to stop their parents from bringing out complete chaos and the rise of Satan.

South Park has portrayed some incredible satire in its nineteen-year-run, but none so potent as Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, which swells with effectiveness upon each viewing. Where to begin? I should perhaps mention that South Park is a musical, embodying the classic Disney formula even more so than Tarzan. The songs clearly parody a variety of musicals, including but not limited to Les Misérables, Oklahoma!, and The Little Mermaid. Nevertheless, the music is a sturdy vessel for the film’s trenchant content, criticizing censorship and weak parenting.

The parents seem not to care too much that their boys are going out to see a movie at first, but when their children come home singing the film’s theme, “Uncle Fucka,” the South Park parents, led by Kyle’s mother, Sheila, seek to deflect culpability onto everyone except themselves. A scapegoat appears in the form of Canada, a country whose constituents are dehumanized by the American public, especially in the Academy Award-nominated tune “Blame Canada,” in which the final chorus rings, “We must blame them and cause a fuss / Before somebody thinks of blaming us!” (Does this tactic sound familiar, my fellow Americans?) The parents’ justification for starting an all-out skirmish seems perfectly “logical” as events come to a head. “Remember what the MPAA says,” cries Sheila impassionedly. “Horrific, deplorable violence is okay, as long as people don’t say any naughty words! That’s what this was is all about!”

The consequence for this malicious behavior not only calls forth a war over words between the United States and Canada, but way down, deep in Hell, Satan and his emotionally abusive boyfriend Saddam Hussein (who died in the TV series before dying in real life) are part of a prophecy that would bring Satan’s reign up to Earth under these very same circumstances. The film begins to rapidly fire on all cylinders once each of the subplots comes to fruition; Sheila and the South Park parents command the United States to execute Terrence and Phillip live on television, as Stan, Kyle, and the other boys form “La Resistance” in an effort to bring their town back to normal, and Satan and Saddam argue as they plan world domination.

The zany, surreal humor that ensues is very much in the same vein as that of the TV show, but in the seventeen years since the film’s release, the thought process depicted in the characters has not evolved. As long as there is lazy desperation and political discord, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut will always have an important place in our culture.

Lastly, there’s The Iron Giant, the National Rifle Association’s worst nightmare. Much like Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon afterward, The Iron Giant is the story of a loner kid who befriends an Other. In this case, the kid, named Hogarth, befriends a giant robot with no memory of how he crash-landed in the forest. This logline may sound innocuous enough, but against the backdrop of small-town United States during the Red Scare, Hogarth must convince the US government that his friendly robot companion is not an incredibly dangerous communist weapon sent to pulverize the way of life we hold dear.

Initially, Hogarth’s bond with the giant is kept under wraps, but Hogarth eventually convinces Dean, the beatnik junkyard proprietor, to give the giant a home among the metal scraps. Government agent Kent Mansley, however, suspects Hogarth of knowing pertinent information, and relentlessly tracks him to find the automaton. What ensues between Mansley and Hogarth is a cat-and-mouse chase, but the boy’s moments with the robot cement the audience’s emotions in favor of Hogarth, who imparts his wholesome worldview to the curious giant.

Nevertheless, the world around them, including laid-back Dean, still believes that the iron giant is “a weapon, a big gun that walks.” Dean and Hogarth later discover that his defense mechanisms and powerful weaponry are instigated at the sight of a gun. In a climactic scene where the government, under Mansley’s initiative, sends troops and missiles to attack the giant, the large metal being rampages through the town, completely brainwashed by the presence of guns. Hogarth pleads to the giant, “It’s bad to kill. Guns kill. And you don’t have to be a gun. You are what you choose to be. You choose.”

The Iron Giant emits a compelling, scathing social commentary on the violence that ensues from a heavy disinclination to question the status quo. Through kindness, Hogarth is able to teach the robot to be a benevolent force in society, only to be undone by others’ closed-minded fears. The iron giant clearly resents any indication of killing, and the movie is loud and clear in being wholly, vehemently anti-gun.

Brad Bird’s profound script is the film’s strongest suit. Bird wisely nixed the idea of the film being a musical based on The Who songwriter Pete Townshend’s 1989 concept album, The Iron Man, also adapted from the 1968 Ted Hughes novel.⁶ (Although, in all honesty, I’d much prefer to hear Townshend’s score to Phil Collins’s any day.) Despite excellent reviews, the film could not even recoup half its production budget in ticket sales.⁷ Slowly but surely, the film is re-emerging in smaller circles as a cult classic, much more so than the other four films.

The animated films of 1999 serve as quite the harbinger of progressive themes and values that would later grow in volume throughout the twenty-first century. The Iron Giant’s Brad Bird would later join Pixar and win Oscars for directing both The Incredibles and Ratatouille, while Tarzan director Chris Buck would receive widespread acclaim for co-directing Disney’s juggernaut Frozen. Princess Mononoke’s Hayao Miyazaki caught international attention with the success of Spirited Away just three years later, and South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone would collectively win nine Emmys for the South Park television series and write the Tony-award winning musical The Book of Mormon. Toy Story 2 cemented Pixar’s foothold in American animation, and the studio would go on to receive eight Oscars for Best Animated Feature in a twelve-year period, including a Best Picture nomination for the highly successful Toy Story 3 (2010).

More so than money and awards, the directors of these films have been working hard to redefine what the medium of animation could do for them, and as a result have come a long way in challenging the norms and formulas associated with the medium. Incredibly affecting themes in a diverse slate of films is what the animation industry looks like at its best. Many animated films have turned into huge critical and commercial hits since, but 1999 was a perfect storm of creative minds in their prime. It’s frankly no wonder that, just two years later, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would form the “Best Animated Feature” category to honor animated films every year.

1. No deities are credited in the actual rendering process of Toy Story 2.
2. “Toy Story 2 (1999),” Box Office Mojo, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=toystory2.htm
3. An IMDB search for “Tarzan” yields over fifty films involving Burroughs’ character
4. “Tarzan (1999),” Box Office Mojo, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=tarzan.htm
5. Ibid.
6. Oliver  Lyttleton, “5 Things You Might Not Know About Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant,” Indiewire, August 6, 2012. http://www.indiewire.com/2012/08/5-things-you-might-not-know-about-brad-birds-the-iron-giant-107519/
7. “The Iron Giant (1999),” Box Office Mojo, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=irongiant.htm