One big driver of this was the Disney Renaissance. This is well known — there are books about it — but the TLDR is that, for reasons beyond the scope of this blog post, Disney suddenly went from making mediocre animated films that nobody much cared about and that didn’t make much money (Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Fox And The Hound, The Black Cauldron, The Great Mouse Detective, Oliver And Company) to making animated films that were good to excellent, hugely successful, and in some ...
