Another summer is upon us and Disney has not let us down by releasing another highly-anticipated blockbuster hit with “The Incredibles 2”. There has been plenty of promotion for the film including a new Incredibles-themed ride at Disney’s California Adventure theme park, McDonald’s Happy Meal toys (which we have several of lying around the house), and even home security commercials featuring Edna Mode and The Incredibles. With all of the hype surrounding another fantastic Disney film, I thought I would sit down and catalog my Top 10 all-time favorite Disney films. Ever!

This 1951 film has to be the first one on my list. It is a film that I remember watching from some of my earliest years as a child and one that had a significant impact on me emotionally. I don’t mean emotionally in the way that you might think. It didn’t bring me to tears or have me contemplating my mission in life or anything like that. It was just a weird movie that probably freaked a lot of kids out. Heck! I know adults that are freaked out by this film. However, I adored this film BECAUSE of its odd nature, its whismical characters, and the bizarre way it moved from scene-to-scene using a wide variety of peculiar settings. To this day, I love odd films and I consider the Cheshire Cat (easily the oddest character in the film) as my favorite all-time Disney character. For this reason, it belongs in my Top 10 Favorite Disney Movies of All Time.

“The Lion King” will probably forever be my #1 Favorite Disney Movie of All-time for a number of reasons. Aside from a fantastic story that made me tear up as a 14-year-old kid, when I first saw it in the theater, it has a tremendous, all-star cast of voice actors and an Academy Award-winning soundtrack, with songs composed by Tim Rice and, one of my favorite Pop/Rock musicians, Elton John. Jeremy Irons brought fear and humor at the same time to a terrifying villain in Scar. I thought the choice of Rowan Atkinson as the voice of Zazu was brilliant, given that Atkinson was HUGE, at the time, for playing Mr. Bean, a character who doesn’t speak. Jonathan Taylor Thomas, of Home Improvement fame, was a mega-star among pre-teens in 1995. It made perfect sense casting comedians Cheech Marin and Whoopie Goldberg as the laughing hyenas. “The Lion King” introduced Broadway great Nathan Lane to audiences on the big screen as the voice of Timon, and of course, James Earl Jones as Mufasa was great, because he has a commanding voice and one that is recognized everywhere it is heard.

I also have vivid memories of hearing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” on the radio and seeing the music video on VH1 pretty much every hour, on the hour that summer. This was the hit that reintroduced me to Elton John and gave me hope that fantastic Disney music would continue in a post-Alan Menken/Howard Ashman era. The music was really the final piece of the trifecta that just made this film a once-in-a-generation type of movie.

“Mary Poppins” was a technical marvel, for 1964, combining live-action with animation. Aside from being an accomplishment in art, it also gave credence to a live-action film for a younger audience. I remember, as a kid, being resistant to watching anything that wasn’t a cartoon or animated. While “Mary Poppins” was one of those films that, for me, didn’t need animation to capture my attention, it certainly helped.

Again, we have a story that tugs at your heart strings, whether you are a child or an adult, and, again, the music is spectacular. This time, the music is written by Richard and Robert Sherman, who have written classics for the Disney theme parks, including “It’s A Small World”, “There’s A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow”, and “One Little Spark”, as well as the music for another Disney film you’ll find on this list a little later. “A Spoonful of Sugar” was not only a catchy song and a tip for taking medicine, but metaphorically, it was great words of wisdom for dealing with difficult life situations. Pretty much every song in this movie is a classic from “Feed the Birds” to “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (which is actually a real word….look it up!).

OK. I love all of the Toy Story movies, but I’m only going to put one on this list. That one is going to be “Toy Story 2” for two very specific reasons. The first reason is, it defied the conventional rule about sequels not being as good as the original. In fact, as much as I loved the original “Toy Story”, I think this film is, actually, better than the original. They brought back Tom Hanks and Tim Allen and expanded the cast of toys with Jessie (voiced by Joan Cusack) and Stinky Pete (voiced by Kelsey Grammer) along with another fantastic story.

The second specific reason this film makes my Favorite Disney Movies of All Time list is something that it added to the great story formula that didn’t exist in the first film – A TWIST! To this day, I view Disney-Pixar’s inclusion of the twist in the end of this film as a testament that they don’t just make films to cater to the youngest of viewers. I remember watching the movie and seeing the twist near the end and feeling like I had just watched a kid-friendly movie that treated me, the viewer, as an adult by adding an unexpected surprise. I love any kind of film with a good twist in the end, but this was the first time I had really noticed that Disney had done it.

So, technically this isn’t Disney, or should I say, technically it IS Disney? You see, I didn’t realize, until I was an adult and started seeing Roger Rabbit in the Disney parks, that this film was Disney, because it was released under Touchstone, which was another film company that Disney owned. This film was a little more mature in nature, which is why it came out on the Touchstone label and not Disney, but that doesn’t make it any less of a Disney classic. Released in 1988, this film had everyone talking about its combination of live-action and animation as they interacted with one another. This took the kind of live-action/animation combination seen in Mary Poppins to a whole new level. Robert Zemeckis directed the film and was teamed up with legendary producer Steven Spielberg, and the stage was set (along was a stellar script written by Jeffrey Price and Peter S. Seaman) for a blockbuster hit. In addition to combining live-action and animation, it is also the first film (and only film, to date) to combine characters from several different film studios along with Disney characters including Warner Bros. and Universal. And you already know how I love a twist – well this one has one of those, too.

Remember how I mentioned that seeing “Alice in Wonderland” at a young age prepped me for my appreciation of strange movies? Well, I have an avid appreciation for Tim Burton films, because of the odd imagery that comes across in his films. His infamous partnership with composer Danny Elfman over the years has complimented his peculiar visuals with eerie and fanciful music that I adore to no end. There is probably no other film, that Tim Burton and Danny Elfman have teamed up on, that I enjoy as much as I do “Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas”. This movie is fantastic, because it works as either a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie, which means you get to watch it numerous times throughout the last 3 months of the year.

Tim Burton created the story and concept for this film while he was an animator working for Disney. The stop-motion animation technique used to tell this story adds to the unique and interesting visual way this story unfolds and it is also another artistic marvel in the art of theatrical storytelling. The songs were not only composed and written by Danny Elfman, but he also supplied the singing voice for the movie’s main character, Jack Skellington. There are also other actors you would recognize, but only if you read the credits. For instance, Paul Reubens (Pee Wee Herman) plays Lock and Catherine O’Hara (from “Home Alone” and “Beetlejuice”) plays two characters – Shock and Sally.

The Jungle Book is one of those classic stories that Disney adapted as a feature animated film and turned it into something far different from the story, as it was originally told. Joseph Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Jungle Book” in 1894, and Disney released this film a little less than a year after Walt Disney’s death in 1967. This was the last film that Walt Disney ever contributed his personal touch to. Richard and Robert Sherman, again, came up with an amazing group of songs for the film along with Terry Gilkyson, who wrote “The Bare Necessities”, which won him an Oscar for Best Music – Original Song in 1968.

One of the things I love most about this film, though, aside from the wide-ranging cast of characters is the voice casting of King Louie. Based on the idea of King Louie being the “king of the swingers”, “I wanna be like you” was written by The Sherman Brothers as a kind of swing song. Therefore, swing/jazz musician Louis Prima was chosen to play the voice of King Louie. This video, below, shows Richard Sherman talking about the process of recording Prima and his band for the film and how their Vegas-style performance ended up influencing the final look of the scene in the film.

Of course, any list of favorite Disney films is going to have “Beauty and the Beast” on it. I still remember going to see this film in the movie theater with a friend of mine and his mom when I was just 11 years old. This film will forever remain on my list of favorites, because of the fact that it is such a well-told timeless tale (or a “tale as old as time”….get it?) with an amazing set of songs to help tell the story.

Done in the fashion of a Broadway-style production, the story is told and the plot moves along through the songs being sung. Once the narrator lays out the premise for the story, we are introduced to Belle in her eponymous opening number. Not only are we introduced to the character of Belle, but we are introduced to Gaston, and we find out quite a bit about Belle’s dilemma of wanting more out of life than her little town can offer her. Alan Menken and Howard Ashman really are the ones who capture our hearts through their songs in this film. While the tale is timeless, I really think this film is just another good Disney film without the music of Menken and Ashman. Songs like “Belle”, “Gaston”, “Beauty and the Beast”, “Be Our Guest”, and “Something There” is what keeps this film on my list of Favorite Disney Movies of All Time.

Before Disney had their hit with an all-star cast in “The Lion King”, they tested the waters with “Aladdin”. Cast with comedy legend Robin Williams as the Genie, we also get a voice in Iago that is impossible to miss as Gilbert Gottfried. This film is another home run for Alan Menken, this time with the lyrics to the songs being written by Tim Rice. Rice was brought in to work with Menken on this film after Howard Ashman passed away from AIDS before “Beauty and the Beast” was ever released.

Robin Williams totally stole the show from the main character of this film due to his genius comedic and improvisational skills. In fact, many of the lines that made the film weren’t even scripted. They were created by Robin off-the-cuff, as they would just let him go off on an improvisational tangent, record it all, and then keep the stuff that worked.

In addition to being funny, this movie is a tender love story, and I remember being touched by this movie, as a 13-year-old discovering love and all kinds of mushy emotions for the very first time.

Although it came out 27 years before, “Pinocchio” has a lot in common with “The Jungle Book”. Much like that movie based off of the Rudyard Kipling novel, “Pinocchio” was based off of an old Italian children’s story written by Carlo Collodi. Also, much like “The Jungle Book”, the film adaptation of “Pinocchio” is very different from the original story.

This film also has its odd and eerie moments, like in “Alice in Wonderland”, and also like “Alice in Wonderland”, the plot moves through a wide array of settings from a wood-worker’s workshop to a marionette puppet show to a theme park for bad little boys and, finally, to the belly of a whale under the sea. Another thing I absolutely love about this film, and also much like “The Jungle Book”, is it doesn’t have just one villain. There are actually several villains who appear in this film. Honest John and Gideon are the first two that appear in the film. Then you have Stromboli (which, for me, might be one of the scariest Disney villains ever), The Coachman who takes Pinocchio and Lampwick to Pleasure Island, and Monstro the whale. I happen to find villains fascinating, and the fact that there are so many that range from quirky and funny to downright creepy and scary is a huge reason why this film is on my list.

There are scores of Disney films out there, and I could easily list 10 more of my all-time favorites, so I’m sure I missed some of your favorites. Let me know what your top 10 are either by commenting below or over at the All About the Mouse Disney Podcast Facebook Group.