Dream Tropes Wiki/All Animation Is Disney

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Oh, the Disney Animated Canon. Such wonderful movies to be found in it: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Anastasia...

Wait, what do you mean that last one doesn't belong? It's not Disney? Don't be ridiculous, only Disney could produce animation of that quality!

Sadly, many people in Real Life believe that, if it's a quality animated feature film, it was made by Disney. This is possibly a side effect of the Animation Age Ghetto, as people are led to believe that not only are all cartoons for kids, but they're all made by the same kid-friendly company. Who wants to tell these people that there's more than one animation studio out there? Small Reference Pools might play a role here, as well. Some people go so far as to believe that Disney invented animation, which isn't true either: Walt was still in junior high school when Gertie the Dinosaur was released (though he did release the first feature-length hand-drawn cartoon, namely Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs).

Remember, though, that Disney is the market leader in animated movies, and so it's understandable that rival animation studios follow trends set by the Disney Animated Canon (including Disneyfication). One critical reason is Don Bluth, responsible for taking that style with him when he left Disney, using it in his films with other studios and making that line more blurred if you're not paying closer attention than looking and assuming. Disney also releases films not made by a Disney animation studio, such as The Brave Little Toaster, and handles international distribution of some bigger-name foreign animators, most notably the works of Studio Ghibli (prior to Gkids buying out the distribution rights to the majority of the latter's backlog).

See also Critical Research Failure — Disney uses Vanity Plates on its work, and so do the other big-name animation studios. However, this can be muddied somewhat when studios strike up unanticipated strange licensing agreements - for example, Disney having the broadcast rights for Thomas in Asia, and between 2009 and 2016, somehow also ended up with the distribution and broadcast rights for DreamWorks movies in certain regions, creating a very bizarre scenario where Over The Hedge and Shrek were screened on Disney Channel Asia.

Since Disney's most famous movies are traditionally animated films, this usually applies to cel-animated movies. On the CGI front, DreamWorks has become a big enough name in its own right that their films rarely get mistaken for Pixar's anymore. The other guys (Blue Sky Studios, Illumination Entertainment, Sony Pictures Animation, etc)... not so much. If it shares DreamWorks' tendency towards subversive or referential humor, chances are it'll get mistaken for one of their films. So a sub-trope of this could be "All CG Animation is Pixar or DreamWorks".

The trope is beginning to die off due to many films such as The Secret of NIMH and The Iron Giant gaining cult followings and being recognized as some of the best animated films not to be produced by Disney. However, because of Don Bluth becoming a household name in the animation community, it's still common for people to believe that all non-Disney 2D-animated films were made by him instead.

Contrast All Adult Animation Is South Park. Compare/Contrast All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles and Disney Owns This Trope.

Not to be confused with Disneyesque or Disneyfication. Of course, sometimes the confusion goes the other way and a film really is by Disney, but it's hard to convince people of this because it's so "un-Disneylike" (Pretty Woman or Pulp Fiction, among many, many others).

The Mockbuster plays on this trope deliberately to make unwary customers think their cheap knockoff is the Disney original.

## Examples

### Works regularly mistaken for Disney

#### Anime and Manga

* Any of the Drillimation anime can be mistaken for a Disney product. This trope ended up going into effect when Disney bought a 15% stake of Drillimation in 1989. At least one fanmade YouTube animation shows what Kagami Ochiai would look like if she became a Disney princess.

#### Western Animation

* The *Alice in Wonderland* Kantasy series from the early 1990s is often mistaken for being a spin-off of the Disney movie.
* *Sagwa: The Movie* is mistaken for a Disney movie, or being mistaken for a Don Bluth movie, even though PBS Kids Movies made the film.
* The Maddox Show has been mistaken as a property made by the Maddoxian government.

### Works mistaken for something else other than Disney

#### Live-Action TV

* *What I Like About You* airs on El TV Kadsre 1 in El Kadsre, and claimed that to be a Nickelodeon show, even though it aired on The WB in the United States, even though Warner Bros. produced the series.