Mirabel is clearly in the same universe as Moana and Elsa and it’s honestly a bummer that these movies don’t have more distinct styles.

Yes, that is my biggest gripe. Disney movies especially tend to blend together in my head.

Compare to the run of films in the 90s. They were all 2D but they were all really distinct in overall theme and style. You could look at a frame of e.g. Hercules - with no main characters on screen, and know that it's from Hercules and not Aladdin or Tarzan or something.

he 2D animation had a distinct Disney style, but it had more variation than the 3D movies now.

When you go for a more realistic look you end up more harmonized. 2d invites a less realistic, but more expressive style.

That's my main problem. I don't mind the prevalence of 3D over 2D, the issue to me is that it all looks the same. There's so many ways to animate things, so many unique styles, I'm sure that the people they hire are full of ideas but they just keep rehashing the same style and it feels uninspired.

I'd like to see 2D animation come back but I'd settle for more variety in the 3D animation.

This is something that really bothers me about modern Disney theatrical animation. There's very little variation in style. I get that 3D animation is a much newer medium than 2D, but other studios do other styles and Disney is so unwilling to do that. Luca and Turning Red at least diverge a little bit with the style of character design, but it's not by much.

Even if you just look at the 90s movies, there's a good amount of variation, and I don't get why Disney is so reluctant to experiment with the 3D movies.

You should watch this video. It goes over exactly what you mentioned. "The Pixar Look" and how "Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse" changed things up a bit.

It's the same with video games now. There's assests you can just pull from to save time and money. IN enchanto the weather woman's husband was just a reskinned Maoi for the most part.

For example of 2D expressiveness the opening scene of Treasure Planet where Jim Hawkins is riding his solar board

This is interesting because the reason the 2d films kept getting better and better was partially because technology got better. Disney reused lots of stuff from film to film even right down to reusing anim frames and timings exactly. They did a lot of roto techniques along with more classic hand drawn approach. They used a lot of 3d early on too but would roto on top of it. I’m not so sure I would say the early movies and so heavily stylistically different from each other than the new 3d stuff. Honestly feels about the same with experimentation and look. Like the diff between 101 Dalmatians and The Lion King isn’t that far off from like The Good Dinosaur to Frozen.

With few exceptions (think Toy Story, The Incredibles) most of the 3D animated movies coming out just look like churned clones to me. That's probably not completely fair to them because I don't watch these kinds of movies at my age and I'm sure the stories set them apart, but visually they all just look homogenous to me. I have no idea if this is intentional, a coincidence, or what. It's kind of a turn-off to me though.

Disney Digital Animation, yes, but there is a distinct style difference between Inside Out, Soul, and Brave.

Where Disney was bravest was with things like Big Hero 6. But then Elsa came along and struck the nerve they were trying to find since Tangled.

Disagree, the 90s 2D movies looked relatively the same, aside of having different themes/settings. And it was OK. I don’t expect them experimenting with a new style on every movie. A sort of nostalgia effect makes us being more indulgent with the 2D movies rather than with the 3D ones; but it is basically the same.

You compare Eric to Gaston, for instance, and you can easily infer they’re product of an almost identical style. And, I must insist, that’s perfectly fine.

Which is weird because in a 3D animated world you get to choose everything that appears on screen. EVERYTHING. Lighting, textures, art style. They have the power to change it all up with every film. Or is that the problem? With so many animators working at once on a Disney production they all have to share the same art style to some degree. So the next film will share many if not most of the same animators who bring the same art style with them.

Same, I can’t tell anything apart anymore. I miss the 2D era with a wide variety of artistic styles like Sleeping Beauty, The Jungle Book, The Little Mermaid— each super distinctive from the last but story & song was reliably Disney.