I agree with Pinocchio being Disney's best film (per your top twenty). I think there's reasons for that as well. At the time they had the very best animators in the world working for them, most of which they'd lose to WWII and the animator's strike. It was also a flop, and I don't Disney has done anything that expensive or ambitious since this and Fantasia.
I adore the period between 1928 and 1942 in regards to Disney. It was just a glorious time of ambition and artistry. You never see much of that desire for innovation at the studio any longer. By the 1950s, they were still making enjoyable and aesthetically pleasing films (and occasionally masterpieces like Sleeping Beauty (1959)), but you don’t see the same drive to reach the stars all that often. The maturity of something like, say Bambi (1942), is nowhere to be found, at least not as much.
If you look at the early features from 1937-1942, no two of them are alike. You have a Germanic fairy tale, a dark morality play with fantasy aspects, an experimentation in music and animation, a charming and emotionally potent story about an outsider who makes it big, and a coming of age story about the life of a deer told in a way Disney would never go for now. It was really a golden age for them. (As much as I love the Disney Renaissance (truly the studio’s second golden age), I always felt the films became formulaic and similar to one another, especially toward the end when we get mediocre stuff like Pocahontas (1995) and Hercules (1997).
Anyways, that’s just my two cents.
