Sorry to respond to your posts in reverse order.HentMas said:
If we're going to look at risk-taking in the Disney brand, I think we can see one of the biggest transformations during the 90s. Though the company had already gone through several transformations (first from animation only to animation and live action content and from content provider to content outlet, etc.) the one during the 90s is both readily analyzed and of particular note. There's a great deal of discussion on this in the WikiPedia entry "Disney Renaissance" so I won't go over that too much. I will, however, note that I diverge from some of the points made in that article by saying that Toy Story (released the year after The Lion King) marked a shift in the primary thrust of Disney's business from their own traditional animation to increasingly looking to the outside for inspiration.
We see this not only in the move from traditional to computer animation (both in their own releases and the new ones through Pixar) but also within the content of the traditional animation itself. If we look at (for instance) the use of chins in character designs, we see a transformation from a readily identifiable "Disney look" to one more influenced by other styles. Take the chins in "The Little Mermaid" and compare them to the ones in "Beauty and the Beast" and then jump straight to "Hercules" and you'll see a deliberate choice to go with a different style to compliment the material in the latter, rather than to make the latter "fit Disney". Look at Mulan and you'll see that again. And by "The Emperor's New Groove" you wouldn't have been surprised if someone had told you that it had been designed by another studio.
Now that's not to criticize those films, as that's a separate issue entirely, but rather to show that Disney was changing. Over the next decade, we would see Disney increasingly defined by Pixar's films, the Disney Channel and other outlets rather than by their core animation studio. As a result, the content from their "safer" ventures has come to define the public perception more and more (exempting Pixar). Disney's live-action family films have never been known for their risk-taking and the "non-canon" animated sequels (not my term, just borrowed from the Disney Wiki article I mentioned) or spin-off TV shows have been even less so. That's why even though the Disney TV animation department was more a product of the 80s, that it was only as the core feature film animated brand became less iconic, that this other work has come to be how many people knew Disney.
I'm just barely touching on a much broader issue here, but I think it provides food for finding out more, at the very least.
