The dynamic is a little different when it's a false mother instead of a false father, and that moment when Gothel finds Rapunzel missing is, even if you know it's as bad as it is because Rapunzel is unwittingly keeping Gothel alive, a perfect moment of the panic any parent feels when they can't find their child. In that moment, Gothel's own honest reactions let me want to believe that nobody could spend eighteen years pretending to be someone's mother without actually ending up feeling some variation of love for them. ... (Also Frollo never lied to Quasimodo about who his parents were (at least as far as Frollo's own prejudices allowed). Gothel controlled Rapunzel because she was terrified of losing her; Frollo controlled Quasimodo because he was repulsed by a) his own guilt and b) the poor kid's unfortunate head.) It's just different enough that I won't complain about it-- especially since I really liked Atlantis the first time I saw that movie, when it was called Stargate.

Although it probably says something that the stand-out parts of the movie, for me, have little to no dialogue-- Gothel's missing-child panic, the moments with Rapunzel's parents, the date/festival montage.

For most of the Disney Renaissance, each movie that came out displaced the last as my favorite. Aladdin is still way, way up there on the list, but... that's... actually got more to do with the direct-to-video sequels and the animated series. I know, I know, sequels are made of evil, but Aladdin had the FIRST of them, storywise still one of the best of them, and the animated series gave a LOT of time for character development alongside adventure stories and ridiculous puns, so yes, of course I completely want my Aladdin TV series DVD box set now, please and thank you, Disney. (And my Hercules TV series box set, while you're at it.)

I had some qualms about Hades-as-villain, but like with Gothel, I liked his motivation and how it dovetailed with a story I heard about how the first three Olympian gods chose their domains (Zeus went first and chose the sky because he thought it was full of amazing secrets, Poseidon went second and chose the sea because unlike the sky, it really is full of stuff, and they left the underworld to Hades, knowing he would've chosen it for himself anyway-- but not giving him a chance to choose). After a couple thousand years of feeling like nobody wants you around and watching mythology's own Divine Frat Boy party it up, cheat on his wife (which Hades only did ONCE in the myths, to prove he could when he was mocked about it), and generally just sort of coast by, the god with the mind keen enough to organize an entire afterlife might could just get a little bit jealous and start trying to figure out how he could take the big chair for himself. So it was believable enough within the confines of the story to be myth-inspired.

That and James Woods is amazing.

I won't knock Pocahontas, because one thing I respect about the casting there (and in Mulan, but with Chinese folk instead) is that Disney cast Native Americans as Native Americans, even though it was all voice-acting and so a race-lift doesn't really matter THAT much. I know it bends the hell out of history, but it's a positive portrayal of Native Americans... and amusingly, if the REAL John Smith had heard the Disney version, he would totally have claimed that was the honest truth. That was the kind of short, balding, red-haired explorer he was-- he went awesome places and saw and did awesome things, and then he went home and told everybody how much MORE awesome and more like a story with a coherent plot it really was.