Sony is Stealing Disney’s Animation Throne
There was a time when the word Pixar was synonymous with innovation, storytelling excellence, and industry dominance. The studio practically invented the modern animated blockbuster. But now, in 2025, that golden era feels like a distant memory. The recent flop of Elio, once positioned as Pixar’s next original darling, and the runaway success of KPop Demon Hunters from Sony, marks a major turning point in Hollywood animation.
KPop Demon Hunters
Let’s start with the unexpected hit. On paper, KPop Demon Hunters sounds like a chaotic mess. A team of magical KPop idols battling demons in the neon underworld of Seoul? Really? And yet, it works. It works brilliantly.
Why? Because it knows exactly what it wants to be and never flinches. The animation is loud, stylized, and refreshingly nontraditional. It feels like the animators were allowed to have fun and that energy transfers to the screen. Instead of chasing the safe, clean look Disney has standardized, KPop Demon Hunters embraces a gritty, hyperpop aesthetic that feels new.
But the movie’s not just noise and flash. It tackles themes of identity, celebrity, and friendship with surprising nuance and never feels preachy or sanitized. Most importantly, it lets those ideas emerge naturally from its story and characters rather than treating them like boxes to check.
And then there’s the music. Rather than being tacked on as an afterthought, the songs are the lifeblood of the film. They’re catchy, story-driven, and, most impressively, memorable. Since the film’s release, the soundtrack has blown up across music platforms, with fan edits and dance covers flooding TikTok and YouTube.
Sony made a smart call here: instead of gambling on a risky theatrical release, they quietly dropped KPop Demon Hunters on Netflix with next to no promotion. And it still blew up. The film didn’t need a massive ad budget, it needed time, word-of-mouth, and a concept bold enough to speak for itself.
Elio
Now let’s talk about Elio. Disney’s answer to the cries for more original animated content… but one that failed on nearly every level. Critics and audiences alike panned it as bland, hollow, and uninspired. Pixar’s worst opening weekend ever.
Elio is what happens when a studio loses faith in itself. The story is flat, the characters are undeveloped, and the visuals, which were once a hallmark of Pixar's brilliance, now feel lazy. The overused "bean mouth" CalArts animation style, once quirky and novel, now just comes across as tired and uncreative.
Even the cinematography feels noticeably off. The film frequently ignores fundamental visual storytelling principles, most notably the rule of thirds. Rather than framing shots in ways that emphasize emotion, depth, and movement, Elio relies on flat, overly centered compositions that make scenes feel monotonous. This may seem minor, but it adds up quickly: without visual rhythm or dynamism, scenes drag emotionally. What's most unfortunate is that the average viewer might not be able to articulate why they’re disengaged. They might even walk away thinking they liked the film, but with a vague sense that something felt dull or empty. That’s the hidden cost of uninspired cinematography: it robs the story of impact without being obviously bad.
And then there’s the alien design: a massive missed opportunity. For a film that takes place in an intergalactic setting filled with strange new species, the creatures on display are shockingly unimaginative. Most of them look like generic blobs, the kind of thing you’d expect from a toddler’s sketchpad. They lack anatomical logic, cultural cues, or even a shared design language. There's no thought given to how these creatures might move, communicate, or survive in their environments. They're just floating shapes with googly eyes or weird appendages slapped on, like a design challenge that ended at the sketch phase.
Even worse, none of them are memorable. There’s not a single alien with a distinct silhouette, personality, or design trait that sticks. Compare this to films like Monsters, Inc., Zootopia, or Into the Spider-Verse, where character designs are instantly recognizable and reflect deeper worldbuilding. In Elio, the aliens don’t feel like citizens of a rich universe, they feel like filler. And in a movie whose premise hinges on interstellar wonder, that’s a failure that undermines the entire story.
Disney: A Studio Afraid of Itself
To be clear, these visual and narrative shortcomings aren’t just the result of bad luck, they stem from deeper production issues. After early test screenings received mixed responses, Disney reportedly demanded the removal of queer themes and ethnic identity. This led to the film’s original director walking away, followed by several other creatives. The version of Elio that was eventually released is not the version that was initially envisioned, it’s a neutered, hollowed-out version. But that doesn’t excuse the fact that Disney still chose to release a film they no longer believed in.
They buried the release in a stacked box office season, sandwiched between How to Train Your Dragon and the Lilo & Stitch remake, and gave it barely any marketing. It was a quiet surrender, not a confident launch.
The core problem is that Disney is no longer willing to take creative risks, and when it does, it second-guesses itself into oblivion. It’s not just that they’re playing it safe, they’re actively sanding down the edges of their films until there’s nothing left worth watching. The boldness, the innovation, the willingness to make something weird but wonderful? That’s gone.
Sony's Creative Confidence
And that’s where Sony comes in.
With the Spider-Verse films, The Mitchells vs. The Machines, and now KPop Demon Hunters, Sony Animation has become the studio that’s not afraid of weird. It’s not afraid of niche. It’s not afraid to let creators fully commit to a vision, even if it doesn’t check every mass-market box. And that’s the point. KPop Demon Hunters isn’t trying to please everyone. It’s unapologetically itself, and that authenticity is what makes it resonate.
While Disney releases a globally distributed, high-budget film and gets barely a blip in pop culture, Sony shadow-drops a niche, female-led animated film on Netflix and it dominates music charts, TikTok trends, and the streaming top 10.
That’s not coincidence. That’s the result of trusting artists, embracing risk, and understanding that originality and quality still matter. Simply releasing something “original” isn’t enough if the end result is dull, compromised, or creatively dead on arrival.
Changing of the Guard
The animation crown is slipping from Disney’s hands, and Sony is picking it up with confidence.
Elio is the kind of movie Disney used to mock its competitors for making: bland, risk-averse, and visually forgettable. Meanwhile, Sony is making the kind of movies Disney used to make: visually bold, thematically rich, and confident in their voice.
KPop Demon Hunters is more than a surprise hit. It’s a signal that the future of animation isn’t in playing it safe. It’s in taking bold ideas, embracing the weird, and trusting that if you make something good, people will find it—even if you don’t spend millions advertising it.
Disney may still be the biggest name in animation. But Sony is the one making people care.
