What's New on Disney+ in January 2022

When Disney acquired 20th Century Fox in 2019, it also acquired that once-venerable studio’s slate of animated films in development, which included two comic book-based properties I was very excited for: Mouse Guard, axed two weeks before production was to begin, and Nimona, which was just 10 months from completion when the new owners shut down its production company, Blue Sky Studios.

Mouse Guard kind of made sense—a $150 motion-capture action-adventure film starring a bunch of mice with swords was always going to be a tough sell. (Awesome, but a tough sell.) But Nimona pissed me off. Not only because it was so close to being done, but because its queer-positive story of a headstrong young magical girl who apprentices herself to ostensibly villainous, mostly just depressed ex-knight Ballister Blackheart, who is locked in a bitter feud with the handsome Sir Ambrosius Goldenloin, was something truly different. Drawn from the Eisner Award-winning graphic novel by Noelle Stevenson, it dealt in complex morality and issues of mental health, foregrounded a gay romance, and shared a message of self-acceptance that would have been groundbreaking for big-budget studio animation.

But Disney killed it.

Don’t worry though, they kept around Blue Sky’s other animated project: The sixth Ice Age movie.

The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild will launch on Disney+ on Jan. 28. Whatever.

If you aren’t a fan of CGI rodents, there’s not much new to sustain your Disney+ subscription this month. Good thing for the streamer’s subscription rates that it’ll still be spooling out episodes of The Book of Boba Fett all month long.