Slipped out in the Storyville slot without much fanfare, Life, Animated is the Oscar-nominated documentary which won a theatrical release and rave reviews in the US and UK last year. It’s a horribly clichéd word, but heart-warming is the best way to describe this tale of a young autistic man, Owen Suskind, who learnt to speak via his passion for Disney animations.

If anyone harboured any doubts as to how diverse the world of musical theatre can be, this past week will surely have proved an ear and eye-opener. While Richard  Taylor and David Wood's poetic take on The Go-Between pretty much threw out the rule book on musicals, Disney's stage version of their blockbuster film Aladdin dutifully returns to the first edition, which is how a successful franchise works. As the old adage goes, "if I knew the secret I'd bottle it". Disney has – and pantomime has come early to the West End. 

It’s a risky venture, remaking a much-loved Disney classic, but Jon Favreau has tackled The Jungle Book with considerable enthusiasm, creating a digital 3D spectacular complete with hundreds of computer-generated animals and one real boy (Neel Sethi). It’s based on the original Rudyard Kipling stories featuring man-cub Mowgli lost in the jungle, raised by wolves and torn between staying or finding his way back to humanity.

“It's true,” Harrison Ford’s Han Solo explains with wonder. “All of it.” The original Star Wars trilogy, its heroes and the Force have become fading folk tales for the new trilogy’s young tyros. 1977 is itself a long time ago and a galaxy far, far away and Star Wars: The Force Awakens has arrived to save a saga which has had nothing to replenish its deep reserves of generational goodwill since the decent bits of Return of the Jedi in 1983. Everyone who needs to be is still around and able to lift a light sabre. It’s possible for JJ Abrams to properly resume the tale abandoned then, and to repair the damage done by George Lucas’s misbegotten prequels.

Indeed Lucas, having sold his legacy to Disney, has been shut out of it, his own outlines for episodes seven to nine, vaguely promised since the Seventies, unceremoniously binned. Lawrence Kasdan, who with the screenwriter of The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, Leigh Brackett, gave The Empire Strikes Back dark drama and Forties Hollywood wisecracking romance, is the keeper of the flame chosen by Abrams to co-write this. The Empire Strikes Back is the film it most resembles, with its sense of good in awful danger and evil unexpectedly ascendant. But from the Tatooine-like desert planet on which we begin to the tortured interplay of the Force’s light and dark sides in new villain Kylo Ren (Adam Driver, pictured below), the narrative and tone of all three original films are deliberately tapped into.Disney and Abrams have kept their pot of gold under wraps admirably till now, and the pleasure of a major Hollywood film which hasn’t had its good bits gutted for trailers should be preserved. But it won’t hurt you to know the new young cast are excellent. Unknown Briton Daisy Ridley’s Rey is the Luke Skywalker figure as we first met him, a working-class rural orphan on a backwater planet, collecting scrap and dreaming of being a pilot.

Finn (another young Briton, John Boyega, pictured below with Ridley) fulfils Han Solo’s reluctant hero role in extremis, as a morally conflicted stormtrooper (there’s only one – the others have their Nazi roots reaffirmed as the Empire-replacing First Order unfurls its red and black banners, and are blown away with the usual untroubled elan). Oscar Isaac, so good as the Coens’ Llewyn Davis, is dashing resistance pilot Poe Dameron, taking on Luke and Han’s swashbuckling elements.And then, there’s Han Solo. Harrison Ford’s box-office power ended a decade ago, but his return to a role whose corny lines he threatened to stuff down George Lucas’s throat in 1977 reminds you he is a great movie star. He has the confident, reluctantly sensitive masculinity and now weathered, craggy looks for the mixture of Bogart and Errol Flynn Han demands. As when Abrams gave Leonard Nimoy his last role in his headspinningly satisfying Star Trek reboot, this further adventure of Han, and a new scene in his star-crossed romance with Carrie Fisher’s weary Leia, make this film real for those who care. As to Luke Skywalker, he’s around.

Star Wars famously opened with the cinema-shaking Dolby rumble of an Imperial Star Destroyer crossing the screen. The effects which were a marvel then are a sometimes beautiful means to an emotional end now. The commercial juggernaut which at my screening filled 25 minutes with Duracell-powered light-sabres and the like has been ignored as much as possible, Abrams, Kasdan and their cast instead breathe new life into something they’ve tried not to think of as a franchise.In 1977, George Lucas created Star Wars, brilliantly, as a tribute to the simple Saturday morning adventure serials of his childhood (and The Searchers, and Kurosawa, and Tolkien...). It was as personal and fresh as the rest of the otherwise morally nuanced, adult New Hollywood it climaxed and killed. We’ve been living in the infantilised fallout ever since, where giving Iron Man some good lines is the best you can hope for from a blockbuster.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens won’t have any wider impact. It has been built to serve and sell to different audiences. Some with no memory of being swept away almost forty years ago will follow strong new heroes and villains. For those old enough now and young enough then to have childhoods consumed by this stuff, it’s a satisfying new turn in a near life-long tale.

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Overleaf: watch the trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens

From Singin’ in the Rain and Anything Goes to Hello, Dolly! and Mary Poppins, Olivier Award winner Stephen Mear has done more than any other British choreographer to usher classic musicals into the modern era. But adept as he is at razzle-dazzling ’em, there’s more to Mear, as recent excursions like City of Angels at Donmar Warehouse and Die Fledermaus for the Metropolitan Opera prove.

Lushly produced to within an inch of its pictorially ripe life, the new Disney/Kenneth Branagh live-action Cinderella couples swoony imagery with a cloying message about compassion. But all its pro forma qualities fall away as and when Cate Blanchett takes to the screen, the actress as beady-eyed as she is bristling – and Branagh's film that much the better for it.

Following the critical and commercial hits Wreck-It Ralph and Frozen, Disney's latest is a film which will win you over with its charming WALL-E-esque antics, oddball coupling and simple slapstick before it – somewhat annoyingly – reveals itself as a kids' first comic book movie, entering the superhero movie stratosphere by transforming into an origin story for the titular crime-fighting team.

Angelina Jolie carries this re-visited Disney classic. She is the flying buttress that supports the old story told anew, as commanding as the nuclear green energy she emits into the stratosphere and as striking as any original drawing may have been.

It's dueling stars when Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson go quite delightfully toe-to-toe as Walt Disney vs P L Travers, author of Mary Poppins, in Saving Mr Banks, the closing film of the London Film Festival 2013. The title suggests the Russian doll-like nature of the story – a story within a story wrapped in an enigma, with seriously fabulous hair and make-up turning both Hanks and Thompson into characters you can almost completely believe in.

Animated 11^th-century Scotland is a great place to live for a girl with a bow and arrow, until your mum decides to marry you off to any young numpty who wins a clan tournament. No wonder the female audience comes predisposed to love Merida, the star of Disney Pixar’s Brave. She’s a snappy, arrow-shooting, red-haired Scottish princess who’ll do anything not to end up like her mum.