Apple adds Disney and Pixar characters to Clips

Apple’s super simple video editing app Clips just got its first significant upgrade since launching in April. There are a couple of feature updates in the mix, but the biggest additions are content — including, most notably, a bunch of licensed characters from the Disney/Pixar universes, adding animated overlays and transitions starring familiar faces like Mickey and Woody.

Content is one of Clips’ key selling points, along with its simple-to-a-fault UI, and Apple’s promised to continue adding new stuff to the app, in order to keep things fresh. The addition of a bunch of iconic characters from Disney and movies like Toy Story and Inside Out will likely help the app get on the radar of more users faster than any standard old filter or overlay. This marks the latest in an on-going relationship between the two corporate powerhouses, including, most notably, the addition of a classic Mickey to the list of available Apple Watch faces.

The teams have done a good job incorporating animated graphical overlays of things Minnie dancing and Fear from Inside Out running away from everything. I haven’t actually played with the upgrade myself, but they add a nice, dynamic touch to videos created on the app. 

The Disney partnership comes at a good time for the app (though it did just barely miss a debut at last week’s Star Wars-heavy D23). Initial interest in the app has seems to have waned after its release. As we noted, shortly after that premier, Clips scored up to one million downloads in its first four days in the charts, but according to App Annie numbers, its ranking fell off soon thereafter.

Perhaps continual updates will help the app get some more traction in the highly competitive Photo and Video category. Apple also released a minor update back in May, but that was mostly focused on feature tweaks and addressing stability concerns.

The new 1.1 update also brings additional overlays and posts from from Apple, along with a Live Tile edit button that makes it easier to interact with the app’s speech-to-text captioning — probably Clips’ most compelling feature. Disney characters will appear in the menus as soon as the update is installed, but users will have to download them individually like the its music offerings, in an attempt to keep the app’s size down.