Thank you for getting your boyfriend up to speed with the older films, we need to spend more time doing this as a culture because clearly Disney's not much interested in helping with this! When I was studying abroad in China, one of my friends bought a DVD collection that had basically every Disney movie in it, so naturally we had a movie night. I discovered, to my horror, that they were flat out not interested in any film that wasn't from the Disney Renaissance, and were more apt to choose one of the terrible sequels to a renaissance film over any of the older films. For some reason, we ended up watching Mulan II, which to the surprise of them, was terrible.
I have a lot of respect for Bambi. I don't know if it's one of my favorite movies, per se, but it is a gorgeous piece of animated art. Dumbo I've only seen a few times, probably because my mother hated it. The last time I watched it, my main takeaway was shock that Dumbo was drunk for ten minutes of a 60 minute film! Home on the Range I've only seen once, but I thought it was better than its reputation and I loved the gloriously weird yodeling song (and in general it has a pretty good soundtrack)!
Sleeping Beauty and Pinocchio are probably my favorite of the Walt films. Visually stunning and more engaging for me personally than Bambi. Snow White is better than its reputation among people in my age group, many of whom just can't get past her voice. It's certainly better than Cinderella, a film that I always found to be a bore, but that's probably because I saw the R&H Cinderella (the one from 1965 with Lesley Ann Warren) before the Disney Cinderella and that forever colored my judgment.
Prior to seeing Chicken Little, I made an effort to buy all of the Disney animated films, even the ones I wasn't super crazy about. I was pretty close to having all of them, but then I saw Chicken Little, which was so bad that my goal of owning all of them stopped dead in its tracks. Just an abominable film.