I recently watched two movies I didn't expect to be good, but were surprisingly decent: Tangled and How to Train Your Dragon. I get the feeling that Disney Animation was under heavy pressure to finally keep pace with Pixar, because Tangled is a gorgeous movie. The backgrounds are fantastically rendered, and the human characters are designed in a very Pixar-esque style. Unfortunately, the movie is bogged down with a fairly lame main villain; pretty terrible songs (at least there's only about 3-4 of them); and some odd design decisions (like having a horse that pretty clearly has the personality of a dog). One odd thing as well is that Rapunzel's hair seems to grow and shrink over the course of the movie, which really bugged me in terms of continuity. It's not a great movie, but it's far better than I expected and would have been a great deal better if Disney hadn't insisted on it being a musical.
As for How to Train your Dragon, it's the first good CG movie I've seen out of Dreamworks (no, I didn't like the Shrek movies and I haven't seen Kung Fu Panda). It doesn't look as good as Tangled, but it has a unique art design of its own. No one in this movie breaks out in singing, something I greatly appreciate after decades of Disney's animated musicals. There's some really unappealing monster design in the dragons and I really did not care for the voice of the main character (it's the same obnoxious guy from Sorcerer's Apprentice using the same obnoxious voice), but really my only big problem with this movie is that it's extremely by-the-books. The movie goes exactly where you think it's going to go based on the general story concept, and it doesn't really do much to surprise. That said, I was very happy with the fact that the overly-sappy ending was still somewhat bittersweet, as for once there actually is a negative consequence for the hero's actions in the story.
I don't think I'd watch either of these movies again, but both are fine movies in their own right despite not being particularly memorable.