Review Tales

Everyone has their own bracket for what they consider Pixar’s Golden Age. For me, Pixar’s run from 1995 to 2010, was the studio at its prime. I’m old enough to remember a 10 year stretch where no other animated movie looked as cutting-edge as Pixar movies. I remember when every original Pixar release filled you with uncontained anticipation that you were gonna see something life altering. Young me would never believe it if you told him Pixar would be culturally irrelevant in animation this decade. Now, Pixar isn’t actually dead, but the studio does appear to be riddled with a disease whose symptoms include mediocrity. I shall attempt to carry out an autopsy on my beloved Pixar, and check for signs of remission, if any.

The Essence of Golden Age Pixar

Before you accuse me of being nostalgic, I implore you to revisit everything Pixar did from the release of Toy Story 1 and ending with the release of Toy Story 3: Golden Age Pixar allowed their characters and their worlds to be flawed and layered just like our own. It felt like there was a cohesive creative vision where it was generally the same group of people making these movies. Golden Age Pixar never sugarcoated anything.

Even in their goofier movies, they all had moments that genuinely felt grounded in reality. Every protagonist and villain had realistic motivations and goals the average person could get behind and for that reason, it made people actually care about the films a lot more. They used to touch on real topics such as: the decline of small-town life (Cars); climate change (Wall-E); setting down in a midlife crisis (The Incredibles); losing your family (Finding Nemo); dealing with the stressful reality of the service industry (Ratatouille); and so on. These were all simple premises but effective because the audience could relate to it.

The Impact of Up and Toy Story 3

I noticed a shift in Pixar after 2009’s Up. We all remember the unforgettable opening montage with Carl and his wife Ellie – a montage so singular that it has its own Wikipedia page. I believe the tremendous success of this emotionally heartbreaking opening has set in motion the creative direction of Pixar. Subsequent films would prioritize chasing similar emotional beats, over executing a well-rounded story with vibrant characters and bold themes. So, Toy Story 3 in 2010 had to have the tearjerking moments of the toys holding hands in the incinerator, as well as Andy leaving behind all the toys; Brave in 2012 had to have the mother bear/daughter bit tugging at the heartstrings, and so on. 

These newer Pixar movies, while competently made, are more focused on giving people an adventure to watch rather than a story to tell. They can be good, they can fun, but in terms of lasting impact they’re a flash in a pan. I admire their themes, but the actual plot elements follow a similar fetch-quest-like structure, which, despite having interesting ideas, makes the storytelling fall flat. 

The recent stories seem constructed around some feel-good emotional little moment where some emotionally insecure character has to learn that it’s okay to feel a certain way. After Up and Toy Story 3, the discourse around Pixar centered on an expectation of crying at some tearjerking scene in a cotton candy world. I am not against people wanting these “characters learning to get in touch with their emotions” stories, but must this be the case for every single original release? It is fine if one or two films go this route, but for all of them? It’s a misconception to think that Pixar became the gamechanger it was by being overly sentimental. Story used to be the priority, not moments pulling at heartstrings.

The Decline in Storytelling Quality

We see this storytelling shift reflect in the character designs of modern era Pixar. It’s as if a focus group mandated that these latter movies must have “non-threatening” designs. Modern Pixar with its wholesome artwork makes almost every character the sweetest quirkiest person in the world (even Anger and Jangles the Nightmare Clown from Inside Out look ‘safe’ enough for soccer mums to post on Facebook.) Today’s Pixar Villains are barely a thing anymore, instead it’s the personal journey or flawed main character or family dynamic that’s the antagonistic force. Remember Sid? Stinky Pete? Hopper? Randall Boggs and Mr. Waternoose? Syndrome? Skinner? These were nasty dirty bastards with a mean streak; they were villains capable of superhero genocide, scaring children, and toy taxidermy to name a few! Take, for instance, a character design like Randall: you know what kind of sniveling weasel he is with just one look at him. But that’s the trade-off with Post-Up Pixar: everything has to be feel-good, ebullient and wholesome.

The Lost Cultural Impact and the Rise of Competitors

There really was a time when every single Pixar film was a monumental event. Their brand name alone used to be enough to get butts in theatre seats. But we cannot ignore the fact that the culture has caught up with Pixar. By the 2010’s, I had pretty much lost all interest in Pixar films. For a while I attributed this loss of interest as just “growing out of animated films“, but I would find myself sneaking to watch the competition: Rango from Industrial Light & Magic; Megamind and How To Train Your Dragon trilogy from DreamWorks; as well as Spiderverse from Sony Animation were reminders that animation as a storytelling medium was still alive. I believe the bigger reason Pixar has had its share of the industry greatly cut into is just the fact the competition (Sony, DreamWorks, even Illumination Animation) has caught up, and the technology has become much more accessible. While this is certainly sad for a studio as culturally significant as Pixar, I’m at the very least glad that we have competing studios giving Pixar a run for their money.

A Critique of Post-Golden Age Pixar Films

C.S. Lewis once said, “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.” I am not opposed to emotional beats, nor am I a miserable prick who wants everything to be gloomy. But Golden Age Pixar had a balance of sentiment and cynicism. Nowadays, things are either too sentimental or too cynical:

• Monsters University could have been a solid parable about the futility of certain dreams and how sometimes it’s better to just settle for something mediocre within reach, and that even your best efforts don’t mean much in the end. Alas, it lacks that healthy balance of the original.
• Inside Out keeps the struggle internal, with Riley being her own worst enemy. The importance of allowing yourself to just be plain miserable at times because sadness is inevitable, and trying to ignore it just makes it worse, is not a bad message. But I swear there are at least three SpongeBob Squarepants episodes that do it better. There’s one where SpongeBob had those little people in his mind and one of them actually said “We don’t even exist. We’re just a clever visual metaphor used to personify the abstract concept of thought.”? That joke is actually way funnier than anything I’ve from Inside Out so far.
• Coco‘s central conflict seems to be about how simple misunderstandings can ripple to cause trauma for generations. There’s also something in there about never meeting your heroes because they’ll inevitably let you down. But honestly, that’s me projecting meaning into the text, since there isn’t much in the text to support this.
• Cars 3 could work as a metaphor for athletes aging out of their sport and no longer being able to keep up with the young bloods, forcing them to accept a coaching role from the sidelines to cheer on the young upstarts instead. Even if you reach your dreams and make it big, you’ll one day get too old and weak to keep doing what you love and have to watch somebody else do it instead. Basically, Rush’s song “Losing It” as a movie. But there’s still that missing balance to really let this theme sink in.
• Soul is a parable about how we’re all so jaded and miserable in our lives that we’ve forgotten the simplest joys of being alive, while also basically ignoring each other to look only at ourselves. I actually really liked this movie and felt it was the closest of the new movies to old Pixar. Not because of any sappy scene that makes people cry but because it dealt with themes of life and death with both the perspectives of an adult and a child.
• Elemental is the worst offender to me. Feels like they thought up an idea for a cool animated short and didn’t have anything better to make into a movie.

I wanna reiterate: these are NOT bad movies. I merely seek to highlight a slow regression in what was once the greatest animation studio of the West. 

Disney’s Influence and the Creative Strain on Pixar

For a while, it seemed like Pixar was doing all the creative movies and its parent company Disney was just living off of its past successes and its tween-oriented TV channel. 

But somewhere along the way, this dynamic has reversed. Disney became the one making all the big, new movies that everyone loves again and Pixar is just stuck in a rut. In Pixar’s defense, they never wanted to make sequels. Disney was the only party interested, and once they bought all of Pixar, they started churning out the sequels. 

When the merger with Disney happened, it hampered their entire production line. So many staff were moved from Pixar to Disney and so many from Disney to Pixar. The blurring of the lines wasn’t just in the movies, it was in the creators. People who had previously been technicians or animators were now promoted and put in charge of writing and were collaborating with the same people from Disney who specialized in rehashing old ideas instead of actually writing original content. You cannot tell me this didn’t have an overall profound effect on the product.

The Decline of a Once-Great Studio

I am reminded of the Ship of Theseus thought experiment: “If all the parts of a ship are gradually replaced, at what point does it cease to be the original ship and become a new one?” Today’s Pixar is Pixar only in name and appearance, the metaphorical ship can still sail the waters, but not nearly as well as the original legendary ship, as what made it legendary in the first place, was its original components, which have been long replaced. 

It’s like the studio is now riding off the success of past movies and sporting their endorsement from Disney, making them pretty much invincible to criticism, making mediocre movies seem a lot better because no one would dare to criticize the great Pixar. 

Pixar was the animation studio that pioneered 3D computer/animation. In 1994, the original animators had lunch where they discussed ideas that eventually became A Bug’s Life, Monsters Inc, Finding Nemo and Wall-E. I think Pixar needs to have another lunch, and I would gladly foot the bill if it means the resurrection of a studio that shaped my formative years.