“Over/Under”: Pixar Edition
I’m known for my controversial opinions on subjective things that don’t matter. Movies, music, foods, whatever.
In order to bring more of myself into my writing while covering well-worn ground tread by sites like Cracked.com and clickbait galore, I’m introducing a new feature called “Over/Under.” In these posts, I’ll be going through some lists and sharing my thoughts on why each item is overrated or underrated. I’ll be judging how others think about the items through impression and by being alive at a time when the internet is what it is.
I just finished watching Inside Out with my son, and he loved it. Spoiler, that one is rated exactly as well as it deserves. Other Pixar films, less so, so here is my “Over/Under” list of all Pixar films to date. I’ll discuss them in chronological order and then put my definitive ranking at the end.
Toy Story: overrated
Toy Story rightly deserves credit for transforming animation through its, at the time, cutting edge use of computer animation, though it does owe a lot to the TV show pioneer of computer animation, ReBoot. Toy Story set the bar high from a technical standpoint, just as Pixar has continued to do with every new release since.
It of course helps that the movie tells a very good story with memorable characters and a sense of humour, all of which work for both adults and children. This crossover approach has remained part of the Pixar brand and has also influenced animated films since. Shrek (extremely overrated) gets a lot of credit for taking the humour up a notch, but Toy Story got the ball rolling.
The Toy Story hype was huge when it came out, so it’s understandable that its high regard has persisted through nostalgia. It’s an alright movie, but way overrated. The problem is the weight of emotion that the story wants us to put on the toys. I covered some of the implications of that in detail elsewhere, but not in terms of how that demand undermines the story. Woody insists that Andy needs him; by implication, being a lost toy would deprive Woody of a sense of purpose, a theme that persists in the sequels. But does the story not allow the possibility that kids can lose toys and get over it?
Yet, that’s kind of the point. The real drama of the film is that Woody is scared of being replaced by Buzz. Since these are just mass-produced toys (as the second movie makes very clear) it’s hard to actually care about their fates despite how much the movie wants us care. I’m pulled out of it because this is a world where the toys exist only to serve people as toys. And yet the toys have full lives of their own. Am I to believe an ownerless toy can’t find ways to exist without a human? The third movie covers this in ways that become increasingly silly, yet also draws toys out of being simply toys. Except that the bad toys become bad because they were abandoned, so really they can’t be complete without a human? But what about all the unsold and broken and lost toys? The movies keep on drawing our attention to those possibilities without convincingly exploring the implications. I dunno, none of it makes sense to me on an emotional level, and I just can’t get behind the franchise as a result.
The premise falls apart most completely with framing Sid as a villain; this is a kid who loves playing with toys as much as anyone, albeit in his own sadistic way. Except it’s NOT sadistic since he doesn’t know toys are alive! Why would he think so? Sure, he’s a bad kid for stealing his sister’s toys, but otherwise he’s only modifying his own toys and ones he finds. He’s a creative, inventive child with perhaps disturbing taste. When the movie wants us to be against him for “hurting” toys, it’s saying that the toys after all are what matter, not people. Yet the toys only matter in relation to people, but only if people play with them in the right way?
Over and again the movie wants us to understand these toys, their purpose, and their plight, in a precise way. This helps to drive the plot, but too many inconsistencies of logic and emotion keep me from liking the movie or its sequels all that much.
A Bug’s Life: correctly rated
Does anyone care one way or the other about this one? It’s fine. Pretty simple and conventional story of the outsider proving his worth by solving the problem in his own way through unconventional means. Standard kids’ stuff. Sort of the sophomore slump of Pixar films. It’s competent and looks good, but over time has faded into near obscurity as a result of so many more, better, and unique Pixar films coming out.
Toy Story 2: overrated
Better than the original because it more fully locks in on the toys as individuals with their own values who can debate their purpose. But these movies only work because of the funnier side of the premise, and this movie does great work in that respect with better jokes than the original. It’s effective as a sequel by ramping up the stakes and exploring a new angle to the premise by way of thinking about how collectibles fit into the world of toys.
The story chooses to go even more emotional than the original, and this is its problem. Jessie’s arc crystalizes the idea that all toys should want to be played with by children, and any feeling to the contrary must be the result of trauma, especially abandonment. Buzz in the first movie, and then Stinky Pete in 2, have a conception of a different kind of life only because they’ve never been special to a child, so they are in a sense broken as well. All of this is absurd because they are toys. Woody screams it to Buzz in the first film and the franchise proceeds to nonstop undermine that claim THROUGH WOODY!!!!
Monsters Inc.: correctly rated
It feels like people used to like this, but the love has dropped off over time. But then there are people who seem to still love it. It’s good enough, a little hamfisted in its emotion at times, but what Pixar movie isn’t? The worst example in this film is the closing shot of Sully peeking through the door with the sappy music.
For the most part, though, it’s a nice romp driven by Mike and Sully’s push-and-pull dynamic and the creative worldbuilding. Much more internally coherent than Toy Story since, instead of creating a completely new dynamic between monsters and humans, it draws on existing ideas about monsters in the closet and explores why those monsters would be there. The story is elevated by then taking this to a larger commentary on corruption. And then it’s about how to choose radical innovation rather than over-commit to old technology while increasing its inherent harm.
That laughter is more powerful than scream is a little convenient, but then so is the relative cost efficiency of solar power.
Finding Nemo: overrated
A rousing adventure. A father learns that being overprotective can be damaging to a child’s self-esteem and even his own. Plenty of cute moments and good gags with memorable side characters. It’s also a lot easier to care about animals than toys.
Nothing to dislike here, but people talk about this one like it’s one of the greatest movies ever. It’s fun and sits comfortably alongside plenty of other good kids’ movies. A little too cute for its own good (those turtles?), and Dory’s memory problem is too selective to work as a plot device.
The Incredibles: incredibly overrated
I’ve seen this one talked about as the best Pixar film. Really?
The premise is clever: take the Fantastic Four, shuffle up their powers, mix in a little Watchmen and then make it about a dysfunctional family and a dad’s midlife crisis. And then big superhero action in the second half.
The execution is the problem. At every turn, the movie wants us to know how clever it is—the monologuing villain who comments on his own tendency to monologue is funny, right? It’s also insufferable. If it were only the villain who was so broad, I’d let it slide. But every character is screaming that they’re both a trope and a sensitive human being with real problems, with scripting and line delivery that’s full of cliches and unsubtle messaging. The mopey teenage girl who feels invisible and can also turn invisible. The hyperactive boy who can run and is just generally obnoxious. The mother who feels stretched thin. The father who is strong but emotionally stunted. It’s smart on paper, but exhausting on film.
The legacy of Incredibles hurts it too. Sure, the cape thing is insightful, and “if everyone’s super, no one is,” and all that hit the first time, but now it’s all so tired.
Cars: correctly rated
The most egregious entry in the Pixar series of movies about things that shouldn’t talk but do.
I have a million questions about how the world of Cars works—why are some vehicles analogous to animals and others humans? Why are there genders? Who made the cars? Why do they eat food?
Everyone knows this movie was made to sell toys to little boys; 17 years and 2 sequels later, it’s still doing its job.
Ratatouille: underrated
Everyone seems to think this one’s underrated, so maybe that means it isn’t.
Great premise that’s largely played for its humour and novelty. Even the big emotional moments are funny in their way, like the food critic’s flashback to eating ratatouille. It’s a rare Pixar film that doesn’t overdo the emotion to the point of cringe. It does rely on the tired trope of the main characters’ egos getting so big that they have a massive fight at the height of their success, but that’s excusable in a kid’s movie. The plotting may be formulaic, but the story details are whimsical and well-told.
Wall-E: correctly rated.
I saw this in theatres and declared it the greatest movie to date—excepting UHF of course. It was quickly dethroned the following week when I saw The Dark Knight. My opinion of both has diminished a bit (I like Dark Knight Rises more), but the first 30-40 minutes of Wall-E is an undisputed cinematic triumph.
Up: correctly rated
I cry every time at the beginning and then again at the end. I’m getting teary eyed right now.
The middle’s not as strong, but yeah, I mean, come on. Top notch filmmaking.
“Yeah, so you cry, and then when you see the dancing, you cry again.”
Toy Story 3: correctly rated
You know why this one works? Not the un-sad furnace scene. Not the tragic story of abandoned toys. Not the sappiness of passing on toys to younger children.
This one is just funnier and more fun than any other Pixar movie.
Cars 2: underrated
My son was really into all the Cars movies for a while, but this one got the most play. Maybe it’s Stockholm syndrome, but I find the most to love here, whether it’s taking the absurdity of the Cars universe to the extreme or running through tropey action sequences, Cars 2 knows that another dumb racing movie would be pointless and does something unexpected instead.
Did anyone want to see Mater take the lead in a Cars movie? No. Are spy spoofs overdone? Sure. Are there great line readings from every character that wasn’t in the first movie? Absolutely.
Brave: The most underrated of all
This is an oddball among Pixar movies, ironically because it is more conventional in its premise, set as it is in the world of fairy tales. Perhaps that less original or ambitious premise turns off the usual Pixar sycophants, but everyone is wrong about Brave. It is the best Pixar movie. Great characters, satisfying plot. It invests emotion with more restraint than usual for Pixar despite meriting it the most. There’s humour, but not too much as to undermine the seriousness of the story.
Frozen got a lot of praise for flipping the fairy tale script and showing true love as familial love between sisters. Brave figured that out a year earlier with love between a mother and daughter. It wasn’t a twist in this case, sure, but it was powerful nonetheless.
Also, in the pantheon of beautiful looking Pixar films, Brave is easily the most gorgeous.
Monsters University: correctly rated
Frat movies as a genre rightfully died out in the early 2000s. So who thought it was a good idea to do Animal House for kids in 2013?! And as a prequel to the beloved Monsters Inc., no less.
Everyone hates this one. Not because it’s bad, but because it shouldn’t exist.
Inside Out: correctly rated
A charming, thoughtful, beautiful filmic representation of child psychology and how our emotions function. Psychologists love this one. I was very surprized at how much my 4-year-old loved it. Affecting, clever. The 5 emotions overact, but in ways appropriate to what they represent. Top tier all around.
The Good Dinosaur: correctly rated
Have you seen me?
Did anybody even see this movie? I didn’t. Pixar didn’t seem to want anyone to see it as they released it just 5 months after Inside out and 7 months before Finding Dory.
Finding Dory: underrated
I like it more than Finding Nemo. Dory is kind of annoying, but the octopus is great. The car chase/escape scene is beyond silly, but if you agreed with that statement, why were you sad about some old toys getting incinerated?
Cars 3: underrated
Pixar heard the complaints about 2 and made this one entirely about racing. But it’s also about aging gracefully, being humble, supporting young people, and great montages. I’ve watched the opening sequence up until when Lightning crashes (“like a rolling thunder chasing the wind”) too many times to count. Man does Pixar know how to start a movie!
Do people consider this the best of the Cars movies? They should. Though I like 2 more.
Coco: overrated
Some people love this one. I appreciate Pixar branching out to non-Western story inspiration, but this one just didn’t do anything for me. The story felt kind of obvious with a lot less sense of fun than is typical for Pixar.
Incredibles 2: correctly rated
More of the same as the first one. The dad’s feeling emasculated while his wife gets to be a hero again. You can make the excuse that the movie is meant to evoke an old-school American sitcom vibe, but the gender politics still feel super dated for 2018. The movie tries to agree, but it also wants us to like the dad, and I don’t.
I’ve seen reviews that harp on the series’ accidentally Objectivist politics and while maybe that reading is simplistic, there’s a lot to support it. With the sequel, reception seems to have caught up to my bad feelings about the original.
Toy Story 4: correctly rated?
I didn’t see it. I also don’t hear much about it, so maybe it was one sequel too many for a series that relies on a very shaky premise. At least the Cars movies know that their world makes no sense.
Onward: criminally underrated
You haven’t seen it. I have. It’s great. Go watch it.
Brilliant premise: a generic fantasy setting but they also have modern technology. Being a DnD nerd is synonymous with being a history nerd.
In the post-Frozen boom of affecting stories about women’s relationships with women, this is a rare deeply emotional boys’ story. It’s about 2 brothers who learn to respect and love each other while coming to terms with the death of their father. But it’s also a fantasy role playing game. I guess I’m just the perfect audience for it.
Soul: correctly rated
There’s a great story here about learning to let go of your dreams and encourage the next generation. Cars 3 did that?
An interesting approach to psychology by anthropomorphizing abstract concepts related to the mind and tracking their relation to the body. Inside Out did that? Also, that one was well-researched and represented up-to-date theory while this one is entirely speculative?
A sort of ghost story where the regrets of the dead leave a legacy on the living. Coco did that? No, but this one is about music! Oh….
Well, surely this one isn’t kinda dull in parts. No?
Soul is pretty good though. The music is great.
Luca: correctly rated
I didn’t see it but my older son did, and he liked it. I got a good student paper about it.
It’s weird that they made such a similar movie right after this one. People seem to think this one’s fine. I’m in no hurry to see it.
Turning Red: correctly rated.
This has the most cringe moments of any Pixar movie, the singing and dancing in particular. Those elements are closely tied to the movie’s exploration of pubescence, so they’re thematically appropriate at least.
This movie does an amazing job of making the fantasy element a metaphor both for Meilin’s physical development and the emotions associated with it. It’s also a story that explores a very specific immigrant experience, which is a welcome bit of detail that makes the film both contemporary and interesting. There’s a fine metacommentary in how the family shrine and Meilin’s red panda form are both objects of exoticism for western audiences. People in the movie pay to see these “foreign” objects, just as we viewers are paying to see the same things represented on screen. The film makes no judgement, but it’s something it wants us to think about.
Lightyear: overrated
This is among the worst Pixar movies (still decent though). I haven’t heard much about it one way or the other except for a lot of trolls complaining about the usual stuff, which is worse that useless as criticism.
The time travel/relativity angle is interesting enough, but the characters are mostly dull. Buzz himself is unlikeable, even after his redemptive arc. Some of the side characters are alright. The cat is of course the star of the show and the thing that makes the movie worth watching.
2 big complaints here. The first is minor: there’s an opening text that reads: “In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. It was from his favourite movie. This is that movie.” But nothing here plays like a movie from 1995, and I couldn’t help but point out how often that was true while I was watching. This bit of text makes the movie worse. It also introduces a continuity problem where Zerg says he’s Buzz’s father in Toy Story 2, yet that’s not the case in Lightyear. Just allow this to be its own movie without making it explicitly part of the Toy Story universe.
The other complaint is to do with dialogue. There’s a scene in particular where the crew sits around eating sandwiches, only Buzz notices they put the meat on the outside and the bread on the inside. They have a whole conversation about it. The scene is an obvious instance of writers reaching for some engaging dialogue to indicate camaraderie while also entertaining the audience. Someone got to write out a personal rant about what they think of sandwiches and turn it into movie dialogue. Imagine, some writer taking advantage of a public forum to air out their own silly idiosyncratic opinions about things that don’t matter!
No, but my complaint is that the scene has no bearing on the movie, is dumb, and is such a blatant shortcut to building relationships and to adding humour to a mostly serious movie. This sort of conversation happens a lot in kids movies and beyond—think the famous shawarma post-credits scene in Avengers. It’s supposed to be endearing and humanize characters while adding levity. It worked as 10 seconds after a movie and that’s it. Maybe I’m just a grump, but that whole angle on writing feels lazy to me. Lightyear smacks of it throughout.
Elemental: Underrated
Critics and viewers both seem to like this one, but the news is that this movie had the worst opening weekend of any Pixar movie to date. It doesn’t deserve that, but hey, this is the post-Covid era, and families spent their movie bucks on Mario just a few months ago.
My kids were watching the trailers for this movie on a daily basis, so of course we went to see it in theatres. This is an interesting one. It’s got the same problem as Soul in that it appears to rehash ideas from older movies. The concept of elementals living in a society together has echoes of Inside Out, and the daughter having a different dream than her dad plot plays weirdly like Kung Fu Panda. The literal fire and water romance is anyway not exactly original. The simple story also relies on a lot of scenes with no dialogue that draw attention to the beautiful visuals of the film. These are executed well, but the technology has gotten old, and there’s no wonder left to it anymore. If Pixar were still the only company making competent high budget computer-animated films, then it might hit harder, but that’s not the world we live in.
Fortunately, the straightforward plot allows for a deeply moving character story and romance that avoids most of the Pixar sins. Though there’s a lot of emotion in the story, and I did tear up near the end, the film doesn’t overstate things. This is doubly remarkable when the romantic leads’ defining traits are, respectively, excessive anger and sensitivity. With a more adult story and emphasis on visuals, the film doesn’t rely on its cuter characters or in-your-face cleverness to drive things along. Instead, it’s just a well-told romance and coming-of-age story set against a colourful backdrop. Even the commentary on immigrant experience and prejudice doesn’t feel ham-fisted, and that’s a feat for Pixar. Like Ratatouille, the intrigue of the premise allows the fairly conventional story beats to work their magic and give us satisfying character development and a good time along the way.
Pixar struggles to get the balance right within and between films, whether it’s going to focus on moving stories about romance and families or silly premises and related hi-jinx. Though the studio’s reputation seems built on the latter (in addition to pushing the frontiers of computer animation), I much prefer when they get the former just right. It’s why Brave is so perfect and it’s the best parts of Up, Turning Red, Onward and more. Elemental shows the studio at a point where they’re comfortable enough to just do the emotion with confidence and few gimmicks.
My Pixar ranking (best to worst):
Brave
Up
Ratatouille
Onward
Wall-E
Inside Out
Turning Red
Elemental
Monsters Inc.
Toy Story 3
Soul
Cars 2
Toy Story 2
Cars 3
Finding Dory
Coco
Finding Nemo
Toy Story
Lightyear
Cars
Incredibles
Monsters University
Incredibles 2
A Bug’s Life
Unranked:
The Good Dinosaur
Luca
Toy Story 4