We started this series last April because IGN published a terrible Pixar ranking following the release of Turning Red. We come out the other side 15 months later having relived our childhoods, experienced new masterpieces of animation, and learned a probably unnecessary amount of history and lore behind Pixar and its creative minds. We have no regrets.

In this final post (until Elio comes out next March), we’ll wrap the series up, go over our final rankings, and discuss our favorite and least favorite parts of the Pixar canon.

Let’s get into it.

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Final Rankings

Now that we’ve each seen and ranked all 27 movies, we can determine a consensus between the four of us. Ideally, we could take each of our four ratings out of 10 and average them, but each of us rated movies in a somewhat different fashion (especially David, who used a relative scale whereas the other three of us used some form of absolute scale). So that’s not gonna work.

Instead, let’s do it AP Poll style: for each of the four of us, our first-place movie gets 27 points, second-place gets 26 points, and so on and so forth, all the way down to one point for the 27th-place movie. If we have any ties, we’ll break them by whichever movie earned the highest ranking from any individual voter.

That looks like this:

Coco is our favorite movie, followed by Toy Story 2 and The Incredibles to round out the podium. Cars 2 was the least favorite movie of everyone but David, who put six movies behind it—just enough to place it above The Good Dinosaur in our overall rankings, which I think is fair. Cars 2 is usually at least considered “so bad it’s good”; The Good Dinosaur is just brutal.

Let’s check in to see how our individual rankings stack up to the consensus ranking. For comparison’s sake, we’ll also throw in the IGN ranking that started it all.

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The IGN ranking was released in response to Turning Red and has not been updated for Lightyear or Elemental, so those films are absent from their list. Even without them, we can notice some pretty big discrepancies between our list and theirs. Most obviously, they placed Cars 3 (a good movie) behind Cars 2 (a terrible one), leading Leah and me to believe none of their reviewers have ever actually seen Cars 3. They also have Toy Story 3 significantly ahead of Toy Story 2—an odd choice considering they’re the same movie in many ways—and are obscenely low on Turning Red, placing Incredibles 2 and even A Bug’s Life ahead of it.

Here’s how each of us ranked each movie relative to our consensus and relative to the IGN list.

Maddy has three of the top four farthest picks from The Low Major consensus, as she placed Luca and Toy Story 4 each 14 spots above and Ratatouille (her #1 movie) 12 spots above. David has the other two farthest picks in the top five: Cars is 13 spots above consensus and The Incredibles is 11 spots below.

As for the IGN list…lol, lmao.

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Superlatives

Favorite Individual Performance

Eli: Tom Hanks and Tim Allen as Woody and Buzz Lightyear (Toy Story franchise)

I really couldn’t pick just one. Tim Allen was right: the Toy Story movies are made by Woody and Buzz playing off each other. It’s central to the first film and even though films 2 through 4 split them apart for a lot of the runtime, each of them still include some great moments between the two. That said, in retrospect, I think the Woody-Buzz relationship taking a backseat in Toy Story 4 is a lot of why that movie fails for me, and that the two are seemingly permanently split up makes me fear the worst for a potential Toy Story 5.

Woody and Buzz were my childhood in the aughts and my adolescence in the early ‘10s. And what keeps me coming back to those first three Toy Story movies as an adult is the unbreakable duo of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen—two great actors at the top of their game—and their chemistry that just jumps off the screen.

Leah: Tim Allen as Buzz Lightyear (Toy Story)

The original performance is iconic. Tim Allen nailed the humor in Pixar’s first movie, and with worse acting, I don’t think the original Toy Story would be so beloved.

Maddy: The many roles of John Ratzenberger

I love when studios do things like this: having a voice actor appear in (almost) every film. Sad it seems to be over now, but we’ll always have the first 22 films.

David: Tom Hanks as Woody (Toy Story francise)

It’s an incredibly tight race between Hanks and Tim Allen, but for me, Tom Hanks plays that dry humor so brilliantly, a perfect foil to Buzz’s head-in-the-stars attitude for so much of the first three movies.

Favorite Song

Eli: “Un Poco Loco” (Coco)

This song was the point in Coco when I realized I might like the movie more than Toy Story 2. It’s honestly a perfect kids’ movie song: silly and impossibly catchy while fitting perfectly within the theming and plot arc of the movie. Talking about this song almost does it a disservice; it deserves to be experienced within the context of Coco.

Leah: “Remember Me” (Coco)

This song is at the heart of Coco. It’s so versatile thematically and creates a very emotional viewing experience.

Maddy: “It Only Takes a Moment” (WALL-E)

If this was only original songs, “Remember Me” from Coco would be the winner. But if we’re including any song from Pixar films, the inclusion of “It Only Takes a Moment” from Hello, Dolly! in WALL-E is such masterful placement, song choice, and execution—just one of the few moments that make the first half of WALL-E the best of Pixar.

David: “Our Town” (Cars)

James Taylor is delightful in most every scenario, but this one encapsulated the driving force behind Radiator Springs so well—and with it, the central conflict of what I would argue is so much of the Cars franchise: the idea that you have to know where you came from in order to go forward. Always makes me just a little bit teary.

Favorite Instrumental

Eli: “McQueen and Sally” (Cars)

Man. I listen to this and I just wanna take a nice scenic drive through the mountains. Pixar nailed this soundtrack and Randy Newman nailed this score, but this number in particular was the one I found myself humming along to while I rewatched this movie for Pixar Pints. An all-timer.

Leah: “Nemo Egg” (Finding Nemo)

It’s a gorgeous piece of music that underlies some of the most emotional moments of Finding Nemo. It’s stuck with me for about 20 years, in a way I don’t think anything else from Pixar has.

Maddy: The entire score of The Incredibles

The theme alone carries the instrumental, but the rest of the film also has a great score.

David: “Define Dancing” (WALL-E)

I have never seen a song so beautifully depict the elation of love realized.

Favorite Character

Eli: Helen Parr / Elastigirl (Incredibles franchise)

Even if I wasn’t trying to reuse answers, neither Woody nor Buzz would be my pick here. Woody is a big jerk in the original Toy Story and his decision at the end of Toy Story 4 makes no sense, while Buzz leans a little too far into comic relief throughout the series (not to mention he’s virtually absent for much of Toy Story 3 as he’s been switched to Demo Mode).

Instead, I will pick the best Incredible (and the only one Brad Bird kept consistent between the original and the sequel). Elastigirl is a superhero in every sense of the word. In addition to being a literal superhero who’s completely kickass on her own merit, she’s a super wife, a super mom, and a super icon.

The Incredibles was about Helen just as much as it was about Bob, if not even more so, and while Incredibles 2 got a lot (a loooooot) wrong, the decision to make her the star of the show was absolutely for the better.

Leah: Ember Lumen (Elemental)

She had one of the best character arcs in the Pixar canon, and I think she’d be one of the most fun to draw.

Maddy: Remy (Ratatouille)

I love that little rat. He just like me for real. Go chef rat go!

David: Lightning McQueen (Cars franchise)

I can’t help it. I love his arc over three movies, I love the way he grows, and he’s a kickass car. What’s not to like?

Least Favorite Character

Eli: Arlo (The Good Dinosaur)

The first act of The Good Dinosaur is Arlo getting tortured. The second and third acts of The Good Dinosaur are Arlo being incompetent. Arlo bafflingly gets rewarded for this at the end of the movie.

I wanted to pick a plot-relevant character here. If I wasn’t restricting myself in that fashion, I would have considered Gerald from Finding Dory; he was that caricaturishly offensive disability-stereotype sea lion. But even then, I think Arlo takes the cake for how badly he breaks the entirety of The Good Dinosaur as its supposed protagonist.

Leah: Ercole Visconti (Luca)

Most punchable face in all of Pixar. Seriously, this dude was obnoxious every second he was on screen. Easily the most pathetic Pixar villain. If I never have to think about him again, it’ll be too soon.

Maddy: Tow Mater (specifically Cars 2)

I hate Cars 2. I hate Cars 2 Mater. He is annoying and awful. Fuck John Lasseter.

David: Gerald (Finding Dory)

Given Disney’s historical propensity in recent years to censor content that could be deemed offensive, I’m pretty baffled this one got through. Christ.

Most Surprising Film

Eli: Ratatouille

I’m ignoring Elemental here because, while I did enjoy that film a lot more than I thought I would, I only felt that way in the first place because the movie was marketed horrendously.

I remember liking Ratatouille as a kid. I’m pretty sure I saw it in theatres. The message of “anyone can cook” is obviously good not just for kids but also generally for everyone, a feat Pixar excelled at in its prime.

As an adult, I honestly hate it. More than that, I hate that almost everyone I know loves it, causing me to bite my tongue whenever it comes up in conversation. My 6/10 score might indicate that I think it’s okay, but that’s mostly because Pixar’s animation is so consistently amazing, and their visual aesthetics so pleasing, that it takes the rest of the movie really stinking for my overall score to fall below 7. And boy, does this movie stink.

I don’t want to repeat my initial review of Ratatouille too much, but I’ll double down on one thing: they absolutely botched the anthropomorphization of the rats. The story wants you to imagine them as humans from underprivileged backgrounds, but the fact that they’re inherently considered subhuman by most humans is the entire point of the movie. It evokes minority race relations in the West to a frankly uncomfortable degree, and the payoff doesn’t justify it at all.

Let’s talk about that payoff. I mentioned it a little in my review, but I was short on characters, so I don’t think I said all I really wanted to. In a good movie about people from underrepresented communities earning their flowers, Anton’s review of Remy’s ratatouille would have focused on the chef and his background just as much as the food he cooked, and—given the seemingly tremendous clout he had—that review would push Remy to new heights and afford his community some respect they’d previously never experienced. This movie cannot do that because, again, Remy is a literal rat. So instead they give us this B.S. half-measure wherein Remy gets to do his thing but it has to stay a secret; meanwhile, Anton loses all his clout. It’s gross and it really serves to undermine the movie’s entire message. Anyone can cook, just…not for everyone. And don’t you dare suggest otherwise.

Leah: Coco

I wasn’t expecting to get a new favorite Pixar movie. It had the most immersive story of anything we watched—the best kind of surprise.

Maddy: Elemental

The most recent one, yes, but considering everything that was going against it heading into its release, it was definitely the most surprising film. Cars 3 is a close second here.

David: Monsters, Inc.

Up until we rewatched this series, this film sat toward the bottom of my rankings, and I’m mentioning it here because I found it far more heartwarming and enjoyable than I remembered. Not really sure why it never held that weight when I was younger, but upon reflection, I think about it far more positively than I did previously.

Best of the Review Categories

Aesthetic

Eli: Elemental
Leah: Turning Red
Maddy: Luca
David: Elemental

Animation

Eli: Inside Out
Leah: Elemental
Maddy: Turning Red
David: Inside Out

Story

Eli: Coco
Leah: Coco
Maddy: Ratatouille
David: Cars

Characters

Eli: The Incredibles
Leah: Coco
Maddy: WALL-E
David: WALL-E

Acting

Eli: Toy Story 3
Leah: Toy Story
Maddy: The Incredibles
David: Toy Story 2

Music

Eli: Coco
Leah: Coco
Maddy: Coco
David: Soul

That’s all, folks!

Thanks for joining us for the past two summers! We hope you had as much fun reliving these films as we did.

We have another fun film retrospective series in the works, but this series will be back in March 2024 for Pint #28: Elio!

Welcome back to Pixar Pints, our two-summer-long journey through all 27 Pixar films in release order.

I get it. I get why everyone clowned on this movie from the jump—even before the jump. I get why it’s had the worst non-pandemic box office performance from Pixar in ages. It’s obvious.

Disney/Pixar marketed this as an extremely basic “what if X had feelings” movie long after that had gone from a meme about Pixar’s creative strategy to an unironic (and completely illegitimate) criticism of the way they make movies. Years after people were tired of seeing Pixar promote “Toy Story, but for cars or fish or internal feelings”, their pre-release marketing for Elemental was almost universally “Toy Story, but for elements”.

Well, that and a baffling fixation on an unimportant side character whom they cringe-inducingly1 tried to make a thing. They sponsored multiple hashtags for Clod on Twitter and produced a hilariously terrible viral video of people cheering for his introduction in a theatre, only for him to get, like, two minutes of screentime, tops? As comic relief, not even central to the plot. Nonsensical.

But what if we look past all that? What is the actual movie, Elemental, even about? If all you knew of the movie was what you saw in the trailers—which describes most of the audience, including me—you had no idea. Would you like to find out?

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Let’s get into it.

Elemental quick facts

Release date: June 16, 2023 | Director: Peter Sohn | Music: Thomas Newman

Starring: Leah Lewis (Ember), Mamoudou Athie (Wade), Ronnie del Carmen (Bernie), Shila Ommi (Cinder), Wendi McLendon-Covey (Gale), Catherine O’Hara (Brook)

John Ratzenberger as: He’s…gonna be back for Toy Story 5, right? C’mon Pixar, don’t do me like this. I mean, don’t make Toy Story 5 either, but free Ratzenberger, dammit!

Budget: $200 million | Box office: $190.6 million and counting

Academy Awards: We’ll see, I guess.

Eli

This is the first time I’d seen this movie…obviously.

Aesthetic: 10/10 | Pixar has mastered the art of anthropomorphizing everything in the universe and making it look stunning, unique, and thought-provoking in a world choc-full of puns and visual gags. It’s no different here. Element City, clearly an analog to Manhattan, feels lived-in. It looks and feels like a city I’d want to explore and experience for myself. And the character designs here are iconic: aesthetically pleasing, instantly recognizable, and fitting for the personalities they represent.

Animation: 10/10 | Despite the “four elements” theming, Elemental centers on just fire and water, and you can tell Pixar put a ton of effort into ensuring those two elements were done well. They nailed it. The movie seamlessly blends the classic cartoonish Pixar style with depictions of these elements acting in a way that’s so natural as to look photoreal. The pièce de résistance here is the scene where Wade carries Ember (fire) in a bubble (air) through a flooded (water) subway station so she can see the Vivisteria flowers (earth). There’s very little Pixar does in this day and age that’s inventive. It’s hard not to compare Pixar’s stuck-in-neutral visuals to Across the Spider-Verse, a groundbreaking work of animation that released two weeks earlier. I think about how Pixar and Dreamworks burst onto the scene 25 years ago with their blockbusting 3D features and almost immediately gave Hollywood the misconception that nobody liked 2D animation anymore. We don’t need to let history repeat itself. Pixar’s current style is great for what they set out to do with their films, just as 2D animation wasn’t actually “bad” in the ‘90s/’00s.

Story: 9/10 | If you zoom out and don’t nitpick every little thing about how the elements interact, this is a touching story about immigration, generational trauma, institutional racism/classism, and coming of age in America. The pacing is pretty odd and it sometimes seems like the creative team didn’t know how to cleanly transition between plot events, but the bigger picture is still clear as day. Fire people are made to live in a slum, the neglect of which leads directly to a disaster striking the neighborhood. Ember struggles with whether she has any right to discard her father’s wishes for her given how much he sacrificed to build their family. Wade struggles with understanding her struggles because he grew up sheltered from anything like them, a plot point that hit me pretty hard as a minority marrying into a relatively well-off white family. This movie forces you to consider the inherent value from people from all different backgrounds and upbringings, how allowing them to blend together makes for a rather beautiful society.

Characters: 8/10 | My primary gripe with…the entire movie, really, is that the first time we’re introduced to Wade, he’s just bawling nonstop for almost a minute. Such an introduction makes me think the entire premise is going to be played for laughs, but the movie itself is super earnest, making this just a misstep in presentation. I can see how it’d be annoying that Ember loses her temper a lot in increasingly unhelpful ways, but there’s a reason for it: she’s harboring feelings even she doesn’t understand until near the end of the film. It made sense in context. Ember’s parents are good representations of well-meaning but set-in-their-ways elders.

Acting: 10/10 | I was sold on all of the characters at every point in the movie.

Music: 10/10 | They got “Kernkraft 400” lmao. Aside from that, the score is just astounding. The best moments in the movie are 100x more memorable because of it.

Final score: 10/10 | This movie’s marketing is a shame. It played into basically none of the central tenets of the film, instead opting for cheap gags on its visual premise. I went into the theatre not sure what to expect and I came out having been moved to tears.

Leah

Aesthetic: 10/10 | Stylizing water and fire is difficult to do well. I noticed the credits listed three people for “Fire Stylization Research”, and I must salute their hard work because the stylization looked amazing! The way the elements are incorporated into the character design is seamless and clever, and the setting hits the right mix of reality and the fantastical.

Animation: 10/10 | Animating water and fire is also difficult to do well, and this movie does both, incorporating those elements (heh) into character movements and the environment around them.

Story: 9/10 | I’m with Eli; the marketing did this movie dirty. From the beginning, this movie is obviously about immigration. It’s a touching coming-of-age love story about a second generation immigrant. The ending where Ember’s dad bows back to her had me crying; it was such a beautiful way to conclude her arc. The main problem people might have with this movie is the logic behind the elements and the way they aren’t a one-to-one representation of different ethnicities/cultures. The metaphor worked for me because Ember and Wade discover that touching each other doesn’t hurt either of them but instead creates something new. They aren’t actually a danger to each other; they only thought they were. There are some clear parallels between that and how prejudice functions in our world.

Characters: 10/10 | Ember was a fantastic protagonist; her arc felt realistic and satisfying. I loved Wade as a love interest; he was funny and endearing. I feel like the two of them brought out the best in each other and had great chemistry. I also really like Ember’s parents. They played a key role in the story and were fun to watch.

Acting: 10/10 | Great performances from the cast!

Music: 10/10 | The score for this movie was beautiful, helping create the unique atmosphere of this world.

Final score: 10/10 | Easily a 10. Gorgeous and touching, this movie tells a beautiful story about a second generation immigrant coming of age with a fantastical twist. Don’t write this one off yet.

Maddy

Aesthetic: 8/10 | Animation: 9/10 | Story: 8/10 | Characters: 8/10 | Acting: 8/10 | Music: 7/10

The last few Pints, I’ve talked about how Pixar has redefined their studio for modern audiences, producing some fantastic films in the process. Elemental is happily included with those films. Yet, at the same time, so much is holding back Pixar. This movie has been dogged on for months because awful marketing has made people just not overly excited for it.

But, in the end, this is a very fun and thoughtful film. I was much more invested in the immigration story and Ember’s relationship with her parents than I was in the romance between Ember and Wade, but that doesn’t mean it was poorly written or anything. In fact, though there is some messier writing here and there when working through the story arcs, I think Pixar’s writing is really hitting its stride. More than that, it’s fun! It’s a fun film that’s getting so much unnecessary flak for just existing, for being tied to Disney and Pixar.

During our time over these two summers with Pixar Pints, we’ve watched and reviewed so many movies considered the cream of the crop for Western animation. While great and all, it puts a burden on future films to live up to these unreasonable standards set by the past. And Disney, when these films aren’t reaching those heights, will just throw the film to the fire with misleading marketing (that you barely see) and hope it somehow makes its money back as budgets balloon into orbit. Elemental won’t hold a candle to the likes of The Incredibles or Coco, but it’s carving its own path: a new path for Pixar into the future, a creative-driven future with deeper and more emotional films drawing inspiration from the real world.

I’m excited for Pixar’s future. As long as it’s allowed to be free and its creatives get the chance to shine with amazing stories and gorgeous art.

Just stop fucking them over, Disney. Please.

Final score: 48/60 or 8/10

David

Aesthetic: They did the four elements pretty damn brilliantly here. I think the earth/trees are the weakest set, personally, but that’s a pretty high bar that they clear with ease. It’s a city that feels alive.

Animation: See above—unbelievable work to portray everything as beautifully as they have.

Story: Here’s my thing. The main plotline is a beautiful story about immigration and adjusting to a world that isn’t friendly to you, especially tied into the fabric of a coming-of-age story, but I also think it winds up being an Achilles heel. Too many plotlines go entirely unresolved or ignored, and it feels like a lot of cuts were made for time, but it doesn’t feel like the scissors were wielded with nearly enough care.

Characters: I think they do a good job here. Embers parents play immigrant elders that have their traditions and don’t like deviation from those traditions quite well. Ember and Wade have a great dynamic from the off, and a lot of that’s due to the way in which both are structured. I didn’t love how Wade was introduced, and I think that a lot of his character growth is left unsolved or outright ignored, but he’s lovable and a doof in the best way. Insanely strong Midwestern vibes from the entire water family, which I can’t help but love.

Acting: No complaints.

Music: Gorgeously scored. I loved that each element had its own music cues, and the way that instruments were applied only served to bolster the movie in all the right ways.

Final score: 9/10 | I am furious with how this was marketed, because they so massively undersold what wound up being an unbelievably heartwarming movie by turning every preview into a nightmare standup routine. This is one of the best things Pixar has put out in a very, very long time.

Final notes

Aaaaand we’re done! For now. After a wrap-up post later this week, Pixar Pints will return shortly following the release of Elio on March 1, 2024. Thank you for accompanying us on this journey from our childhoods to the present day.

The last 27 posts have led up to this: the final ranking. Enjoy.

Next up: Elio (but, again, expect a wrap-up post later this week)

Y’know, I actually grew up watching Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins (2000) on VHS. I have generally fond memories of it. I still remember the alien character designs, the voice acting, and several lines of dialogue despite not having seen it in probably two decades. That might be because I was a kid when I watched it, and kids eat more stuff up and form core memories more easily, but hey: it stuck with me.

Probably the best thing working in favor of that movie (and the ensuing series) was that they got Tim Allen to voice Buzz, even though this version of Buzz was a real human space ranger and not a toy. It added to the realism of it all; the toy was a true-to-life depiction of the actual Buzz. That was really cool to kindergarten Eli!

It’s also why it was really weird to hear Chris Evans voice Buzz in Lightyear and even weirder to hear Tim Allen’s reasoning for why it wasn’t him. In an interview with Extra, he said:

“The short answer is I’ve stayed out of this cuz it has nothing to do [with Toy Story Buzz]. … [Lightyear] is a wonderful story; it just doesn’t seem to have any connection to the toy, and…I wish there was a better connection. … It’s [Tom] Hanks and I. There’s really no Toy Story’s Buzz without Woody.”

Woody does not appear in Buzz Lightyear of Star Command: The Adventure Begins.1

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Let’s get into it.

Lightyear quick facts

Release date: June 17, 2022 | Director: Angus MacLane | Music: Michael Giacchino

Starring: Chris Evans (Buzz), Keke Palmer (Izzy), Peter Sohn (Sox), Taika Waititi (Mo), Dale Soules (Darby), James Brolin (Zurg)

John Ratzenberger as: He just said he was going out for some milk. I’m sure he’ll be back any day now.

Budget: $200 million | Box office: $226.4 million

Academy Awards: None. The only accolade of any kind this movie won was an NAACP Image Award for Keke Palmer: Outstanding Character Voice Performance in a Motion Picture.

Eli

This is the first time I’d seen this movie.

Aesthetic: 4/10 | The entire movie is spent either on a barren planet or in space, which is basically what they did in WALL-E, but it makes a lot less sense here. This is supposed to be a sci-fi action flick for kids, a six-year-old Andy’s favorite movie. They should have made it more cartoony. It needed to pop more.

Animation: 7/10 | I hesitate to give them more than an average grade here because they didn’t even really attempt to do anything experimental. It’s a movie where the heroes face monsters from another planet and space robots from an evil emperor. Feels like they could have hammed it up some more beyond adding the federally mandated gratuitous Pixar explosions.

Story: 2/10 | This story suffers from one major problem: there are no stakes. Buzz’s entire mission is to escape the barren planet and go “home”, but we never see what “home” is, so I’m never under any impression the movie will return there. The movie simultaneously has too much exposition and not enough. The first act is Buzz monotonously failing the same mission over and over again while his friends’ lives zip past him, but the movie doesn’t make me care about those lives. We don’t get to see what Buzz and Hawthorne’s lives are like before they get stuck because the film begins with the conflict, so we as viewers don’t even know what we’re rooting for. The movie gets a couple points for a few touching moments, most notably in Izzy’s arc. But all of these problems plus some unintuitive time loop shenanigans made this one a chore to finish.

Characters: 7/10 | Well almost everyone in the first act has passed away by the second, so we have to get introduced to two different sets of characters, which is a slog. Aside from that, I thought the characters in this movie were mostly good. Buzz acts like a hotshot space ranger; cool. Izzy is the legacy recruit who wants to live up to her family name; great. The other two recruits whose names I forgot before I wrote the Quick Facts, at least they’re funny sometimes. But the star of the whole show—the character whose merch would have been the real hot seller if this movie was actually released in 1995—was Sox. Perfect character; no notes.

Acting: 7/10 | The first Pixar movie in a long time in which I could notice slips in the acting. I know why they didn’t retain Tim Allen as Buzz, but when the first thing I notice about your movie is “wow, that’s obviously not Buzz’s normal voice”, you’re not off to a great start. Keke Palmer’s Izzy is also a little flat.

Music: 4/10 | There are a few ways in which Lightyear is the Cars 2 of the Toy Story franchise and this is one of them. Precisely as with Cars 2, this franchise should be scored by Randy Newman, not Michael Giacchino. I wish Buzz’s musical motifs reminded me of his cues in the Toy Story movies even a little.

Final score: 5/10 | This movie is pretty drowsy, which—again—is surprising and disappointing given the premise.

Leah

Aesthetic: 7/10 | I liked the inspiration they took from old sci-fi movies. It was fun seeing Pixar’s take on it. Overall, the setting was a bit drab; I suppose that’s what you’d expect from an inhospitable planet, but it still wasn’t interesting to look at.

Animation: 8/10 | Pixar put their talent to good use, though I agree with Eli that it didn’t do much to break new ground. Still an impressive product, but nothing that stuck out to me compared to the 25 movies prior.

Story: 4/10 | I might be about 20 years too old for this movie. The message was good—accepting mistakes and not trying to do everything alone—but it was presented in a way that was too obvious, even for me: a person who tends to like the obvious in art. Buzz’s determination to complete the mission at the beginning of the movie just seemed absurd. Surely he’d want to stop and think for a day about blowing through time like that? Alisha isn’t more upset about her best friend ditching her for most of her life? Also, Sox was able to solve the energy problem in 60-ish years?!? They didn’t have a more advanced AI than a therapy cat that could work on it? I think worst of all, I just couldn’t get very invested in this movie’s narrative. It was just too boring.

Characters: 7/10 | Sox was the best character in this movie, a 10/10 in an otherwise 6/10 world. A robot cat that’s super smart, full of silly surprises, and adorable to boot? They should’ve made a movie about him instead. The other characters were okay, but I didn’t really connect with them in any meaningful way.

Acting: 8/10 | I thought the actors did a fine job, though they were held back by the script they had to work with.

Music: 6/10 | Nothing really stuck out to me. It did the job of backing the movie, but I can’t say much more than that.

Final score: 6/10 | The narrative really holds this movie back. The old sci-fi setting is fun, and Pixar clearly put their skill to work here, but there just isn’t a lot to care about when it comes to the story or characters.

Maddy

Aesthetic: 9/10 | Animation: 7/10 | Story: 5/10 | Characters: 6/10 | Acting: 7/10 | Music: 7/10

As a premise, this movie sounded interesting: a Pixar film taking inspiration from sci-fi films of the ‘70s and ‘80s and throwing Buzz Lightyear into it for kicks and giggles. And early trailers looked promising! And yet…

What we got was a largely forgettable, confusing, and fine film that didn’t really justify being tied to the Toy Story franchise outside of a need to put butts in seats.

It’s a 6/10 based on looks alone. I really do appreciate what they tried to do with the aesthetic and the aforementioned homages to the look of old sci-fi films. But in a time when overly realistic animation is becoming old news, this feels boring and flat, just like its story. It tries to do something unique, but doesn’t hit the right notes in my mind like Pixar used to.

I’m not saying Pixar is losing its way—far from it, considering how highly I’d rated the last three films. It just feels a need to use intellectual properties for money to the detriment of the films’ actual quality.

Lightyear will slowly settle into the category of forgotten animated films, which is rare for Pixar, mind you. It’ll only be brought up in “hey, remember when they made a Buzz Lightyear movie?” posts on social media. It exists, and our world ate it up and took it in without feeling much about it.

I still have faith in this studio, but this is another moment in recent memory when I’ve questioned what strings Disney is pulling behind the scenes.

Final score: 41/60 or 6/10

David

Aesthetic: This is kind of a miss, I think. Everything just feels a little too flat, and not even in a way that feels real. It reminds me of WALL-E, but bad.

Animation: They’re good at animation, but this isn’t exactly outstanding in any regard.

Story: At no point is there anything that truly feels like it’s going to make or break things for the crew. At no point does it feel like this is anything but a vehicle by which to sell merchandise, which, given this is a cash-grab spinoff of a series that has also overstayed its welcome, is probably not wrong, but I didn’t think that it would come off so blatantly. So much of the movie feels like it’s stagnant or like it’s missing cornerstone pieces—by not giving us glimpses into what these characters are actually fighting for, everything remains a nebulous concept with no real gravity to it.

Characters: Sox is better than I expected. Having to acquaint myself with two sets of (on the whole) forgettable characters—not great. Buzz is Buzz. At least they didn’t fuck that up too badly.

Acting: This is not great. Evans is a mediocre Buzz and Palmer’s Izzy is eh.

Music: Giacchino is so good, but this is one of his worst. Keep continuity between series—let Newman handle this. He knows what he’s doing.

Final score: 2/10 | This suuuuuuuucks. If I were a toddler, maybe I’d like it. Unfortunately, I am 26.

Final notes

I guess it’s worth noting that this movie was the first Pixar project since Toy Story 4 to get a full theatrical run in North America, not that anyone actually went to see it in theatres.

Next up: Elemental

Man, when we started Pixar Pints, this was the most recent Pixar movie. Now Lightyear has been out for a year and Elemental drops literally tomorrow. What a time to be alive.

Anyway, this was a movie of firsts and lasts for Pixar.

First: feature film directed solely by a woman. This should have been Brave a whole decade earlier, but John Lasseter replaced Brenda Chapman with Mark Andrews halfway through production because he’s a jerk. Turning Red director Domee Shi had been a storyboard artist for Pixar since 2011, and she drew on various elements of her life as a Chinese Canadian woman1 in telling the story this movie presents.

Last: feature film Disney-Pixar released directly to Disney+ in the wake of the pandemic, so it didn’t do nearly as well at the box office as it absolutely could have had it gotten a theatrical release in North America. Like Luca, it did still get the theatrical run in countries that did not have access to Disney+. One of us will get into this and you can probably guess who.

The movie itself is another coming-of-age film, which you could reasonably describe as Pixar’s bread and butter at this point. Two of the three movies before this one (Onward and Luca) were also coming-of-age stories, as are some of the firm’s classics in some way or another (Finding Nemo most obviously, but also Inside Out, Coco, Brave, and probably also the Incredibles, Cars, Monsters, and Toy Story franchises if you expand the criteria a smidge).2

How does Turning Red compare to any of the above?

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Turning Red quick facts

Release date: March 11, 2022 | Director: Domee Shi | Music: Ludwig Göransson, with original songs from Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell

Starring: Rosalie Chiang (Mei), Sandra Oh (Ming), Ava Morse (Miriam), Maitreyi Ramakrishnan (Priya), Hyein Park (Abby)

John Ratzenberger as: No one. I don’t even know who Pixar is anymore.

Budget: $175 million | Box office: $20.1 million

Academy Awards: Nominated for Best Animated Feature but lost to Netflix Animation’s Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio

Eli

This is the first time I’d seen this movie.

Aesthetic: 10/10 | I wasn’t a teenage girl in the early aughts but I did live through the early aughts and yeah, this hits. The decision to set the story in a real North American city and get the naming and design licenses for real buildings/stadiums was a good one, grounding everything in a sense of realism despite the obvious fantasy elements. As far as character design goes, I enjoyed how the major characters all had their own flair and didn’t just seem like carbon copy humans.

Animation: 10/10 | In 2001, Monsters, Inc. was considered an animation marvel because of Sulley’s fur simulation. In 2022, Turning Red simulated fur for several red pandas at once and it was maybe the 15th most impressive feat in the film.

Story: 6/10 | I have just one gripe with the story but it’s a gamebreaker. At Tyler’s party, Ming confronts Mei’s friends, blaming them entirely for Mei’s missteps over the past month. Asked to stand up for her friends, Mei freezes and retreats toward her mother. This makes no sense to me. At this point, Mei has every reason to stand up to her mom. She’s already given the speech to her friends about how she’s over doing everything her mom says; she understands that her mom does not necessarily act in her best interest. She has long since understood that her friends are her true comfort, the ones who help contain the beast. There is zero reason for her not to side with her friends in this scenario. Every actor is worse off for her failure to do so, and she seems mentally mature, so she probably knows this. After this, the story jumps forward in time eight days, and in the interim, it’s implied that Mei has not contacted her friends and has possibly not been in school at all. This was certainly an extremely stressful week for Mei. How did she keep the beast contained without her friends’ love? How did she keep the secret from her mother? How did everything wait to come out until the ceremony? I don’t think this is a nitpick; it broke the flow of the story for me. Everything was pointing to that confrontation being the climax of the movie but then it just wasn’t. It baffled me to no end.

Characters: 9/10 | Aside from that seemingly uncharacteristic misstep from Mei, I liked how the characters were written (and even the Mei thing can kind be explained by generational trauma, but not entirely or excusably). Ming is a controlling jerk for most of the movie, but the same trauma goes an even further way toward explaining her actions. The fact that her arc is completed by recognizing simultaneously that she’ll never be perfect to her mother and that she shouldn’t expect the same of Mei is a touching moment that allows her to get away with a lot of heinous parenting earlier in the film. I would have hated Mei’s dad as a character if they never gave him a moment and spent the whole runtime having him get shushed by Ming, but that his conversation with Mei is what finally (belatedly) set the climax in motion added the depth that his character deserved. Mei’s friends are all pretty one-note, but they remind me of my friend group in high school, so it’s hard to say they’re “bad”.

Acting: 10/10 | I have never heard of most of the credited voice actors in this movie, but they knock it out of the park.

Music: 9/10 | “Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell make good, fun pop music” isn’t exactly a revelation. Did you know “Nobody Like U” peaked at #49 on the actual Billboard Hot 100? Banger. The combination of this Max Martin-esque boy band cheese with traditional Chinese music added something to both sounds that I never knew was missing.

Final score: 9/10 | If you ignore the rising action going on for two scenes too long, this movie hits just about all the right notes for me. I felt simultaneously nostalgic and as though I’d embarked on a brand new adventure.

Leah

Aesthetic: 10/10 | This movie nailed the aesthetic tone. I’m a child of the aughts and I loved how they incorporated the style of that era into the movie. Pixar pushed what they could do with character facial expressions in a way I loved. The anime/2D cartoon influence added to the charm of the movie. I also liked how they pushed the surrealism of the environment to highlight the emotional experience of being a teen girl, like in the convenience store scene.

Animation: 10/10 | I love how this movie leans into the cartoony style. Lots of fun moments with the red pandas.

Story: 8/10 | I want Pixar to make more stories like this, drawing from specific cultural experiences. 25 movies in and we’ve got the first film solely directed by a woman (of color, at that). Domee Shi draws inspiration from her experiences as a Chinese Canadian woman to tell this specific story. It’s not a perfect story, and it’s gotten valid criticism over various aspects, but what movie hasn’t? I think it tells a great story about growing up that most people can relate to, Chinese Canadian or not. It’s a touching narrative about growing up and making your own choices.

Characters: 10/10 | I love everyone in this movie. The middle school friend group, the extended family, the mom, the dad, and of course Mei. The kids reminded me so much of people I knew growing up, and seeing their friendship was so sweet. The family interactions struck the right balance of hilarious and heart-warming.

Acting: 9/10 | The performances in this movie are funny, heartwarming, gut-wrenching…just running the gamut of human emotion in the best way.

Music: 10/10 | Aughts pop + traditional Chinese music + killer Pixar film score = something really special. They absolutely nail fitting the music into the aesthetic of the movie.

Final score: 10/10 | Really good movie, and an important first for the studio. Touching story, amazing art style, nostalgic in all the right ways, definitely not a Pixar film to miss!

Maddy

Aesthetic: 9/10 | Animation: 10/10 | Story: 8/10 | Characters: 9/10 | Acting: 10/10 | Music: 10/10 (highly influenced by 4*Town)

Okay, so first, pretend I start this review gushing about 4*Town for like four paragraphs. Cool? Cool.

I really, really like Turning Red. The characters are fun (I am Miriam irl), the music and score are some of Pixar’s best work, and it has a wonderful story at heart.

It felt cathartic in a sense. A creative, original Pixar movie that embraced the medium of animation and let its creatives explore new ideas. It wasn’t revolutionary like their early films were to animation as a whole, but it felt like the Pixar of before: open to any idea and doing their best to bring these stories to life.

A film about a Chinese Canadian girl growing up in the early ‘00s and all that encompasses that part of life? Hell yeah! It’s not a perfect story and, admittedly, Pixar has only gotten that perfect twice in my account. But it lets the story be told and flourish, letting generations young and old experience these stories and connect with them.

It’s this part that makes Turning Red being put only on Disney+ really sting. It followed the trend of the last two Pixar films also getting no theatrical release in America. As someone who’s said these three films were a return to form for Pixar, a turn in the right direction for the studio, seeing these movies shipped off to a streaming service just to be forgotten amongst the sea of “content” and their value diminished because they were branded as “Disney+ Originals”…it hurts, and it hurt Pixar staff too.

These films did not deserve this fate. Soul, Luca, and Turning Red will always be my favorite collection of consecutive Pixar films. They were creative, imaginative, and emotional. It reminds me why I love film, and why I love Pixar Animation Studio. I hope the future is bright.

Final score: 56/60 or 9/10

David

Aesthetic: It feels like the early 2000s, in a really good way. It’s well-done homage without being hokey, as we saw in Luca.

Animation: I don’t like how they animated the people in this movie. It’s not the first one—I make a call to it in my Soul review—but it’s a glaring issue here for me. I’m glad they didn’t continue on the path of hyperrealism, but this feels very Illumination (derogatory).

Story: Eli calls this out, and I’m glad he does, because it’s something that totally wrecked my interest in it: there’s a pivotal plot point where Mei, instead of standing up for her friends when they’re given the blame for her actions by Ming, falls into line with Ming instead. It doesn’t make any sense! You spend an hour+ building Mei into a character that can and wants to stand on her own two feet and then completely wipe the chalkboard clean! It neuters her arc in a way that really missed the mark, and it’s not a decision that I think makes sense in the scope of the story either—Mei spends so much time growing into her own person and building that independence, and I don’t think that an overbearing mother figure explains away what looks to me increasingly like a completely baffling decision on all fronts. I think it was a decision made to give the familial arc more emotional impact, but for me it made it feel much more orchestrated and tropey.

Characters: See above—Mei’s good up until she fumbles the metaphorical bag. I don’t really feel like Ming gets the full scope of how poor a parent she is, though I’m also not sure it was ever intended to wrap up that cleanly—but to have a linchpin of your story be that moment of realization, I sort of wish that we’d had a bigger impact post-moment. That one moment of acknowledgement Mei’s father gets is supposed to be this big, pivotal moment, but it sort of falls flat in the way he’s a fly on the wall for 98% of the film. The friend group is sweet, very clearly based in real-life archetypes.

Acting: Largely names I don’t know that did quite well.

Music: It’s catchy. I think they nail the classic late-nineties/early-aughts boy band aesthetic that was everywhere, and did so in a way that drew some really fun parallels to modern group acts.

Final score: 7/10 | This is a great step forward in terms of acknowledging experiences we don’t get to see on the big screen very often, especially from a studio like Disney. I just think a few major pitfalls cripple the movie, bad decisions that hang heavy in a way that makes it glaringly obvious what this film could have been.

P.S. Most of the humor in this movie had me actively cringing. Big miss, and the movie almost fell a couple more points because of it.

Final notes

Another friend of ours had this to say:

“Turning Red is far and away the best movie Pixar has put out since at least Inside Out, and has soared to the highest echelon of my rankings. Puberty is kind to no one, but especially to young girls and AFAB people. I have yet to meet anyone that looks fondly back on that time in their life, but I didn’t know how blown away I would be by a piece of media that was actually a love letter to it. I cried multiple times watching this, not only at the emotional high points but at the mere fact that a high-budget movie by Disney/Pixar was openly discussing periods. The relationship between Mei and her mother is one that resonates deeply whether or not you’re Chinese-Canadian (but especially if you are). I needed this movie at 29 and I’m sure that there are many that need this movie at 12. It’s funny, heartwarming, and healing all at once.”

Next up: Lightyear

When is Luca? Where is Luca? How is Luca?

Why is Luca?

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Luca quick facts

Release date: June 18, 2021 | Director: Enrico Casarosa | Music: Dan Romer

Starring: Jacob Tremblay (Luca), Jack Dylan Grazer (Alberto), Emma Berman (Giulia)

John Ratzenberger as: No one. Not even a cameo this time. He’s just gone. Not so much as a mention of him on this film’s Wikipedia page.

Budget: Undisclosed (but probably in the $150-200 million range) | Box office: $49.8 million

Academy Awards: Nominated for Best Animated Feature but lost to Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Encanto

Eli

This is the first time I’d seen this movie.

Aesthetic: 7/10 | It’s Italy, but I can’t tell if the movie wants to play that fact straight or not. I don’t know if you can count lines of dialogue as part of the aesthetic, but Giulia saying “Santa Mozzarella” and other saintly cheeses all the time sounded less like an authentically Italian experience and more like a joke that detracted from the experience. The aesthetic didn’t seem like it was supposed to be a joke, and yet. There are underwater scenes but they’re just an extended exposition and seem like a visual afterthought. It’s not Pixar’s best cityscape and it’s not Pixar’s best water world. The character designs overall bump this up a notch but this movie looks exactly fine. No better, no worse.

Animation: 8/10 | I wanted to give this a 10 because it’s Pixar and Pixar is generally excellent at animation, but I dunno. This movie’s juxtaposition to Soul does a pretty good job of drawing a line between great Pixar animation and simply good Pixar animation. Nothing about this wowed me, but it did its job.

Story: 0/10 | I am so uninspired by this movie that I can’t even pretend to write an honest review of the plot. It centers on outsiders learning to fit in with a society that doesn’t like them, which in itself is such an overused trope that I’m surprised Pixar—almost always groundbreaking or at least intriguing storytellers—felt they needed to touch it. And the way it’s presented is so obvious throughout, ending with the society embracing them because hey, they’re not so different after all.

Characters: 0/10 | This movie has everyone. It has Protagonist. It has Wacky Friend with Mysterious Past. It has Sunshine and Rainbows Girl. It has Overprotective Mother. It has Physically Imposing Yet Emotionally Mature Father (no relation). It has Cartoon Villain. There are gay undertones between Protagonist and Wacky Friend that I’m pretty sure were unintentional. Overprotective Mother is such an obviously bad parent that I wanted to scream at the TV. It’s impossible to care what happens to Cartoon Villain in the end because he seems so one-note and unhuman.

Acting: 9/10 | I liked the child voice actors a lot. Given my critique of Soul being that it would have worked better if they casted someone like Maya Rudolph as 22, it’s kinda funny (derogatory) that she was instead cast as a white woman sea monster in this movie, but whatever.

Music: 8/10 | It’s good, not great. I’m not really sure what there in this movie for the music to add to but I liked the score more than I didn’t.

Final score: 5/10 | Nothing in this movie takes me by surprise. It has an exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and conclusion. It is told in three acts. It is a movie. I got movie vibes. I can’t help but try to compare this to Ratatouille, another movie with about half of the same plot but a more novel story and a harder-hitting message. Ratatouille has a weird power dynamic thing going on that this movie avoids, and while that is most of why I don’t like Ratatouille, at least it made me think critically about what it said about the world and the social hierarchy. Luca doesn’t do that. It doesn’t do anything.

Leah

Aesthetic: 8/10 | Luca’s imagination sequences were very creative and fun. I also liked getting to see the sea monster society at the beginning of the movie. The Italian aesthetics in the village looked good.

Animation: 9/10 | Pixar is as impressive as ever, animating underwater, fun character movement, bicycle shenanigans, the whole Pixar nine yards.

Story: 7/10 | I thought the story was cute. It was a sweet coming of age story. Luca had to deal with conflict with his family, with his best friend, with society…it’s all something most people go through growing up. The resolution of all the conflicts with acceptance is the hopeful note that makes the ending feel good. The narrative was structured competently overall.

Characters: 7/10 | Pixar used a lot of tried and true archetypes in this movie. I liked the main trio of Luca, Alberto, and Giulia. They reminded me a lot of myself and my childhood friends. I think a lot of kids see themselves as the underdogs, so it makes them relatable. The supporting characters felt a bit flat. For instance, Luca’s mother didn’t have much substance beyond being an overprotective parent. I think the movie could have benefitted from fleshing out these characters more. Also, the antagonist might be the most pathetic Pixar villain. Bullying children like that? C’mon. Obnoxious presence through and through.

Acting: 9/10 | The actors’ performances mad the film fun!

Music: 8/10 | I loved how they scored the very end of the movie where Luca is on the train. The music at the very beginning of the movie definitely set the tone. The rest of it didn’t really stick out to me that much.

Final score: 8/10 | It’s a fun summer movie. I think it’s a cute story about growing up, with the usual Pixar artistry. Not Pixar’s most groundbreaking achievement, but fun and relatable, especially for the younger kids watching the movie.

Maddy

Aesthetic: 10/10 | Animation: 10/10 | Story: 7/10 | Characters: 8/10 | Acting: 9/10 | Music: 9/10

Yeah, I like this one. If this was a ranking of Pixar films in the context of being comfort films, this would be #1. Every time I watch this film, I cannot help but smile and just enjoy the vibes this movie gives off.

Its story might be basic, but, like…does it need to be anything more than it is? Can Pixar just release a film about kids enjoying summer in a seaside town? Just vibing and enjoying their time? I really wish Pixar would make more films like Luca. There’s value in these kinds of films that aren’t out there to say anything profound or deep with their themes. It’s not trying to be something grand like so many big studio movies feel they have to be nowadays. It’s a simple film for people to enjoy and become engrossed with its characters, their lives, and the world they inhabit. It’s the simple power of art and the medium of film.

This film really solidified to me that Pixar was in a new creative era, trying new things with their films, and it was seemingly sticking to the wall. It sucks the world had to keep Luca on Disney+ (and somewhat Disney seemingly not wanting to try and do a theatrical run with this film in the States while other countries got one, but I’ll talk more about this in the next Pint). But Luca will live in my heart as Pixar’s most heartwarming film.

Final score: 53/60 or 8/10

David

Aesthetic: For the first time in a while, I feel like Pixar stumbles a bit here. It’s good, but it doesn’t pull me in the way their past movies have. As much as I like to poke a little good fun at Italy, a lot of the homage felt tongue-in-cheek in a way that contradicted how the movie wanted to be taken seriously. Doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to me.

Animation: Quality as ever—the underwater scenes are a particular highlight here. I think it’s outdone by Soul, in particular, but it’s not bad. This movie marks the first in a continuing trend where I don’t really like how the human characters are animated, which is a minor nitpick of my own.

Story: This is one of the weakest stories in the entire Pixar canon, and that includes a movie centered on Mater becoming a James Bond-like spy god. How, in the year of our lord 2021, do you screw the pooch this badly, with a story that’s both unexciting and overdone? A lot of these later movies, while not always excellent, have unique stories (when they’re not dogshit sequel bait)—I mean, look at Soul. That’s a beautiful story. Look at Coco or Inside Out or even, turning forward, Turning Red. It feels like Luca was just horribly half-assed compared to a lot of its contemporaries.

Characters: This was pre-AI infiltrating all the bullshit, but it does feel a bit like a ten-year-old needed an essay and asked ChatGPT to write them a story. Stereotype characters that aren’t enjoyable enough to overcome the failings of their typecasting.

Acting: I think the kids do a great job here. No one else really stands out as particularly good, but there aren’t any performances that have me actively wincing.

Music: It’s there!

Final score: 4/10 | Put a dress on a pig, it’s still a pig and now your dress is muddy. What good does that do? This was released one day after my 24th birthday and I really do think I could’ve done without the crappy belated present.

Final notes

Maddy got into this a little bit, but yeah, this one was also released directly to Disney+ except in countries where Disney+ isn’t available, in which case it got a theatrical release. That (and a general lack of hype) led to low box office returns, which in turn led to Pixar refusing to reveal the budget for the film—the first (and still only) time they’d ever done that.

Maybe if she or Leah were writing these, they’d have more to say about this movie in the intro or outro, but Eli is, and he felt nothing watching this movie, so that’s all you get.

Okay, no, hold on. Just looking some more things up right before I hit publish and I found that the director of this movie, Enrico Casarosa (in his directorial debut), worked as “head of story” on The Good Dinosaur, the other brutally boring1 Pixar film. That explains everything.

Next up: Turning Red

Soul resulted in a couple more firsts for Pixar, still breaking new (to them) ground in their 25th year since breaking into the mainstream with Toy Story.

Within their control, it was their first movie that told a Black story. The lead, Black jazz musician/teacher Joe Gardner, was voiced by Jamie Foxx.1 The majority of the cast was Black, and Pixar went to great lengths to consult their Black employees2 in making sure they were telling the story correctly.

Outside of their control, it was the first Pixar feature film that was released directly to Disney+ due to the COVID-19 pandemic.3 Originally slated for an October 2020 release, the film was first pushed back to November before its theatrical release was abandoned in countries that had access to Disney+. Most of the world first saw Soul on Christmas 2020, and—unlike with Onward—it was released directly to all subscribers instead of first being released for standalone purchase.

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Soul quick facts

Release date: December 25, 2020 | Director: Pete Docter | Music: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross; jazz compositions by Jon Batiste

Starring: Jamie Foxx (Joe), Tina Fey (22), Graham Norton (Moonwind), Rachel House (Terry)

John Ratzenberger as: No one! This was another first for Pixar: the first feature film without Ratzenberger’s voice in it. In a chase scene through a subway station, a character model based on Ratzenberger is briefly visible as an Easter egg.

Budget: $150 million | Box office: $121 million

Academy Awards: Won Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score; also nominated for Best Sound but lost to Amazon Studios’ Sound of Metal

Eli

This is the first time I’d seen this movie.

Aesthetic: 9/10 | So much care went into this movie’s presentation. It’s not easy to accurately capture the frenzy of New York outside of live action, but they pretty much nailed it (although you can tell they got the license for exactly one sports team and wanted to get the maximum use out of it). The Great Before is kind of a blank canvas, but that’s clearly on purpose due to the film’s subject matter, so it mostly works.

Animation: 10/10 | No notes. Loved the sequence where Joe fell into The Great Before.

Story: 6/10 | I enjoyed the message but the details kinda lost me. Joe’s primary struggle of “full-time band teacher” vs. “jazz performer” never struck me as pressing given that you can still pretty easily have nighttime hobbies with a full-time job. The movie seems to want you to think Joe is the first person ever to reject death, or at least that it isn’t very common, which…no? I had it in the back of my mind for a lot of the movie that the real Bjorn Borgenson was gonna appear as a plot hurdle, The Good Place style, but that never happened. I have a lot of smaller nitpicks to make that sound like overwrought CinemaSins-esque commentary, but I dunno. They kind of add up when there are so many of them. I liked the plot more than I didn’t, and the message rang true in the end, but it’s not very clean storytelling.

Characters: 6/10 | If Coco was a love letter to Mexican culture and a landmark for Latin American representation, I’m not sure what Soul was supposed to be. It’s a majority-Black movie of which the fabric wouldn’t have changed if the characters were white; you’d just have to replace jazz with some other genre of music. 22 is supposed to be cultureless, raceless, and theoretically genderless given she hasn’t lived a human life, but the movie treats her as a white woman throughout, which makes her precocious mastery of Joe’s lifestyle as a Black man seem…off? I liked Moonwind.

Acting: 7/10 | Man, I just really don’t understand why they had to cast Tina Fey as 22. Why couldn’t it be a Black person? You want an irreverent comedienne with improv and writing experience? Go get Maya Rudolph! She was in Luca less than a year later, so I bet she would have said yes! Everyone else is good-to-great—it’s Pixar—but that one casting decision makes the rest of the movie significantly worse. It’s baffling that they still treated white as the default.

Music: 10/10 | Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross are musical geniuses whose style works extraordinarily well for the setting of this movie, and they might not even be the best musicians Pixar got for this film, as Jon Batiste’s work really just steals the show. When Pixar makes movies about music, they go all out. This was a home run.

Final score: 8/10 | I think I want to like this more than I actually do, but there’s a certain air of cultural neglect here despite Pixar’s attempts to avoid it. I’m not Black, so maybe I’m just talking out of my ass, but it feels very neutered. That said, when Dorothea Williams told that fish story near the end…that stuck with me, and so will most of the messaging in this movie, no matter how convoluted it was.

Leah

Aesthetic: 10/10 | They did a great job visualizing abstract concepts, like being in “the zone”. (Showing Joe there at the beginning was a great choice.) They also did a great job capturing the aesthetics of New York.

Animation: 10/10 | I loved the animation of Joe falling into The Great Before; it gave the effect of falling through a place beyond the physical world. I also enjoyed the way the Jerrys (and Terry) were animated. Their abstract forms were a good contrast to the more concrete cartoony world, and the character designs were used creatively, especially when Terry visits New York.

Story: 5/10 | This is where the movie misses the mark for me. A few things about the storyline feel contrived or don’t stand up to scrutiny. Why the binary between having a full-time job and getting a dream job? If it’s so easy to get from The Great Beyond to The Great Before, why is Joe the first(?) to have done it? I can’t believe he’s the only one who freaked out while facing death in the year of our lord 2020. Most egregious was the way the body swap plotline took away from Joe’s agency. After watching the movie, I read this review and I think it explains why Soul misses the mark on Black representation.

Characters: 6/10 | The supporting cast was very fun and well rounded. I liked Moonwind, the Jerrys (and Terry), and Dorothea. The main characters are fine but the narrative does them a disservice.

Acting: 7/10 | This movie is worse for Tina Fey being cast as 22. Having her play a Black man for a significant portion of the movie was weird in a bad way.

Music: 10/10 | The score fit the surreal nature of the movie really well, enhancing the immersion. The jazz was an aurally gorgeous experience.

Final score: 8/10 | Soul has gorgeous visuals and music, with creative was of showing abstract ideas. The story doesn’t reach that level of artistry, dragging the overall experience down. Cool concept, mixed results in the execution.

Maddy

Aesthetic: 9/10 | Animation: 8/10 | Story: 6/10 | Characters: 7/10 | Acting: 8/10 | Music: 9/10

From December 2020 to March 2022, Pixar released three original, non-sequel movies (all to Disney+). It was a nice change of pace from the sequel fodder of the 2010s, but to me, it showed a long-needed change for Pixar. To return to what made the studio great: creative stories that could be enjoyed by everyone.

And they were really good movies! Soul, Luca, and Turning Red are the closest, in my opinion, that Pixar has recently gotten to capturing the magic of their run of films in the 2000s. Soul was the start of this three-movie run and…it’s probably the weakest. But I think it has the highest highs of modern Pixar.

When the movie isn’t dragging itself with highly questionable body-swapping nonsense or kinda monotonous scenes with 22 early on, and when it’s diving deep into its themes of life, death, and one’s self worth, it’s a truly impactful movie that will make you think about your worth and your spark (as the movie focuses on). Finding worth and peace with life. It’s such an adult movie in that respect, but the 22 aspects keep the kiddies involved. Sometimes it’s fine and other times, as mentioned, it’s really questionable (though the body-swap portion still does have some great moments!).

It’s messy, it’s profound, it’s weird, it’s…Pixar, in a sense. Using kinda out-there ideas to tell really good stories that can be enjoyed by everyone. There’s a lot holding Soul back, but it’s still a great start to the Pixar early 2020s run of fantastic movies.

Final score: 47/60 or 7/10

David

Aesthetic: Like I’ve said for the past few movies, these are almost always 9s or 10s, so it’s hard to keep these categories distinct—but in this case, I’m glad I did. The way they nail the frenzy of New York, the way they depict The Great Before and everything after death—it’s beautiful, it’s familiar, and it’s exactly what I wanted. Among the best they’ve ever managed.

Animation: Delightful.

Story: I think, not unlike others have said, there are some minor issues that kind of swap me out a bit. I feel as though a lot of the movie centers on a conflict that isn’t unique, and in that, I was a bit lost—but at the same time, I think it’s well depicted. Ups and downs. Similarly, I think that it’s a bit weird that so much is hinged on Joe’s inability to keep playing music. I mean, look, it’s hard, but I manage to make time for my hobbies outside of work. There’s no reason he can’t too.

Characters: I think everyone’s good, some are great, no one’s truly outstanding—except for, maybe, the Jerrys. They were funny as hell. I think casting 22 as they did was an impossibility in some sense; yeah, you can portray them as genderless, raceless, what have you, but to earnestly do that, you have to make them appear that way, and—like it or not—Tina Fey is specifically “white woman” the whole way through. Which leads me to…

Acting: …Tina Fey, while funny, is not a good choice here, because it turns the emotional climax of the film into a moment where a white woman pilots a Black man’s body to experience all of these feelings. If you wanted to make it a movie truly centered around the Black experience, go get Maya Rudolph. This was before Quinta Brunson broke out, I think, but she probably could have been another fantastic choice—the more I see her work, the more I like her. Outside of that, stellar as always.

Music: Bro. Broooooooooo. Holy hell. Reznor and Ross, absolutely. Yes. Please. More. Jon Batiste, though. My guy. My guuuuuuuuuuy. Up there with the Cars soundtrack.

Final score: 9/10 | Honestly? This one’s great. Minor details, yes, but god, what a joyous experience.

Final notes

More movies should make fun of the New York Knicks.

Next up: Luca

It’s impossible to discuss Onward without mentioning when it came out: March 6, 2020. The movie got a theatrical release…for about a week. Then everything shut down and Onward only grossed $142 million worldwide against a budget of $175-200 million.

Perhaps auspiciously for Disney, the company had just launched its Disney+ streaming service in November 2019. After a digital release on March 20, Disney made the film available to all Disney+ subscribers on April 3, ensuring Pixar fans still had ample opportunity to enjoy it. But even at the time, Onward seemed like it just kinda got lost in the shuffle, and—fair warning—if discussing the spring 2020 lockdowns and the rest of the early pandemic sends you to bad mental places, you might want to skip the next two paragraphs.

All of the everything going on in the world made media at large seem less consequential to a lot of people. I mean this in two ways. First, obviously a lot of brainspace was dominated by the whole, y’know, world-changing virus, and it was way harder to get excited for creative projects. But, second, even if we did get excited for them, the pandemic in some way diminished that excitement. Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia is probably my favorite album of the year, but it was released in late March, and it wasn’t as impactful when it was impossible for fans like me to go out and dance to these songs at bars and clubs, let alone for Dua to tour. Movies that were clearly meant to be experienced in theatres were still being released with theatres shut down, greatly hampering the viewing experience and reducing their perceived value.

This isn’t to say media was nowhere—we had to pass the time somehow—but Onward just wasn’t what got the people going. Everyone was talking about Animal Crossing: New Horizons or Tiger King or which shows were coming out of retirement to produce a Zoom special. And I think the reason is obvious: these things all originally dropped during lockdown, not just before it. Onward dropped while the world was still mostly open, got about a week in the sun, then had its timeline hastily revised after everything turned apocalyptic.

This movie would almost certainly be remembered far more fondly if it was released directly to Disney+ on March 20. Disney understood this and recovered to release Soul, Luca, and Turning Red straight to the service in the two years that followed.

None of this says anything about the actual content of the film. What was that like?

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Onward quick facts

Release date: March 6, 2020 | Director: Dan Scanlon | Music: Mychael and Jeff Danna

Starring: Tom Holland (Ian), Chris Pratt (Barley), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Laurel), Octavia Spencer (The Manticore)

John Ratzenberger as: Fenwick, the construction worker who’s also a cyclops

Budget: $175-200 million | Box office: $142 million

Academy Awards: Nominated for Best Animated Feature but lost to…Pixar’s Soul. Okay, wow, spoilers. Sorry!

Eli

This is the first time I’d seen this movie.

Aesthetic: 10/10 | I won’t pretend to be an expert on the modern fantasy aesthetic but I was thoroughly enthralled. It reminded me of the Percy Jackson series in that it made me feel like I was watching a fantasized version of a world I had experienced.

Animation: 10/10 | Pixar has this mastered by this point. My favorite part is when the curse becomes a dragon by pulling out chunks of the school building.

Story: 9/10 | Ian’s realization that Barley had been a father figure to him the whole time is truly touching. My dad’s still alive but he spent most of my childhood either working or sleeping, so I never really felt connected to him in the way many sons do to their father. My older brother, on the other hand, introduced me to a lot of culture and habits that are still a big part of me today. I relate to this, even if it’s not a 1-to-1 comparison.

Characters: 8/10 | It’s a pretty pared-down ensemble compared to most Pixar films, but it still works. Ian and Barley feel like real brothers who existed and grew up together in modern North America. “Retired badass is convinced to go on one last ride” is usually a fun trope and The Manticore is no exception. This section gains a point for finally having Pixar’s first openly gay character1 but loses the same point right back because the character is a cop who gets almost no development.

Acting: 10/10 | It’s the Tom Holland and Chris Pratt show. Love him or hate him, Pratt is an incredible entertainer.

Music: 7/10 | It’s there. It didn’t stand out to me but it didn’t ruin anything either. It did its job.

Final score: 9/10 | This movie’s release date is a shame. It’d be a lot more beloved if it got a fair shake.

Leah

Aesthetic: 9/10 | I loved how it was Dungeons & Dragons meets 2020s USA. You have magic and still decide to build an overcrowded highway! They had a lot of fun playing with and subverting western fantasy tropes and I’m here for it.

Animation: 9/10 | My favorite bit of animation was the smoke that came from the curse. Very dynamic!

Story: 10/10 | This was a very satisfying, touching story. The concept of the quest to bring their dad back for a day was well done, with obstacles both fantastical and mundane.

Characters: 9/10 | The main duo of Ian and Barley played off each other very well. Their personality differences helped create the conflict that moved the story forward. There weren’t a lot of side characters but I have to note that The Manticore was hilarious. I guess I should also mention Disney’s First Openly Gay Character of the Week had a throwaway line in this movie. So brave.

Acting: 9/10 | Great performances by the cast here! Pixar has a high standing when it comes to acting and this is no exception.

Music: 9/10 | Really good! I think it added a lot to giving the movie a fantastical atmosphere.

Final score: 9/10 | This is a very sweet story with a super fun premise. Well woven tale with plenty of Easter eggs for the fantasy/D&D fans among us.

Maddy

Aesthetic: 10/10 | Animation: 9/10 | Story: 5/10 | Characters: 6/10 | Acting: 8/10 | Music: 6/10

I am writing this review like five days after actually watching Onward, and that time has done nothing to either boost its score or hinder its score. Heck, I don’t even really have much to say about this movie. I feel bad it’s become forgotten amongst the crowd because of its March 2020 release, which was…a not good time to release movies.

It’s overall fine with a really strong ending, but it’s nothing crazy or exciting. Yet it’s a 7/10! Other studios would kill for their most “okay” films to be 7/10s.

It’s carried by its aesthetic and world, but that’s okay. It’s enjoyable, but—as I said earlier—sadly forgettable because our world didn’t wanna give it a chance (for reasons entirely out of its control).

Final score: 44/60 or 7/10

David

Aesthetic: I really like how they integrated the fantasy elements into a modern-ish world. It’s amusing that even in a world so fantastical, some things (like poor infrastructure) can’t really be avoided.

Animation: Good as always—the way that the pants were orchestrated in their movements was wonderfully fluid. These first two categories are at this point very lightly weighted into my full scoring of the film because it’s evident that this is the standard we should be holding these films to.

Story: Ian + Barley’s arc coming to completion was really, really good. The rest of it felt nonsensical and simultaneously rushed and dragging. Quite a few of what felt like loose ends to me were not really resolved, and the main through line of the film just felt like a cheap ten-minute resolution. I spent 90% of the film waiting to see how they tied it all together and then they did it with duct tape and promises.

Characters: It’s fine. I feel like they needed to give a little more depth to basically every character in the ensemble for the emotionally hefty climax of the film to really hit its mark. Also, ACAB, and deciding to arbitrarily make the cop gay doesn’t win you any points with me. Mickey Mouse casting.

Acting: Tom Holland is pretty good. Chris Pratt does Chris Pratt things and I’m frankly pretty over that whole show. He plays Chris Pratt regardless of the role he takes on, and there’s only so many ways to dress up the same archetype before it gets wildly tired.

Music: This is one of the bright spots of the movie, but even then, it’s pretty standard “Pixar whimsy”—it does its job to build the atmosphere of the film throughout, but I’m not going to pretend it does anything particularly fantastically.

Final score: 3/10 | I believe the kids would call this a flop era.

Final notes

So, the elephant in the room. That pink cyclops you see in the shot between Leah’s and Maddy’s reviews, that’s Officer Specter. She is canonically lesbian, but it’s easy to miss and easy to ignore; she offhandedly refers to her “girlfriend’s daughter” at one point in the conversation with who she thinks is fellow officer Colt Bronco,2 as seen in the aforementioned shot. It never comes up again.

It’s not the first time LGBTQ+ characters have been visible onscreen in a Pixar film—there were blink-and-you-miss-it lesbian couples in Finding Dory and Toy Story 4—but it’s the first time a character has spoken a line in reference to their own queerness. It was…not received as well as Disney-Pixar hoped it would be.

To the film’s credit, they casted an openly lesbian actress, Lena Waithe, to voice Specter. On the negative side…well, our reviews have already gotten into why we (four LGBTQ+ people) felt her character was poor representation, and I won’t blabber on about it any longer. But any representation was enough to draw scrutiny from countries in which homosexuality is illegal or (in fewer cases) still socially taboo. The film was banned in Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia; the line was changed to “sister’s daughter” in Bahrain, Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates, and “partner’s daughter” in Hungary, Poland, and Russia.

At the end of the day, this was a masterclass in how to do LGBTQ+ representation wrong. It’s hard to say the movie suffers for it given the character is so unimportant to its overall plot, but its reception definitely suffered. It was another thing the movie had going against it.

Next up: Soul

Toy Story 3 came out in 2010 and grossed a billion dollars, so it didn’t take long for a fourth movie to begin production. It took nine years for Toy Story 4 to finish. It also grossed a billion dollars, so now a fifth movie is in production.

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…yes. That’s all I’m writing about this one. Deal with it.

Toy Story 4 quick facts

Release date: June 21, 2019 | Director: Josh Cooley (originally John Lasseter, who stepped down in 2017) | Music: Randy Newman

Starring: Tom Hanks (Woody), Tim Allen (Buzz), Annie Potts (Bo), Tony Hale (Forky), Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele (Ducky and Bunny), Madeleine McGraw (Bonnie), Christina Hendricks (Gabby Gabby)

John Ratzenberger as: Hamm, naturally

Budget: $200 million | Box office: $1.073 billion

Academy Awards: Won Best Animated Feature; nominated for Best Original Song (“I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away”) but lost to “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” from Rocketman

Eli

Aesthetic: 4/10 | In the original Toy Story, my problem with the character models was mainly that the humans had no detail to them and tended to look and function like life-sized toys. In Toy Story 4, the toys have too much detail to them and tend to look and function like bite-sized humans. Both are jarring, but I think this end of the spectrum is a worse look because the entire point of this franchise is that the toys’ lives are supposed to be separate from the human world. This movie also greys that line by making the toys way more reckless with their actions in the immediate presence of humans than they were in the other three movies combined. On an unrelated note, thematically, the contrast between the dull and drab antique store and the super colorful carnival is…a little too obvious? Why is the ending scene so bright?

Animation: 9/10 | A couple wacky edits but otherwise it’s the same quality we’re used to by now. It’s not 1995 anymore.

Story: 4/10 | It’s so obvious this is a Modern Pixar Cash Grab Sequel™️. They rehash plotlines from other Toy Story movies (Woody losing his spot as a kid’s favorite, Woody having to convince another toy that they’re a toy, etc.). They introduce (and reintroduce) a bunch of easily merchandisable characters. It’s a playbook. They tried harder here than they did on, say, Finding Dory, but it’s still pretty clear to me that relatively little passion was put into this film. Threads introduced at various points in the story are either not tied up by the time the credits roll or they’re resolved in a way that seems inconsistent with established character motivations. This includes the ending, which…man, I hate it. At least this movie is funny and well paced.

Characters: 3/10 | Speaking of merchandising, Bo Peep was little more than a joke in the first and second movies and was completely absent from the third, and now suddenly she’s one of the stars of the show. That she changes her mind about Woody’s behavior at the most convenient time is so poorly written that it makes her seem more like a plot device than a dynamic character. Forky’s shtick gets old fast and then he just becomes a background character who spends most of his time offscreen as the main cast tries to save him. Ducky and Bunny start the movie incensed at Buzz for costing them a chance at living with a kid, but by the end of the movie, they’ve decided to live the carnival life for…no stated reason. Gabby Gabby is a danger to several toys throughout the movie, but then she experiences one sad moment, so we’re supposed to feel sympathetic for her and relieved that she then receives a copout happy ending.

Acting: 10/10 | “Uhhhh, your backpack’s in the antique store. Let’s go!”

Music: 5/10 | So, in Cars 3, the music team (led by Randy Newman) pulled off a lot of the same tricks they did in Cars, using popular songs to help enhance the narrative and adding a few callbacks to the first movie’s orchestral score, but not enough that it just felt like the same music. Of course, Randy Newman has also scored all four Toy Story movies, so you’d expect him to use that same wit to make Toy Story 4 seem like a product all its own and not just, y’know, a Toy Story cash grab, but he really doesn’t! “You’ve Got a Friend in Me” plays in its entirety over the opening sequence for no reason except “hey, it’s that song we all know and love”. Some of the orchestral cues seem copy-pasted from the first three movies. It sounds fine but it’s lazy.

Final score: 6/10 | I remember liking this one a lot more when I saw it in theatres, but when I remove the rose-colored glasses, this movie secretly kinda stinks. It’s not horrendous or anything but I think it’s fair to say this franchise has run its course. Do not want Toy Story 5.

Leah

Aesthetic: 5/10 | This was another case of an older aesthetic not translating well into the present day. The toys looked so realistic it almost fell into the uncanny valley for me. They were like plastic humans. It just ended up looking weird.

Animation: 9/10 | Pixar has yet to miss on animation quality.

Story: 4/10 | This was kind of a mess, contradicting the previous movies while also rehashing a lot from them. My willing suspension of disbelief couldn’t stand up to this movie; the toys just acted with impunity around humans and somehow no one ever notices? The other movies got away with it because the toys interacted mostly when the humans weren’t around, but it didn’t seem to matter in this movie.

Characters: 4/10 | Gabby Gabby’s arc was supremely messed up and I don’t feel like her “redemption” was earned. Ducky and Bunny were funny but I feel like they were just there so Key and Peele could be in the movie; their characters added almost nothing beyond that. I hated Woody leaving his whole family behind at the end of the movie, as it went against the themes of the original Toy Story movies. I get what they were going for, but it just didn’t fit with the rest of the franchise.

Acting: 9/10 | This franchise still has a solid cast.

Music: 6/10 | It reused a lot from previous movies. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t very memorable or original either.

Final score: 6/10 | How did this movie beat Klaus for the Academy Award?!? In my opinion, this is one of the worst Pixar cash-grab sequels. Toy Story 3 did a great job wrapping up the franchise. This wasn’t needed at all and it actively made the story of the franchise worse.

Maddy

Aesthetic: 9/10 | Animation: 10/10 | Story: 8/10 | Characters: 7/10 | Acting: 10/10 | Music: 8/10

Sequels are hard. Sequels sometimes feel unwarranted. The entire existence of Toy Story 4 is still somewhat debated (though the news of Toy Story 5 is the new talking point). Yet, this is the Pixar golden goose. This is the franchise that put Pixar on the map. They wouldn’t dare tarnish their child…would they?

No, lol.

I like Toy Story 4. Like, a good amount. I have it higher than Toy Story 3!

Does it need to exist? No. Was Toy Story 3 a better sendoff? Maybe. Did this movie give me the warm fuzzies more so than 3? Absolutely.

At its core, it’s flawed. Buzz is absolutely pointless, the new characters don’t have as much depth as seen in previous films, and the story is, like, fine. But Pixar knows what to do with these toys in the end. They know these films are stories about life and moving on and being accepting of your worth and your meaning. Finding happiness in the new. The new can be scary, but the new can also be exciting and bring with it new life experiences. It’s Woody’s entire arc throughout these films.

The story might suffer in the long run but, just like most other Toy Story (and Pixar) films, it tugs at the strings and makes you think about life. When the movie dials it up to 10, it’s a strong 10.

Toy Story 4 didn’t need to exist, but I’m happy it does. The world is better with a Toy Story 4.

A Toy Story 5 is debatable.

Final score: 52/60 or 8/10

David

Aesthetic: Part of what always made this series so cool to me was that they did differentiate between the toys and humanity in the ways they moved, reacted, what have you. It distinctly felt like two different societies coexisting, marginally aware of each other. Instead, in this one, they’re brazen with their movement, and they’ve gotten to a point where they feel human—and in becoming as such, have lost some of what set them apart at the very beginning.

Animation: Time has been kind to animation; that much is certain.

Story: I’m very disappointed. Classic sequel moment here. I recall, upon hearing this was coming out, thinking, “man, we don’t need this”, and what do you know? I was right. It feels inconsistent and like previous threads that were closed were reopened just to have some sort of plot-based motivation to carry this movie forward.

Characters: Why center the story around Bo Peep? She barely even featured in the first three movies! Forky is haha funny in one or two moments but goddamn does the bit run its course real fast. Additionally, not a fan of basically anyone else they introduce, and—as mentioned earlier—so many of the other characters that have been features of this series since 1995 feel like they were just cheaply altered to make a story point run its course correctly.

Acting: Outstanding as usual. This is one area where the series has not faltered.

Music: Again, I feel really disappointed. In other series, it felt as though the sequel(s) at least built on the music of the previous films to add new cues and dimensions, but this one just feels like it’s trying to say: “Hey, look! Don’t you remember this song? Don’t you want to give us more money?”

Final score: 3/10 | It’s really lackluster. I’m deeply disappointed.

Final notes

Well, we didn’t like this movie either. Except Maddy. I’m still not sure what she saw in it even after copyediting her review but I suppose people are entitled to their opinions.

Next up: Onward

Between The Incredibles’ release in 2004 and this movie’s eventual confirmation in 2014, the announcement of just about every new Pixar film made some people upset that it wasn’t Incredibles 2. Up? Who cares, give us an Incredibles sequel. Cars 2? Really? They gave Cars a sequel before The Incredibles? And it’s awful! Who wanted this?1 I don’t need to see Mike and Sulley’s college days; just give us more Incredibles, dammit!

Bob Iger announced the movie at a Disney shareholders meeting in 2014 and the mob finally lowered their pitchforks. Unfortunately, we’d have to wait through four more years—and five more Pixar films—before it actually released, and it didn’t help that most of those five interim films weren’t very good.2

Enough beating around the bush, though; Pixar already did that for us. The movie printed money. It was always going to. Was the product we got any good?

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Incredibles 2 quick facts

Release date: June 15, 2018 | Director: Brad Bird | Music: Michael Giacchino

Starring: Craig T. Nelson (Bob/Mr. Incredible), Holly Hunter (Helen/Elastigirl), Sarah Vowell (Violet), Huck Milner (Dash), Samuel L. Jackson (Frozone), Bob Odenkirk (Winston), Catherine Keener (Evelyn)

John Ratzenberger as: The Underminer

Budget: $200 million | Box office: $1.243 billion

Academy Awards: Nominated for Best Animated Feature but lost to Sony Pictures Animation’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Eli

Aesthetic: 4/10 | This aesthetic feels weirdly unfaithful to the first film's despite being set immediately after that film ends. Some of that is good—The Incredibles is from 2004 and it definitely shows—but some of it just seems like they forgot how they built their own world. The first film heavily featured sci-fi technology and visuals, which made it seem futuristic despite being set in 1962. Aside from hi-tech elements immediately connected to the protagonists, this movie feels a lot more like the real ‘60s, but the characters still act like they’re living in a futurized version; for example, the Screenslaver’s primary concern in the first half of the movie is that people are spending too much time watching screens, but the moral panic over screen time really wasn’t a thing that far back in history. It’s like they couldn't decide what era they wanted to use.

Animation: 10/10 | Looks just as bombastic as the first film and, in many ways, better by default due to the advance in animation technology.

Story: 3/10 | I just can’t get over how nonsensical Evelyn’s actions are throughout the movie. If you want supers to stay illegal, why do you go so far out of your way to help your brother make them legal...just to try to make them illegal again? Are you just bored with life or something? The B-plot is just cliché “men can't parent” shlock and the resolutions feel cheap and unearned. And the pacing of both these storylines is just awful. Everything drags on way too long. The movie clocks in just under two hours but it feels longer. The action scenes are fun to watch and the film generally has a good sense of humor, so it's definitely not all bad, but it doesn't come close to touching the original.

Characters: 5/10 | Helen is still a great character and so is Violet, mostly, but the family dynamic seems so much different because of how the men are written. Bob is an asshole in an uncharacteristically foolish way: why does he seem to be rooting for Helen to fail despite needing her to succeed for his crimefighting career to continue? Dash is also more of a bully here than in the original. Winston is pretty fun to watch despite being one-note, but Evelyn’s entire character is baffling in ways I’ve already ranted about and which feel at odds with her social prowess and technical genius. Frozone is cool as always. So is Edna but they definitely only brought her back for nostalgia because her scene is very out of place. The other superheroes…exist.

Acting: 8/10 | Everyone’s good-to-great but a few characters sound like they’ve aged, understandable but at odds with the movie being set immediately after the first one. Craig T. Nelson makes Bob sound like a geezer. Catherine Keener’s Evelyn sounds a lot like Rashida Jones.

Music: 7/10 | I can’t remember much of anything from this score that wasn’t copy/pasted from the first film, but it still does its job.

Final score: 6/10 | I have generally positive feelings toward this movie, but I think most of them are because I loved the first movie so much. On its own, Incredibles 2 is kind of a mess. But it’s a mess in the fun, junk food kinda way and not the brutal, The Good Dinosaur kinda way, so it’s definitely rewatchable. Like Finding Dory, I’m mostly disappointed that this is the direction they chose to go with a sequel. It feels like we got The Incredibles: Part 2 more than a true Incredibles 2. Brad Bird admitted he didn’t age the characters because he didn’t want to have to write a new family dynamic, but the writing here botched the first film’s dynamic so much that that decision just seems lazy. Bird also said he was “not interested in a college aged Jack Jack”, but what the hell is the point of his character if we never get to see what he becomes?

Leah

Aesthetic: 5/10 | I didn’t like how the aesthetic was updated. The character designs seemed inconsistent; like, the way Winston was rendered seemed different from, say, Helen. I also feel like the older character designs of the first movie held this one back. Bob’s nose just looked so bad. Humans in a CGI movie was still relatively new in 2004, but by 2018 we’d seen it done better than this so many times.

Animation: 10/10 | The complex fight scene choreography is impressive.

Story: 4/10 | The whole B-plot of Bob needing to learn how to take care of his kids was pretty stereotypical. It had some funny moments but it was a pretty boring concept overall. The main story with the Screenslaver didn’t make a ton of sense either. Wouldn’t it have been easier for Evelyn to sabotage the plan earlier instead of after everyone signed the document?

Characters: 4/10 | Bob was an unlikeable jerk in this movie and his jealousy of Helen seemed very odd after the way he was characterized in the first movie. Helen was fine, but not a standout like in the first movie. Seeing characters like Edna and Frozone return was fun. Violet’s arc in the movie was entertaining. The new supers had distinct designs but not the most memorable personalities.

Acting: 9/10 | I enjoyed the performances given here. Holly Hunter did a fantastic job as Helen again.

Music: 7/10 | It was fine. Not very memorable in my opinion.

Final score: 6/10 | I think this movie might have been the reason I didn’t have high expectations going into The Incredibles for this project; the sequel was fresher in my mind. It had a lot of fun moments but a lot of this movie just didn’t work for me. The characters were worse, the story had too many plot holes to ignore, and the art style didn’t work as well in 2018.

Maddy

Aesthetic: 7/10 | Animation: 9/10 | Story: 6/10 | Characters: 7/10 | Acting: 9/10 | Music: 9/10

Sequels are hard. You go in already having to fight the expectations set by the first film, but also trying to tell a new story so audiences don’t think you’re retreading the same shtick. When you’re trying to follow up one of the most well respected and loved films in your studio’s history? Well, good luck.

Incredibles 2 is nothing more than a good-not-great film, fitting right into Pixar’s “eh-to-great” track record of the 2010s. It still features strong lead characters, amazing action sequences, and some of the strong writing of the first film, but it loses a lot of steam with its story.

On its own, it’s fine, but you’re comparing this to the original. Given the 14-year wait the world had to endure between films, it’s hard not to feel disappointed in Incredibles 2. It’s the nature of the sequel beast.

I enjoyed my time with Incredibles 2 overall, but I don’t think this is high on my rewatch list after completing this project. Just like everyone else has seemingly forgotten about this movie’s existence.

Final score: 47/60 or 7/10

David

Aesthetic: Asynchronous to the era—which isn’t entirely awful, but man. Once again, it just feels like they didn’t really think about what they were actually making a sequel to.

Animation: Very good. Technology was kind here.

Story: Nothing good to say here. It doesn’t make sense, it goes on far too long, and in a lot of ways to me, it feels as though some of the resolutions of the first film are undone by the second.

Characters: I don’t like this characterization. It feels like a miss basically all the way through.

Acting: It’s solid but undistinguished.

Music: It’s fine. A film like this should have something remarkable in its score, and once again, it just feels like this sequel is missing something the original had.

Final score: 2/10 | Thoughtless and overall a poor effort, especially for a sequel to what is definitively one of Pixar’s more beloved films. Feels really lazy and like there was no actual thought applied to what was done here. At best, this is a 2. At best.

Final notes

Well, we didn’t like this movie.

It’s worth noting that Brad Bird originally said he didn’t want to make a sequel to The Incredibles unless it could be better than the original. Whether he actually believes this movie is better than the original or Pixar just saw dollar signs and forced his hand is up for debate.

Despite this movie not really coming close to living up to the original, I’m at least glad it exists, if only as a testament to the first film’s legacy. Besides, if it didn’t, people would still be screaming for it. And that era was just obnoxious.

Next up: Toy Story 4

Coco was a landmark film for Latin America. It was the first film of any kind, much less animation, to have a budget of at least $100 million and feature an all-Latino main cast. In Mexico, it had the highest-grossing opening weekend of any animated film to date and went on to become the highest-grossing film of all time in the country.1

Less importantly, it was the first film Pixar first released in a market that was not the United States. Coco debuted at Morelia International Film Festival in Mexico on October 20, 2017. That in itself wasn’t new; Up, Toy Story 3, Monsters University, Inside Out, and The Good Dinosaur had all previously debuted outside the United States.2 What was new was that Pixar then released the movie in the entire Mexican market a week later, almost a month before they released it in the United States.

How lucky was Mexico to get this film a month early?

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Let’s get into it.

Coco quick facts

Release date: October 27, 2017 (Mexico) / November 22, 2017 (United States) | Director: Lee Unkrich | Music: Michael Giacchino

Starring: Anthony Gonzalez (Miguel), Gael García Bernal (Héctor), Benjamin Bratt (Ernesto de la Cruz), Alanna Ubach (Mamá Imelda), Renée Victor (Abuelita Elena), Ana Ofelia Murguía (Mamá Coco)

John Ratzenberger as: Juan Ortodoncia

Budget: $175-225 million | Box office: $814.3 million

Academy Awards: Won Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song (“Remember Me”)

Eli

This is the first time I’d seen this movie.

Aesthetic: 9/10 | It’s such a love letter to Mexican culture in a way that suggests actual research and care were put into its presentation. The stark contrast between the relatively monotone real world and the extravagantly vibrant Land of the Dead is both visually appealing and thematically appropriate. This also extends to the character designs; the human designs are very grounded—almost photoreal in some cases—in contrast to the cartoonishly fantastical skeletons in the Land of the Dead. And that's without even mentioning the vividness of the alebrijes! My only gripe (however minor) is that, for as cool as the Land of the Dead looks, the plot of the movie demands that it only be shown at night, so a lot of it just looks the same.

Animation: 10/10 | I really can’t pick any holes here. The subtle-but-necessary differentiations in how the humans and skeletons were animated deserves high praise. As with Brave, Pixar’s first foray into the mystic, the magical effects and animations are truly enthralling and enchanting.

Story: 10/10 | Man, this thing is just woven together so seamlessly. I’m almost at a loss for words for how many messages, storylines, and character arcs they stitch together in a perfectly sensical way that resolves almost everything at once. More than that, it’s just a super fun and interesting story to watch; it’s been a while since the events of a Pixar movie drew me in like this and left me on the edge of my seat for what was going to happen next. And the twist is done perfectly! All of the pieces are there if you’re paying close enough attention and yet it still hits so hard. I’m being vague on purpose because my words really can’t do this film justice; it must be experienced.

Characters: 10/10 | Miguel learns so much over the course of this movie and the best parts are that 1) it all feels like it happened because of his own actions, and 2) all of those actions make sense within the context of the story. All of the marks of a dysfunctional family are present at the beginning of the movie: the elder who rules with an iron fist despite having frankly delusional motivations, the child protagonist whose emotional needs are going largely ignored, and the father who clearly wants to side with the child but is often overruled. Imelda and Abuelita’s matriarchy dominating the family dynamic gives the movie an air of gender diversity despite most of the primary characters being male. Miguel, Héctor, and Imelda all being naturally talented musicians and having to repress their musical expression for different reasons is great writing, and the resolution to this storyline is both touching and inspiring. Ernesto is just the right level of sociopathic to make sense in context. If there’s one complaint I have, it’s that Miguel might be a little too precocious for the age of 12, but I think his actions and words still mostly track based on what he goes through over the course of his early life and throughout this movie.

Acting: 10/10 | There’s not a bad acting performance in this film, and some of the actors are also evidently very talented singers. Everyone sells their character perfectly.

Music: 10/10 | It’s not easy to create original songs for a kids’ movie that still sound like authentic, era-appropriate Mexican ranchera tunes, but these guys did it and they’re catchy as hell; "Un Poco Loco" was still stuck in my head when I woke up the next morning. This is the first Pixar movie in which music has been a key cog in the plot and they injected enough of it to clearly enhance the experience but not enough that it overstays its welcome. I love everything about this soundtrack.

Final score: 10/10 | I’ll be honest: when I started Pixar Pints, I thought Toy Story 2 was going to be my #1 film all the way. I’m glad to be wrong. This is pretty close to a perfect movie.

Leah

Aesthetic: 10/10 | Gorgeous movie! The land of the dead is fantastical. Shout out to the alebrije character designs for being so colorful and creative. Pepita was my favorite, she was so pretty. The skeleton character designs were culturally inspired and aesthetically appealing. I also liked the real world setting; it provided a nice contrast and helped us understand Miguel.

Animation: 10/10 | Pixar animation does it again. The characters’ movements showed so much about their personalities, and kudos for animating the alebrije in a way that looks natural.

Story: 10/10 | It’s been a while since one of these movies totally immersed me in the story but Coco pulled it off. I love the way the plot is structured. This movie has a few “twists” but the foreshadowing is excellent and none of the surprises feel contrived. This is my second time watching Coco and I enjoyed seeing how they built up to the reveals. This is Pixar’s best movie thematically. The subversion of “seize your moment” is brilliantly executed. It starts out like a typical “follow your dreams” kids’ movie but it completely turns that on its head when Ernesto is revealed to be a villain who hurt a lot of people on his road to success. I also appreciated that both Miguel and his family had growth in their relationships with each other. This movie is so layered thematically, I could write a whole pint just about that.

Characters: 10/10 | Miguel is a character I was 100% invested in. He had motivations I cared about and I was rooting for him to succeed. The characters make this movie engaging. Héctor and Imelda are both flawed and sympathetic, and Ernesto is everything a good villain should be.

Acting: 10/10 | Singing and acting are on point!

Music: 10/10 | This soundtrack slaps.

Final score: 10/10 | Easily the best Pixar movie of the decade. A lot of other Pixar movies have very noticeable problems or bad implications (even my beloved Finding Nemo), but I didn’t find that in this movie. It’s a great story with strong themes and so much artistry put into the telling.

Maddy

Aesthetic: 9/10 | Animation: 9/10 | Story: 8/10 | Characters: 8/10 | Acting: 9/10 | Music: 10/10

Wiping the tears from my eyes as I try and find the words for this review. Even on second watch for this project, I cannot help but lose it during “Remember Me” (and honestly the movie as a whole, but yeah).

Pixar’s inconsistency of the 2010s, in retrospect, is so fascinating. For the amount of mediocre films Pixar released for money, just to get it out there, or to show off their CGI, you get movies like Coco. Ones that let Pixar’s storytelling powers shine in beautiful colors, as well as the environments.

It, to me, doesn’t feel like a Pixar movie of the 2010s. It doesn’t feel fully tied down to the trends of the time, besides a twist villain but it actually works here so it’s fine! This is Pixar’s last big hurrah for now: a movie crafted out of love, given the full ability to spread its wings to tell an emotionally engaging story about death, family, and the process of moving on.

Movies are a powerful medium that can do anything and impact so many. The existence of Coco should not be forgotten. Its praises should be spoken and its achievements should be studied. While not the best (nor my favorite) Pixar film, it is the Pixar film I have felt the most emotion for, and that’s the power of 24 moving drawings per second. Mwah!

Final score: 53/60 or 8/10

David

Aesthetic: My only ding here is that the Land of the Dead is so monotone, but that’s because the bounds of the film require it to be shown at night. Nothing really to be done about that from the perspective of the animators.

Animation: Gorgeous as always. I feel like even between Inside Out and this, you see leaps and bounds in the fluidity of the characters, and it’s a touch that I really like in this case. Pixar knows how to make magic look…well, magical.

Story: This one’s pretty great. I don’t think it hit me quite like I wanted to, but it’s far from a miss—beautifully crafted and woven together in so many ways.

Characters: Miguel is a little too on the ball for his age, I think, but like…that’s basically the only gripe I have. Damn. They do a great job making Ernesto reasonable in that it’s not a hamfisted nor particularly stupid arc that he has—something that I’ve definitely felt in other movies.

Acting: Solid all the way through.

Music: I’m not huge on the style of music—personal preference—but damn. It’s very evident, at the least, that this soundtrack is remarkably well thought-out.

Final score: 9/10 | It’s extremely good. As much as it doesn’t necessarily hit a lot of my personal notes, I think it’s one of the peaks of Pixar’s craft up to this point.

Final notes

Director Lee Unkrich based the main real-world town in the film on Santa Fe de la Laguna, a town of about 5,000 in the Mexican state of Michoacán. Santa Fe de la Laguna is primarily inhabited by the Purépecha people and its main industry is pottery.

While researching for Coco in and around Santa Fe de la Laguna, the film’s producers met María de la Salud Ramírez Caballero, a local woman who at the time was about 100 years old. She became their direct inspiration for Mamá Coco.

She was never credited for this, much to the dismay of her and her community, as well as several Mexican media outlets. Despite many calls for Disney-Pixar to recognize Salud’s contributions to Coco, the studio has yet to do so.

It may very well be too late. Salud died on October 16, 2022, at the age of 109.

Next up: Incredibles 2

No one was asking for this. At this point in Pixar’s history, audiences were either sick and tired of unnecessary sequels (especially given Finding Dory had just released) or they wanted one sequel in particular and this wasn’t it. Incredibles 2 had been officially announced back in 2014 and fans of the original were on the edge of their seats waiting for it…or even just any new information on it. But, by the time Cars 3 released in 2017, we still knew very little. And given how awful — vain, even — Cars 2 was, nobody was tripping over themselves to see another entry in this franchise. Did we miss out on anything?

Let’s get into it.

Cars 3 quick facts

Release date: June 16, 2017 | Director: Brian Fee | Music: Randy Newman

Starring: Owen Wilson (Lightning), Cristela Alonzo (Cruz), Chris Cooper (Smokey), Nathan Fillion (Sterling), Larry the Cable Guy (Mater), Armie Hammer (Jackson)

John Ratzenberger as: Mack, our beloved

Budget: $175 million | Box office: $383.9 million

Academy Awards: None

Eli

This is the first time I'd seen this movie.

Aesthetic: 8/10 | As with Cars 2, less Radiator Springs on my screen generally means a better-looking movie. The set designs aren't quite as dynamic here, but they do their job, and some of them (like Florida Speedway) were obviously the result of a ton of imagination. The character design is way better than either previous Cars film, though I do wish they would have made it more apparent that the main cast had aged significantly, especially given the whole movie is about Lightning getting old.

Animation: 9/10 | This is gonna sound at least a little deranged, but this film is a masterclass in animating limbs. The wheels of each car do such a good job in conveying the emotions of their characters, from Lightning's stress-induced blowout at the beginning to Cruz confidently getting the hang of "turn right to go left". Aside from that, it's standard high-quality Pixar animation...with a fair share of gratuitous explosions, of course.

Story: 10/10 | This is a near-perfect story for a modern sports movie and a perfect follow-up to the events of Cars. I love it because it integrates its era's real-life sports analytics movement seamlessly into the plot in a way that both unfamiliar children and sports-fanatic adults can understand. I love it even more because it sees the return, physically and especially spiritually, of the late Doc Hudson, whose life story is integral to Lightning's passing of the torch to the next generation. The ending is absurd, but I'm willing to give it a pass because it fits in with the absurdity of the film's universe and it resolved the storyline in a way that wouldn't have made much sense had it been written differently. Where Cars excels in making me nostalgic for my childhood, Cars 3 excels in reminding me why I love sports.

Characters: 10/10 | As much as I love Larry the Cable Guy's shtick (at least relative to the rest of our reviewers), the decision to make Mater the side character he should have been from the start is a good one, and it makes his gimmick less grating and far more endearing. Every new character in this movie is excellent. Sleazy billionaire owner Sterling, new hotshot Jackson Storm, determined trainer-turned-racer Cruz Ramirez, the living legends from Doc's hometown, and even the demolition derby folks at Thunder Hollow all add to the movie in their own fun ways without really being any flavor of offensive or overstaying their welcome. Lightning turns from the conceited asshole he was in Cars to a humble-yet-revigorated coach, truly completing his arc in a way that Cars didn't, and Chick Hicks being a post-career TV analyst is a perfect recasting.

Acting: 9/10 | Owen Wilson and Cristela Alonzo have incredible chemistry in this movie and both performances are better for it. Larry the Cable Guy still plays himself as well as he ever has. All of the side characters are acted pretty much exactly how you'd expect them to be. No real cracks, but no real standouts either.

Music: 8/10 | It's not the Cars score, but nothing ever could be; however, the callbacks are numerous and wonderful. The soundtrack pulls the same trick Cars did, using popular music to enhance the storytelling and atmosphere, but — and I'm definitely biased because I owned the Cars soundtrack as a kid — the hits just aren't as hard. All in all, it's good, not great.

Final score: 9/10 | I'm far from the first person to say this, but this is the movie Cars 2 always should have been, not the wacky John Lasseter vanity project we got in 2011. Cars 3 stands as an excellent sports movie on its own while also serving as a perfect follow-up to Cars.

Leah

Aesthetic: 9/10 | As someone who's lived in the southeast most of her life, I loved the setting of this movie. Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida? Heck yeah! Minor gripe is that Thomasville, Georgia, does not look like that; they made it look like northern Georgia, not southern Georgia. Still lots of cool visuals throughout the film.

Animation: 9/10 | Lots of fun effects! I do admire the thought they put into making cars expressive.

Story: 8/10 | What Cars 2 should have been. It's a good continuation of the arc McQueen went through in the first movie. I also think it's a creative take on the sports movie genre. Dealing with getting older and the changing sports landscape is a reality many pro athletes face. Even if you're not a pro athlete, you'll probably have to contend with change and getting older. I think the moral of the story was sweet as Lightning learned to find fulfillment in being a mentor to Cruz, just as Doc was a mentor to him. I also appreciated that this movie was funny. I found myself laughing at a lot of the jokes. (Chick Hicks as a talk-show host? LMAO) The ending didn't make a ton of sense though. If switching racers is allowed, why wouldn't cars do that all the time? It's faster than pit stops. I appreciate the thematic meaning behind it, but the logic fell apart for me.

Characters: 8/10 | Lightning fills the role of older athlete well. Cruz played well against him; she's really easy to root for. I appreciate that this movie included a female racing legend and had a few lines about how she broke the glass ceiling. The Thunder Hollow cars were fun. I also really loved Smokey and all the old racing legends!

Acting: 8/10 | Solid performances across the cast! Owen Wilson is really good!

Music: 8/10 | I dunno, maybe I’d like the pop songs more if I'd grown up watching this movie, but this just wasn't as good as the soundtrack of the first movie. Still good, but not as memorable.

Final score: 8/10 | I think this movie is better than Cars. It was a fun idea and it made sense as a sequel. I think if you're looking for a Pixar sports movie, this is it.

Maddy

Aesthetic: 8/10 | Animation: 9/10 | Story: 7/10 | Characters: 9/10 | Acting: 7/10 | Music: 8/10

I don’t even know how to start this review. Cars 3 is just…a good movie. If the Cars 2 we got didn’t exist, and this was Cars 2 instead, the Cars franchise would absolutely be seen in a much better light than it is now.

It’s Pixar’s sports movie attempt and it does a really good job making you feel for the characters. The biggest strength of the original Cars is its vibe, even though the writing was pretty lackluster. Cars 3 is the opposite; it has the strongest writing of the series, and while we are long past the wonderful vibes of the original, this movie is better because of how its story develops.

Watching McQueen witness his career falling apart honestly hits, and seeing this buildup to the movie’s amazing climax really highlights how good of a story Pixar put together here. Lightning McQueen isn’t an asshole for no reason and has a good arc, Cruz Ramirez is likeable and hard not to cheer for, Jackson Storm…is fine. The side characters are wonderful. Sterling is such a bitch, but it’s for a good reason that makes sense in the story. Mater being nonexistent is swag. Doc Hudson is still the best character, rivaled only by Chick Hicks being the Stephen A. Smith of the Cars universe.

The movie is absolutely beautiful and stunning. Everyone is on their A-game in the acting sense. The soundtrack is…really good??? This movie is good?????

The impact of Cars 2 cannot go overlooked because of how it absolutely killed any general interest for a franchise with two movies that can, in my opinion, be considered Pixar classics, even if for different reasons. Maybe Cars 3 won’t be for everyone given how deep it digs into “sports movie” storytelling, but man, it’s good.

It’s really good.

Final score: 48/60 or 8/10

David

Aesthetic: Pixar has had some missteps in the movies leading up to this, but one of their sure bets is that they're generally going to get the look of their worlds real right, and this movie is no exception. I loved the designs of the "new generation" of cars, but do wish that there had maybe been some grander indication of the aging process for other cars.

Animation: They give the cars such a realistic movement - it's almost disorienting at times. Really neat.

Story: I love this story, genuinely. Perfect “sports movie” fodder, and watching that transition as Lightning realizes he doesn't have it anymore and moves into the coaching role that gives him that same purpose is just chef's kiss.

Characters: As it turns out, taking Mater out of the central focus point of your movie is in fact the good decision literally everyone could have told you it would be. Lightning's story fulfills itself beautifully as his arc comes to a close, and all the new additions fit into the puzzle just well enough to make it work. Chick "Stephen A. Smith" Hicks is phenomenal.

Acting: [Owen Wilson voice] wow

Music: Real solid. It's not Cars, but nothing could be that soundtrack. This one was just fine in comparison.

Final score: 8/10 | I...really wasn't expecting to like this one this much, to be honest. It slots just in front of Toy Story in my rankings - which is a wild sentence given where Cars 2 left us.

Final notes

So there you have it: Cars 3 is legitimately a hidden gem. If you liked the first Cars, or if you like sports movies in general, and you haven’t seen this one yet, our consensus is that it’s definitely worth your while.

That IGN placed it last on their overall list is nonsensical. Here’s where we have it on ours.

Next up: Coco

This is the one where it felt like they stopped trying. For years, previous additions to established Pixar franchises had been accused of being nothing but cash cows, but these criticisms were largely ignored because the movies themselves were still good. Not here. Finding Dory is a blatant attempt to recapture the magic of its predecessor, Finding Nemo, without doing much of anything to expand upon it. If a different studio released this movie, it would be considered a straight ripoff of Finding Nemo. It is the definition of a money grab. How much money did it grab?

$1.029 billion. That’s a lot of money! When Finding Dory was released in 2016, it was the fourth-highest-grossing animated film of all time! But remember: Finding Nemo grossed a little over $940 million all the way back in 2003. Adjust that for inflation and you get $1.227 billion in 2016 dollars. So Finding Dory performed worse not only critically, but also monetarily.

Let’s get into it.

Finding Dory quick facts

Release date: June 17, 2016 | Director: Andrew Stanton | Music: Thomas Newman

Starring: Ellen DeGeneres (Dory), Albert Brooks (Marlin), Hayden Rolence (Nemo), Ed O’Neill (Hank), Kaitlin Olson (Destiny), Ty Burrell (Bailey), Diane Keaton (Jenny), Eugene Levy (Charlie)

John Ratzenberger as: Bill, the husband crab

Budget: $200 million | Box office: $1.029 billion

Academy Awards: None

Eli

This is the first time I'd seen this movie.

Aesthetic: 4/10 | Finding Nemo did the most with the least, making what should have been relatively same-looking open water sets seem dynamic and distinct; it's probably that film's biggest strength. Finding Dory does something close to the opposite, taking place mostly within one closed environment and having most of the movie look the same, a terrible creative decision that completely kills any sense of adventure. The new character designs in this movie are (mostly) good.

Animation: 8/10 | It's so frustrating watching this movie because if there's any classic Pixar aesthetic I would have loved to see remastered in modern Pixar animation, it's Finding Nemo's. But they didn't do that. The animation is good - it's pretty impossible for Pixar to miss at this point - I'm just left wishing we got more than we did.

Story: 0/10 | Who wanted this? Finding Nemo was a complete story and did not need a part two. Like Marlin says near the beginning, traveling the ocean once is enough adventure for a lifetime. Marlin, Nemo, and Dory all learned their lessons and got to live happily ever after...it should have ended there. Instead, we get a totally contrived "adventure" that not only fails on its own, but also retroactively hurts Finding Nemo because Dory and especially Marlin basically just rehash the same arcs they did in the first movie. Not only that, but man, I do not like the way disability is portrayed in this movie at all. Monsters University did a great job of teaching its audience to live with disabilities and poor natural circumstances, but Finding Dory goes all the way to the other side of the aisle and botches the perception of disabilities in like three different ways. 1) Dory's disability basically makes her a secret supergenius. Like, that is the entire point of this movie, and it results in a lot of BS deus ex machina getting her out of tough situations. 2) When we meet the whales, Destiny and Bailey, Destiny tells Dory that Bailey is faking a disability, and the plot requires that Bailey's disability be resolved, so it's implied that he was indeed faking it and that he "just wasn't believing in himself" hard enough, which...gross! 3) The sea lions spend the entire movie making fun of Gerald, a caricature of someone with developmental issues, for no reason.1

Characters: 4/10 | Loses points because, again, Marlin and Dory learn the same lessons they did in the first film. Loses more points because the writers didn't know how to make Nemo wise without making him precocious. Loses even more points for the mere existence of the sea lions. Gets a couple points back because Hank is pretty cool.

Acting: 9/10 | Great performances all around. I think I could have done with less whale speak, but that's not the actors' faults. Albert Brooks sounds like his own person this time and not like Tom Hanks 2.0 (like he did in the first film), so hats off to him.

Music: 6/10 | Tries to capture the magic of the Finding Nemo score and largely fails, but I think it's mostly because the movie itself is a little confused about what it wants to be and, thus, there didn't appear to be much of a true direction for this score to expand on the first one.

Final score: 5/10 | Maybe I'm being too harsh on this film, but man, most of the time I spent watching it was spent thinking, "wow, y'all sure did this better 13 years ago". This movie on its own is passable. Like, it's fine. But it doesn't expand upon Finding Nemo at all and, in some ways, even takes away from it. I just really hate that this is the direction Pixar went with this movie. Completely pointless film; it screams "cash grab". I would have rather had a spinoff that expanded on whatever became of the tank gang (all we get is a tacked-on end credits scene).

Leah

Aesthetic: 7/10 | It looks fine, but it wasn't as creative as Finding Nemo. I liked the colors and variety of the Open Ocean exhibit. I appreciate how they made a fish look like a middle aged man.

Animation: 9/10 | Pixar consistently puts out high quality animation.

Story: 6/10 | This story concept would have been better if it wasn't a Finding Nemo sequel. I had fun watching this movie, but a lot of it was a rehash from the original. It was sweet, but did it really add anything? It didn't build on the original or say anything new. It also veered a lot more into the absurd than the original, which felt odd as a follow-up. The moral of this movie seems opposite Monsters University; here, Dory is told that she can do anything despite her disability, and is able to overcome her problems through the power of believing in herself. I didn't really like the way this movie treated disability in general. Gerald seemed like an ableist caricature, Dory overcame her disability in a way that seemed unrealistic, and Bailey's issues were dismissed and shown to be all in his head.

Characters: 6/10 | I liked Hank the best; his character arc was new, unlike most of the other characters in this movie. It was nice to see Nemo, Marlin, and Dory again, but this movie didn't really do anything new with them. Seeing Marlin make the same mistakes over again was frustrating. I didn't care for the sea lions; they basically just bullied Gerald because he looked/acted different.

Acting: 8/10 | The acting was fun; I didn't have any problems with it. All the VAs brought the characters to life.

Music: 8/10 | I liked the references to the original score, because I love the original score to pieces, but it wasn't as good as the original.

Final score: 7/10 | The nostalgia factor was fun, and I liked some of the jokes, but it was worse than the original in every way. Finding Nemo was the last Pixar movie that needed a sequel. Finding Dory was fun, but didn't add anything positive. The ableist implications were also disappointing.

Maddy

Aesthetic: 6/10 | Animation: 9/10 | Story: 5/10 | Characters: 5/10 | Acting: 8/10 | Music: 7/10

Finding Dory is a fine movie. This is the first movie on the list I had yet to see in full, so I was going in blind. Here I sit feeling the same way I did when it came out back in 2016, and the way I have felt during the six years since the release of the movie.

Why?

Finding Nemo is a wonderful film filled with creativity and heart. A fun 8/10 with a lot of my childhood stuck in it. Nostalgia is a powerful emotion and a great marketing tool. Yet, none of the nostalgia that I think Pixar wanted to evoke with Finding Dory actually comes through. It’s a money-first, movie-second production at the tail end of John Lasseter’s tenure at Disney-Pixar before getting the boot because he’s a scumbag. While Disney was turning out pretty good original movies, Pixar was in the mindset of making sequels and maybe an original movie here or there because people will go out to see a sequel to a childhood classic, especially if they have their own children now.

The product itself doesn’t hold up to the films that made Pixar a household name; among animation firms, Pixar could easily be considered in a lower tier with Sony and Dreamworks if not for those first five movies being such iconic, well-rounded classics with charm and love put behind everything in them. Yet it’s now 2016 and Pixar wants money more than anything. Finding Dory is perfectly suitable for the kids of today and for their parents to remember their DVD or VHS copy of Finding Nemo that they played to death, but it just reminds me of a time when hope in Pixar was fading.

Considering this is the same year Disney released both Zootopia (a very popular and well-liked film) and Moana (in my opinion, their best movie of the 2010s), no one knew what to expect from Pixar going forward. In hindsight, we now know Pixar has slowly gotten back into shape, which makes Finding Dory such a great time capsule of where they were just half a decade ago, while also giving us a glimpse into the modern mindset change of the company, with just a few more hiccups to cross before we get to the revitalized modern Pixar of today.

Final score: 40/60 or 6/10

David

Aesthetic: Way too samey. Coming back to this years later, I think I expected to see a lot more in terms of the scope of color and design.

Animation: Finding Nemo in a modern setting could have been absolutely spectacular - and we see bits and pieces of that in other movies when they delve into water scenes, but instead, we're left with this hollow imitation. It's still Pixar - still excellent - but jeez.

Story: Why? The entire premise of this film is built on the backbone that the characters DIDN'T LEARN FROM FINDING NEMO. Stupid! Also, Dory's whole schtick got really really grating really fast.

Characters: Fuuuuuuck the goddamn sea lions dude. Holy shit. Also - what I and others have alluded to in the story section. Nobody done learned nothing.

Acting: Fine. They do what they need to do, but it lacks a little of the wonder from the first time around.

Music: Fine. So many of these scores are okay, and it's harder when some movies are truly special because it casts the rest of them in a less favorable light.

Final score: 2/10 | Man. Rough go of it. This movie takes everything that sequels shouldn't want to be and aspires to exactly that - being a faint echo of its predecessor, missing the central tenet of the original story in order to build the story here, and all in all feeling like a very cash-driven choice of film to make, trying to capitalize on nostalgia that I'm not sure was really there. The movie never needed a sequel. I wish we didn't get one.

Final notes

Do we really have to do another sequel next? C’mon.

Next up: Cars 3

Imagine if [The Land Before Time] was CGI and they released it now: an extremely literal coming-of-age dinosaur movie with dark atmosphere and beautiful backgrounds (but, frankly, ugly dinosaurs), with a very basic story which skews to a very young audience despite the dark tone and despite the fact that it comes from a studio which historically has made deeper stuff.

But wait! All of that stuff I just said did happen. It was called The Good Dinosaur and it got mediocre reviews and lost a lot of money.

—Jenny Nicholson, 2020

Let’s get into it.

The Good Dinosaur quick facts

Release date: November 25, 2015 | Director: Peter Sohn | Music: Mychael and Jeff Danna

Starring: Raymond Ochoa (Arlo), Jack Bright (Spot), Sam Elliott (Butch), Anna Paquin (Ramsey), A. J. Buckley (Nash), Steve Zahn (Thunderclap), Jeffrey Wright (Poppa), Frances McDormand (Momma)

John Ratzenberger as: Earl the velociraptor

Budget: $175-200 million1 | Box office: $332.2 million

Academy Awards: lol

Eli

This is the first time I'd seen this movie.

Aesthetic: 9/10 | Boy, this is "Pretty Scenery: the Movie". Never have the sets in a Pixar movie looked so stunning, realistic, and true to life, and that's a really high bar at this point. I really like most of the dinosaur designs too; the Stormchasers, Rustlers, and T-Rexes clearly had a lot of thought put into them and their characters are better for it. The one downside: Arlo's family was designed a little too simply and, let's be honest, lazily for me to give this full points.

Animation: 9/10 | The animation here goes above and beyond, not just fitting in with the aesthetic, but heavily improving it. Every movie since Pixar switched to Presto has been just incredible in this category. I dock it one point for sometimes going out of its way to do things that don't really make any sense but instead just Look Cool™, mostly in action sequences, as Pixar often does.

Story: 1/10 | I hated this story so much. The first half hour+ is just Arlo getting tortured in various ways and it's so fucking brutal for no reason. The rest is Arlo repeatedly being an incompetent, useless protagonist and getting saved from death or serious injury by Spot. And that's honestly the entire movie. The only good scenes in this film were the ones with the T-Rexes; Butch was the first good mentor Arlo had ever had in his life, and being with him actually allowed Arlo to grow as a character. But then Arlo and Spot split from them and it's like Arlo got his memory erased because he goes back to being a selfish idiot in the very next scene and almost getting the two of them killed. The redemption scene of Arlo saving Spot feels completely forced and drags on for way too long. Then Arlo gets to make his mark on the silo at the end for...some reason? He didn't do anything for the family except almost get himself killed.

Characters: 2/10 | The two main characters in this movie are Arlo (idiot, see above) and Spot (precocious human child who is somehow a master of the wilderness at age 7). I spent the whole movie groaning at Arlo's stupidity and scratching my head at Spot's omnipotence; not a great combo. Arlo's dad Henry is an unbelievable asshole who honestly deserved to die (a scene they play twice for some reason), and the rest of the family enabling him isn't any better. The T-Rexes and Stormchasers save the characters from being completely irredeemable, but they're on screen so little that it barely matters.

Acting: 6/10 | Child actor Raymond Ochoa plays Arlo a little too stiffly for my liking but he's mostly fine. I could tell Thunderclap was played by a Minnesotan without looking it up, though it also sounds like he's trying and failing to do a California surfer dude accent? It's confusing. The rest of the cast is meh except for the great Sam Elliott as Butch, who rules.

Music: 5/10 | There are no elaborate musical ideas in this score. It goes up and down at the "right" times. The orchestral cues try to make you feel certain emotions in certain scenes. It's just so obvious and predictable. Which isn't necessarily to say that it's bad. I just...expect more from this studio.

Final score: 5/10 | Amazing-looking film completely ruined by literally everything else. I'm tired of writing about this movie.

Leah

Aesthetic: 8/10 | The setting in this movie is visually stunning. There are some great shots, like the scene in the clouds or the scene when Arlo and Spot are running through the birds. The backgrounds look so realistic; it's impressive. It makes the cartoony dinosaurs stand out though. I thought a lot of the dino designs were creative, but Arlo and his family seemed out of place.

Animation: 10/10 | I thought the animation was also impressive. Lots of fluid movements and creativity with how the different dinosaurs moved.

Story: 6/10 | The story was very cookie cutter. The general idea of a scared dinosaur learning how to face his fears with the help of a cute little human friend is fine, but the execution didn't do anything original. The plot wasn't very engaging. I liked the family scene with Spot at the end; I thought that was pretty touching. (Though, when scrutinized, a lot about it doesn't make sense; like, how did Spot understand Arlo?)

Characters: 4/10 | The dad wasn't a very good parent. The rest of Arlo's family members were one-note characters. Spot was cute, but I didn't really get the whole “acting like a dog” thing. The western t-rexes and the cult pterodactyls were fun side characters. Arlo was underwhelming as a protagonist. I think he learned the lesson of the movie over and over again and it didn't fully sink in until the end. It's a pretty simple character arc. I don't necessarily think that's bad, but it didn't help make this particular film engaging.

Acting: 8/10 | Lots of fun western bits in here.

Music: 6/10 | The score was fine. It more or less did what I'd expect it to do. It didn't super stand out to me, but I didn't think it was bad, just typical.

Final score: 6/10 | This movie didn't offend me like Cars 2 or A Bug’s Life, but compared to most other Pixar movies, this one is pretty boring. The visuals are the most interesting part of the movie. This one is a resounding “meh” for me.

Maddy

Aesthetic/Animation: 10/10 | Just gonna put these two together since they really work in tandem in the movie. It's so pretty. It's a visual showcase the entire run time. Mwah!

Story: 1/10 | Cars 2 has structure. The Good Dinosaur has sticks with marshmallows on the end trying their best to stay upright in a leaning tower. Everything is either boring or frustrating. It has like two total minutes of good content. Ugh.

Characters: 2/10 | The main two are just whatever. I have nothing. I was bored. This movie isn't good. None of the characters are good or memorable.

Acting: 5/10 | I would like to congratulate everyone in this movie for talking into a mic and trying their best.

Music: 6/10 | I would like to thank the composers for trying as well because this movie would be even worse without music.

Final score: 34/60 or 6/10 | It is only ranked higher than A Bug’s Life and Cars 2 because I liked looking at the movie. This is undoubtedly Pixar’s worst flick, but Cars 2 is also really bad and A Bug’s Life was…a movie? So good job, The Good Dinosaur…I guess.

David

Aesthetic: It's one of the few bright spots in this movie, and I think the first time I saw it I didn't really perceive it the same way I did in my most recent watch.

Animation: Gorgeously animated.

Story: Where do I even start? It's nonsensical. None of the plotlines follow through in any substantive manner, and the ones that somehow manage to bumble their way into the second act are unwound by the stupidity of various characters throughout the film. By the end, you feel completely unsatisfied.

Characters: I do not like any of these characters at all. The world did not need them.

Acting: I mean. It's what it is. It's not a bad job, but much like other bottom-tier movies, this is a case where2

Music: Unmemorable, which isn't necessarily a bad thing (see: Inside Out) - but in this case, I felt like there were more than a couple cues wherein something could have been fired off and really added some sorely-needed depth to the film.

Final score: 1/10 | More like The Bad Dinosaur. Gottem.

Final notes

I was ill when I watched this movie and the 97 minutes I wasted with this gracing my screen were worse than the two hours I spent tossing and turning in bed that night because my sinuses were so clogged that I couldn’t sleep.

Next up: Finding Dory

I don’t know what it was about this movie that intrigued me. I didn’t really watch Pixar anymore; I had graduated high school by the time Inside Out came out and was “too old” for it. I’m not really that much of a movie person in general, so I didn’t just watch it out of boredom or because there was nothing else interesting in theaters. Maybe it was the basic part of me being a really big fan of both The Office and Parks and Recreation and wanting to hear Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith, and Mindy Kaling on the big screen. Maybe it was just marketed really well and some promotional material sold me. Whatever it was, the fact of the matter is that this is the most recent Pixar movie I’ve seen (prior to starting this project) that isn’t a sequel, and somehow I don’t think I’m alone.

Let’s get into it.

Inside Out quick facts

Release date: June 19, 2015 | Director: Pete Docter | Music: Michael Giacchino

Starring: Amy Poehler (Joy), Phyllis Smith (Sadness), Richard Kind (Bing Bong), Bill Hader (Fear), Lewis Black (Anger), Mindy Kaling (Disgust), Kaitlyn Dias (Riley)

John Ratzenberger as: Fritz, the panel repairman

Budget: $175 million | Box office: $858.8 million

Academy Awards: Won Best Animated Feature; also nominated for Best Original Screenplay.

Eli

Aesthetic: 9/10 | The way they envisioned the inner workings of the brain is incredible. I remember watching this movie for the first time and wondering how my personality islands would look or what my brain's take on Imagination Land would be. The emotion character designs (and Bing Bong) are just A+ too. My only negative here is that I think they made the human characters a little too cartoony for such a raw story that's so plainly about the human experience.

Animation: 10/10 | It complements the aesthetic perfectly. The way everyone moves, the way things zoom around inside Riley's brain, the way memories are displayed, and a whole lot more neat features had the effect of making me fascinated by my own brain, even though I know it doesn't quite work that magically. Special shoutout to the abstract thought scene; that rocked.

Story: 3/10 | This script is a mess. The transitions between the scenes in the brains of Riley and other characters to those taking place among the humans in the real world are blunt and awkward; check out this edit of a conversation between Riley and her parents without the in-brain scenes and listen to how inane it sounds. Riley's motivation for running away seems farfetched: all indications are that she's well adjusted, has a good relationship with her family, and was generally excited for the move, but two bad days and she's suddenly ready to throw her life away? What? More than anything, though, I couldn't tell while watching this movie whether Riley's emotions controlled her or she controlled them. The movie wants you to think it's the former — they have an actual control panel through which they seem to dictate her every emotional response — but the primary plot-driving events appear to be consequences of incidents in Riley's life altering her brain chemistry. Inside Out teaches the viewer that putting on a happy face through troubling times is unsustainable and that feeling all of your emotions is vital to good mental health — both excellent lessons — but the way they get there, to me, borders on incoherent. My family also moved to a place I was unfamiliar with at age 11 and my early experience in my new city was probably worse than Riley's, so I feel qualified to say that the way everything in the human world pans out is poorly thought out and makes no sense.

Characters: 6/10 | The plot is centered on Joy, who is fun and literally lights up the screen, but she's also incompetent past the point of believability. She's lived and worked with Sadness for 11 years and still doesn't understand what she does or how she contributes to Riley's wellbeing? Every other in-brain character is a plus. We stan a family of Minnesotan kings and queens, but the humans are a little stiff for me. Riley's dad seems like kind of a jerk and her teacher is sneakily the least valuable player of the entire story, just letting her entire class gawk at Riley as she has a total nervous breakdown and apparently doing nothing to console her during or after it. (Also, they caked up Riley's mom for no reason; thanks Pixar!)

Acting: 8/10 | As Joy, this is supposed to be Amy Poehler's show, but Phyllis Smith's Sadness steals it and Richard Kind's Bing Bong is almost as great. All of the other emotions are fantastic. The problem, again, is with the human characters, who are merely okay (except for Kyle MacLachlan as Riley's dad, who is bad).

Music: 8/10 | The score plays very well into the emotional effects the movie is going for and is decently memorable. I won't lie and say it's Michael Giacchino's best work — The Incredibles is hard to top — but it's a great effort.

Final score: 7/10 | For the third consecutive movie, I've come away thinking that Pixar's taught me a good lesson in an entirely too convoluted manner. I'm honestly stunned this film won Best Animated Feature; I think it definitely loses out in a stronger year at the Academy.

Leah

Aesthetic: 9/10 | I love how creative the mind world is! Pixar hasn't done something that cartoony before, and I thought it was really unique. The visualization of the mind was really fun to look at. The human world was more muted in comparison, but I think that's how it needed to be to work.

Animation: 10/10 | The movements of the emotions have so much personality. I think Joy was my favorite animation-wise; her movements were so bouncy and full of energy. A perfect contrast to the lethargy of Sadness. The whole abstract thought scene was a joy to watch. I love it when animated movies use different styles.

Story: 8/10 | I enjoyed this story as a metaphor for the way emotions conflict. It's a really imaginative journey through the human mind (and I love a lot of the humor they use, like mixing up facts and opinions and the jingle getting replayed randomly). I know the human story seems a little clunky, especially without the context of the emotions, but the human story wasn't meant to exist without the context of the emotions, so I can forgive some of the awkwardness. The absence of Joy and Sadness leading to depression (and eventually not feeling anything) is very real.

Characters: 8/10 | Joy and Sadness were a fun duo. I like the idea of Joy needing to learn the importance of Sadness. It's easy to feel like you have to be happy all time and that sadness is a "bad" emotion, but it's really important. All the other emotions were fun within their roles. Riley and her family were alright, though her parents were stereotypical.

Acting: 9/10 | They got a really fun cast for this! All the emotions gave memorable performances that felt true to their characters.

Music: 9/10 | Really good score; I think it's memorable and adds a lot of emotion to the film.

Final score: 9/10 | This film wasn't quite as top tier as I remembered it, but I still really enjoyed it. I like the metaphor and the creativity. I think it's one of the most interesting concepts Pixar has put out. Plus it added one to my Pixar cry count!

Maddy

This is the start of modern Pixar.

Aesthetic: 10/10 | This is the stuff. Humans and real world stuff are generic Pixar flair but everything inside Riley’s head: yes, yes, yes. Vibrant, imaginative, full of life, and overly creative. It’s a nice change of pace after the last three Pixar films.

Animation: 10/10 | Aaaaaaaaa! I love looking at this movie. The animation inside Riley’s head is so expressive. After so many movies that felt grounded in reality and didn’t dare try to do something unique with the medium at its hands, this was wonderful to see.

Story: 6/10 | It’s fine. It’s neat. To me, it represents a turning point at Pixar. Pixar has always been the "blank has feelings" studio, yet rarely has Pixar pushed the envelope this far before. The feelings of Riley are the main characters; they push the story. From this point on, Pixar’s modern day slowly came into shape: character-driven, emotional stories about the everyday struggles and problems of life. Some took fantasy-style twists to these stories, like Coco and Onward, alongside the more "grounded" movies like Soul, Turning Red, and Luca. They all pushed this same basic idea for story, touching on different topics, with Soul shining bright as the biggest example of this modern-day Pixar formula. Coming back to Inside Out and seeing the roots of Pixar’s more character-focused emotional stories was interesting knowing how the studio looks in 2022.

Characters: 7/10 | Joy is kinda stinky but I guess that’s how she grows. I am low on words but everyone is cool and neat, even the humans.

Acting: 10/10 | Everyone is A+ gaming here. Shoutout to Bill Hader.

Music: 6/10 | Just another "it exists" score for me. It’s good but nothing special.

Final score: 49/60 or 8/10 | I really enjoyed coming back to Inside Out. It’s such a fun movie with a heartfelt story that laid the groundwork for the future of Pixar original stories.

Fun Maddy note: Pete Docter directed Inside Out as well as Soul, and is now one of the creative leaders of Pixar. There might be a connection here.

David

Aesthetic: Gorgeous. The mindscape deal is still one of my favorite sceneries in all of the Pixar canon. All the vibrant colors come together perfectly, and their usage in emotional identification is perfection.

Animation: It's good. You really get to see how far they've come with a lot of things - their human animation, the non-human animation? Major steps forward that don't always click until you're there seeing it for yourself. This, to me, opens a new "era", as it were, of Pixar's animations - another step forward visually and technologically.

Story: It's not perfect - the human segments, particularly, seemed present more of necessity than of anything else, but the inter-emotional growth is really awesome. I love seeing the way that the emotions have to move past their own obstacles, framed through the lens of puberty and growing up, and seeing Joy and Sadness have their moments together is heartwarming throughout.

Characters: Joy sucks at first, but her growth throughout the movie really moves me. The way each emotion is entirely coded to their persona is really neat, and the way we see those influences play through in the human characters is dope as hell.

Acting: No one misses here. Just an all-star performance from a ton of top-tier actors.

Music: I feel like it does exactly as much as it needs to and not much more.

Final score: 10/10 | I don't always have the easiest time articulating what's going on in my brain. This movie, though a simplification of the myriad emotions that we're capable of feeling on any given day, framed a lot of things in a really accessible way. It's another in the list of Pixar entries categorized under "what if ___ had feelings" - except, someone lit a massive joint and asked "what if feelings had feelings". It's a really sweet and touching story that came out at a particularly poignant time for me, and as such, lands in the top spot of my rankings.

Final notes

Disney-Pixar was sued on three separate occasions for various flavors of copyright infringement in this movie. One of the suits came from a former Canadian film student, who apparently made a similar film with the same title all the way back in 2000. His suit was withdrawn in the U.S., but he successfully appealed in his home country and eventually was evidently awarded $25,000. Which just goes to show you: always sue, no matter how frivolous.

Next up: The Good Dinosaur

Have you ever heard of Circle Seven Animation? If not, I don’t blame you; they never released a single movie. A quick backstory: before Disney acquired Pixar, they were merely Pixar’s distributor. It began with a three-film deal, which was soon extended to seven films, through which Pixar retained most creative control on their films while Disney distributed them for a hefty fee. The deal also gave Disney the rights to create any sequels based on these films, but allowed Pixar the right to refuse to make them.

During production of the last two of these films (The Incredibles and Cars), talks between Pixar and Disney to further extend the deal reached an impasse. Oversimplifying to save time, Disney wanted more control and Pixar said no, so they began to search for other distributors. We all know what ended up happening: Disney caved, bought Pixar outright, and gave them creative control over basically all of Disney animation. But while the deal was still in jeopardy, in an attempt to give themselves more leverage over Pixar, Disney founded another animation studio whose sole purpose was to create sequels to Pixar properties that Disney owned.

Which brings us back to Circle Seven Animation, the studio in question. In 2005, while Pixar was producing Cars and beginning work on titles they thought would be distributed by someone other than Disney, Circle Seven began production on sequels to three of their properties: Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and — you guessed it — Monsters, Inc. These movies all currently exist, of course — Pixar would go on to produce sequels (or prequels) to each of its first seven movies except A Bug’s Life — but they all had vastly different scripts. Circle Seven’s Toy Story 3 was going to be about Buzz Lightyear getting recalled, their Finding Nemo 2 was going to be about Nemo meeting a long-lost brother…and that leaves Monsters, Inc.

Disney originally wanted a sequel, not a prequel, in which Mike and Sulley try to revisit Boo in the human world, but find that her family has moved and subsequently get stuck in the human world and lost. It was to be titled Monsters, Inc. 2: Lost in Scaradise. What did we get instead?

Let’s get into it.

Monsters University quick facts

Release date: June 21, 2013 | Director: Dan Scanlon | Music: Randy Newman featuring the Blue Devils Drum and Bugle Corps

Starring: Billy Crystal (Mike), John Goodman (Sulley), Steve Buscemi (Randall), Helen Mirren (Hardscrabble), Joel Murray (Don)

John Ratzenberger as: Abominable Snowman (again)

Budget: $200 million | Box office: $743.6 million

Academy Awards: None!

Eli

This is the first time I had seen this movie.

Aesthetic: 8/10 | Character design is top notch again. Hardscrabble looks just as intimidating as she acts, Worthington screams "snotty frat douche", and the Oozma Kappa gang are all well varied in looks and personality. The set design was mostly good. It automatically looked way better than Monsters, Inc. because a) it's 2013, not 2001, and b) Monsters, Inc.'s set design sucked. The biggest problem for me was the campus sets; sometimes they made me nostalgic for undergrad and sometimes all I could think was "this is a boomer movie studio executive's idea of the modern college experience".

Animation: 9/10 | Where Monsters, Inc. was mostly a fur simulation exhibition, this film goes above and beyond in making every monster the exact type of creepy they're meant to be. Some of the mouth movements randomly looked pretty stiff (Hardscrabble comes to mind), but I can't tell whether it was intentional.

Story: 6/10 | This is somehow among both Pixar's most jumbled stories and its most formulaic. You can tell so many things about what this movie is going to be from the moment Mike steps foot on campus. It was obvious that Randall was going to be his roommate. It was obvious that he and Sulley were going to start the movie as rivals and end as best friends once they realized they complemented each other perfectly. It was obvious that Oozma Kappa was going to win the Scare Games. It just took multiple storylines beginning and ending and intertwining for that to be the result. For what the story is, it's fine. It's a good, G-rated time. It shows the audience that sometimes you might not be meant to do a certain thing no matter how hard you try, but that doesn't make you worth less as a person. The stakes just felt lower to me because I knew how almost everything was going to unfold.

Characters: 7/10 | Most of the new additions to the cast are fairly one-note, which...fine. At least they're not offensive stereotypes. Where this movie shines is in its portrayals of Mike and Sulley. Mike came from nothing, had to scratch and claw his way to everything in life, and still came up short; Sulley was born on third base with nobody out and still couldn't score. Both characters failed at first because, for as talented as they were, they were still unable to look past their own egos and insecurities. It wasn't until they pooled their talents together and made themselves a part of something bigger that they thrived. I love this dynamic, as it's something that I aspire to in interpersonal relationships on a daily basis, and I think this film did an excellent job showcasing it. On an unrelated note: why did half of Oozma Kappa sound like they're from International Falls? Lmao.

Acting: 7/10 | Billy Crystal is the star of the show, just as he was in Monsters, Inc., and everyone else ranges from decent to great; it's standard Pixar fare. John Goodman is a good actor but he just doesn't sound like a college freshman at all and is clearly playing Sulley like the adult he was in the first film, which loses points from me given how big he is to the movie. Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day, and John Krasinski were all in this movie and I didn't recognize any of them until the credits, which feels like it should be impossible?

Music: 8/10 | Another movie where the end credits song blew pretty much everything else out of the water, though here that's a higher bar, because I mostly liked this score. It's gotta be the college sports fan in me, but I'm a sucker for fight songs. Even fictional ones.

Final score: 7/10 | In pretty much every regard, this film is just a touch below the standard of quality Pixar led us to expect during its golden age. It is the dictionary definition of "good, not great".

Leah

Aesthetic: 9/10 | The character designs in this movie were so good. Each monster had so much personality. Hardscrabble was appropriately terrifying, Oozma Kappa were loveable dorks, and the Greek council presidents were my favorite designs in the movie. MU's campus was a fun setting. I really liked the look of the camp too.

Animation: 9/10 | Pixar is great at animation; more news at 11.

Story: 7/10 | This was the movie that made me realize how formulaic Disney-Pixar movies are. There a few elements of the story were a little unbelievable to me (like the way final exams worked), and parts of the story did seem ridiculous, but I can appreciate a story about learning to work with your limitations and learning how to find success in different ways than you might have expected.

Characters: 7/10 Dean Hardscrabble is terrible at her job, but I 100% believed her as an academic. Universities are full of power-trippy people like her. Mike and Sulley were a fun duo here, going from enemies to best friends. The contrast between them made the movie more fun and interesting.

Acting: 8/10 | Lots of fun moments in this movie; I thought the cast did a great job.

Music: 9/10 | I love marching band music. I also want to point out that this movie got the Blue Devils (of Drum Corp International fame) to do some of the soundtrack, which is really cool and adds some authenticity to this movie. I thought the tracks complemented the movie well, and it was a total bop.

Final score: 8/10 | It's a little ridiculous, but the aesthetic and the music pull it up for me. I also think it's a good message for a kid's movie.

Maddy

Aesthetic: 9/10 | This is when Pixar really started to hit a stride in really pretty-looking movies. The monster designs are great once again.

Animation: 8/10 | Same as above, but for animation.

Story: 6/10 | At its surface level, it is a fine film with nothing really amazing about it. But as a 21 year old neurodivergent college student, Mike’s arc in this movie really hits closer to home than I expected. Mike is born "not scary", hindering his chance of becoming a scarer. He is constantly told over and over again that he can’t achieve his dream. He has no support system so he can only rely on himself to make his dream a reality, and he has to work harder than any typical person. It hits hard because that was me, and so many other neurodivergent kids, going through the public school system. We relate to Mike here because his story is like ours. When Mike says, “I did everything right. I wanted it more than anyone. And I thought…I though if I wanted it enough...” I genuinely felt like crying a little. The amount of times I’ve thought this myself is too high to count. A lot of movies tend to pull a "your disability makes you special" card when dealing with these topics and it never sits right with me. It doesn’t feel special when my disability holds me back from basic human interaction or doing what I want to do. Monsters University shows Mike fail. He doesn’t get to be a scarer, but that doesn’t make him any less of a person. It’s a good message for everyone, but for me, it reminds me that my disability doesn’t stop me and I’m good enough.

Characters: 7/10 | Everyone is fine on their own merit, but I don’t have much else to say here that I didn’t already say in the Story section.

Acting: 9/10 | John Goodman and Billy Crystal. That is all.

Music: 7/10 | I can’t say no to the pep band music.

Final score: 46/60 or 7/10 | For as much of a personal tangent as I went on, this is still just a very ok/fine movie as a whole, but it has a lot more meaning to me now than it did in 2013.

David

Aesthetic: I love the varied designs of the monsters - something I think I mentioned last time, but 12 years on it carries so well, which is great. Though a lot of them are somewhat giveaways for a character's alignment - you can kinda tell who the villains are just from the off - I think it works. It's also important to remember that this is, at the end of the day, a kid's movie, and so getting on them for more oblique references is maybe a little unfair.

Animation: The company continues to stand out in the field - though this wasn't the same technological marvel that Monster's, Inc. was, it's still a really beautifully animated film. No complaints.

Story: Much like the aesthetic - it's a little played out, a little obvious. Nothing about this story was really surprising in any sense, and I sort of wish they had been bold enough to deviate from that formula a bit more. I appreciated that we got to see this sort of prequel to a movie I really enjoyed, but... yeah. Left feeling a little whelmed here.

Characters: Why did Oozma Kappa sound like one of my family get-togethers? Goofy-ass accents kind of took me out of the immersion, if only momentarily, but that's okay. Still got a kick out of it. Mike and Sulley excel in their roles, Dean Hardscrabble is an academic played perfectly, and everyone else fills out the rest exactly as you'd expect they would.

Acting: It's fine. For such a star-studded cast, I think in retrospect I'm maybe a little let down, but it's Pixar - they don't really ever do a bad job.

Music: I just don't really recall much from this. It's solid, and I love the marching band influences, but outside of that I don't really feel like much of the score really pulls its weight.

Final score: 6/10 | Solid, but at this point, I think I'm realizing that I've come to expect more from Pixar.

Final notes

We’re over halfway there!

Next up: Inside Out

Brave is another movie of firsts for Pixar. It’s their first fairytale (and a film that feels a lot more Disney than Pixar as a result). It’s their first film directed by a woman (Brenda Chapman), but only in part, because it’s also their first film with two listed lead directors (Mark Andrews). And least obviously, but perhaps most importantly, it’s their first film using Presto, an elaborate in-house animation software they created to make everything look exactly how they wanted and have used for every film since.

Let’s get into it.

Brave quick facts

Release date: June 22, 2012 | Directors: Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman | Music: Patrick Doyle with original songs by Julie Fowlis

Starring: Kelly Macdonald (Merida), Emma Thompson (Elinor), Billy Connolly (Fergus), Julie Walters (the Witch)

John Ratzenberger as: Gordon, the castle guard

Budget: $185 million | Box office: $540.4 million

Academy Awards: Won Best Animated Feature

Eli

Aesthetic: 10/10 | Wow, this movie looks phenomenal. Not only are the sets more beautiful than any Pixar movie to date, but the character designs are a near-perfect blend of real-human-like and cartoonishly hyperbolic (though I do wish the grown male characters were a little less jokey looking). If Cars 2 was proof of concept in Pixar acing set design, Brave is really what seals the deal.

Animation: 9/10 | The way everything moved help to set the mood about as well as you could expect. From Bear Elinor bumbling around and having no idea what to do with her own body, to Angus and Merida hectically scurrying through the glen, to the natural elements of fog, sun, and water working perfectly within the confines of the story. I did sometimes feel as though some of the objects were at odds with each other in how they were supposed to interact, but otherwise, more A+ work.

Story: 4/10 | Maaaan, I dunno. It does everything a Pixar movie (and a Disney fairytale, as this also technically is) should. It's got the action, the tender moments, the character development, the life lessons. It's generally fun to follow along with. My problem with it is that most of the plot is driven purely by magic; the characters have a weirdly small amount of agency. Of course, Merida unwittingly turns Elinor into a bear by magic, but that was borne of her own naiveté and was a decision she made, so I'm not talking about that. But how does Merida find the witch in the first place? Magic. How are she and Elinor led to Mor'du to learn their fate if they can't lift the curse? Magic. Why does Elinor turn primal at the exact worst possible time? I dunno, magic! The advances and setbacks in this story don't feel like they come from the characters doing things well or badly; it just feels like everything is being done for them. The morals are upstanding and you feel good after watching this movie, but in a way, the entire thing seems pointless.

Characters: 9/10 | The story not packing a huge punch hurts even more considering how good the characters are here. They're a little (okay, a lot) archetypal, sure, but you can still write archetypes well if you know what you're doing. The actions from Merida, Elinor, and Fergus are not only believable within the context of the film, but also feel like they could be scaled down to any conflict in any old family. Given this is the first Pixar movie to be directed (in part) by a woman, it stands to reason that the female leads here are well-written and dynamic in a way that female characters in Pixar just haven't been to this point, and that's a breath of fresh air. Also, the three boys are cute and I thought it was neat that they didn't give them any dialogue; they didn't need to.

Acting: 10/10 | Merida was originally supposed to be voiced by Reese Witherspoon, but she couldn't figure out how to do a good Scottish accent, so they dropped her and replaced her with Kelly Macdonald, a decision that was absolutely for the better as Macdonald's Merida is iconic. The rest of the cast continues Pixar's tradition of putting a ton of effort into voice acting, another welcome sight after the odd misstep that was Cars 2.

Music: 10/10 | They got an actual Scot to score this and another actual Scot to provide some original songs, and everything just works perfectly to provide the aesthetic the film is going for in its setting while not slamming you over the head with it. It's done with the same effect as Randy Newman's Western theme in Cars.

Final score: 9/10 | Some uninspiring plot elements notwithstanding, this is a fantastic film. A true return to form for Pixar after tripping over themselves the year prior. It's nothing like anything Pixar had ever done before, and isn't that what these guys used to thrive at? Especially with the last two films being cash cow sequels, this new blood is a delightful addition to the Pixar canon.

Leah

Aesthetic: 10/10 | I love Celtic aesthetics, so I really love the way this movie looks on a personal level. Beyond that, Pixar continues to be technically impressive. The forest, the background, the castle all came together to create a distinct setting that was amazing to watch.

Animation: 9/10 | Merida's hair is amazing! I thought the animation in this movie had a lot of personality. Elinor's movements as a bear were pretty funny and had a nice contrast with Mor'du.

Story: 9/10 | This is the most "Disney" story Pixar has done so far. I like the fairytale framing of a family drama. The conflict between mother and daughter is a tale as old as time, and I enjoyed seeing how Merida and Elinor learned to understand each other better. Also, after decades of Disney princess movies, it's refreshing to finally get one where the princess doesn't have to end up with a prince. I didn't mind the magic aspect of the story as much as Eli did. I think it reflected/symbolized the characters' agency and struggles as opposed to stripping it away/rendering it meaningless. I also liked the story within the story about Mor'du.

Characters: 9/10 | Merida and Elinor are both great foils to each other, and their conflicting personalities made it fun to watch their journey. Fergus and the Clan leaders/sons added a lot of humor to the movie, which I could appreciate. I also enjoyed the humor the little brothers added. The witch was a fun character too; the cauldron scene was one of my favorite parts of the movie.

Acting: 10/10 | Great performances really make this movie feel authentic to its setting.

Music: 9/10 I love Celtic music. This soundtrack really sets the mood of the movie, and even further establishes the setting as a medieval Scotland.

Final score: 9/10 | I remember feeling underwhelmed by this movie when I saw it in theaters, hoping for a Celtic fantasy epic, but now I think I appreciate it more for what it is. I love the Celtic aesthetic, and I think it tells a good story about familial relationships.

Maddy

Brave: a trans person’s least favorite word.

Aesthetic: 6/10 | The world is great and cool. My problem is the humans. Pixar was doing great with human designs but this movie tried to lean into more realistic features alongside previous cartoony styles and it just looks bad to me. The actual "aesthetics" of the world are great though.

Animation: 8/10 | This is a hair animation showcase and it rocks. Rest of the movie is good too.

Story: 3/10 | Merida faces no consequences for her actions in this movie. It is frustrating. This entire story is frustrating. It’s really hard to get involved in the world when the writing is confusing or bullying you every second. I love the world and lore of the world, but man, everything is fighting to kill it. This is but a D-tier Pixar story.

Characters: 4/10 | Merida sucks. She is not a good character. She is not well written. She is the worst Disney princess. I really, really don’t like her. She has one good scene (going up against her mother in that one competition scene) in this movie and she is the main character. The rest of the cast and Elinor are fine. I have no problems with them besides being the subject of very poor jokes.

Acting: 8/10 | I enjoyed all the performances in this movie. Nothing stands out, but it’s good.

Music: 9/10 | Banger. One of my favorite soundtracks of the Pixar lore.

Final score: 37/60 or 6/10 | I like a lot of things about this movie, but none of it is has to do with the pieces that hold a movie together: its writing and its characters. It’s not the worst script Pixar has written, or the worst characters Pixar has put on screen, but I just did not enjoy these parts of the film. It’s a great animation showcase and not much else, a phrase you might hear again soon.

Fun Maddy note: I got nothin’. This movie means nothing to me.

David

We're in the shit now, folks. We were in it with Cars 2 but, like, point stands. This is not a great period for dear ol’ Pixar.

Aesthetic: I love it. I think they did a fine job with the setting here, and despite the way the rest of the film kind of lets it down, I think this might be my favorite part. It's really nicely put together, and supports what I think they were trying to do with the rest of the film the way it was intended.

Animation: Her hair oh my god. Gorgeous.

Story: This one sucks - like, one of my least favorites in the entire Pixar canon. It's a drag, unmemorable, and at best, confusing. Nothing positive to report here, and it's a huge reason this movie falls to where it is.

Characters: Merida isn't good! No one's amazing, and having a very bad character as your absolute front focus for most of the film is a really rough way to get people into a film.

Acting: It's fine. Nothing remarkable.

Music: This shit bangs, I love a good Celtic ripper, but at the same time, when I'm asked to recall individual moments that shine through, I find myself unable to call back to any specific moments. Maybe it's a measure of how weak the story is. Still good, though.

Final score: 5/10 | A bad story and characters that don't pull their weight really drag this movie down. It beats A Bug's Life, but that's only by a very very narrow margin. Is it the worst? No. Is it good? Also no.

Final notes

Merida did nothing wrong.

Next up: Monsters University

I’m not gonna beat around the bush: this is Pixar’s first truly, unquestionably bad movie. The reason why is the subject of a decent amount of debate. Many moviegoers chalked it up to Pixar (or Disney, now its owner) being greedy. They’d just seen their star franchise, Toy Story, gross over a billion dollars the year prior with a highly anticipated sequel people had wanted for years.1 It stands to reason that they’d want, no pun intended, lightning to strike twice.

The other major theory, and the one I personally subscribe to, is that this movie was just a vanity project for John Lasseter, the director of Cars and, at the time, the chief creative officer of Pixar. Most Pixar movies have a point. The creative team comes up with an original story with dynamic characters and touching moments to relay some important life lesson or moral. Not Cars 2. By Lasseter’s own admission, this movie exists because he thought it would be funny to make Lightning and Mater travel the world.

And so after Cars came out, I was doing publicity all around the world and had Cars' characters on the brain. And, so every place I went, I kept looking out the window and found myself laughing and thinking, "What would Mater and Lighting McQueen be doing in these situations?" Like getting lost on the streets of Tokyo, which are so confusing. The huge roundabout around Arc de Triomphe in Paris. How anybody could try and maneuver through that would get stuck for days. Driving on the wrong side of the road on the Autobahn with no speed limit. In Italy, with all of those little scooters all around you like gnats. And so I thought that if I had the chance to do another Cars movie, I'd love to take them out of the United States and travel around the world, where there's so much opportunity.
— John Lasseter to Animation World Network, 4/19/2011

Regardless of how this movie came to be, the general consensus is that it should not have.

Let’s get into it.

Cars 2 quick facts

Release date: June 24, 2011 | Director: John Lasseter | Music: Michael Giacchino

Starring: Larry the Cable Guy (Mater), Owen Wilson (Lightning), Michael Caine (McMissile), Emily Mortimer (Shiftwell), John Turturro (Francesco), Eddie Izzard (Axlerod)

John Ratzenberger as: Mack again

Budget: $200 million | Box office: $559.8 million

Academy Awards: None. Not a single nomination. It had to settle for a Golden Globe nomination for Best Animated Film, which it lost to Paramount’s The Adventures of Tintin.

Eli

This is the first time I'd seen this movie all the way through.

Aesthetic: 9/10 | Big improvement over Cars. Gotta be the most dynamic Pixar movie to date in terms of scenery and set locations. The newly-introduced character designs are a mixed bag; Shiftwell is pretty neat but McMissile is kind of blah and some of the villains are too similar to each other to avoid mixing them up. The film has enough fun visual gags and gimmicks to make up for its few aesthetic pitfalls.

Animation: 6/10 | Oh boy, is this hectic. There's a baseline of quality Pixar couldn't sink below if they tried, but as a viewer, you're distracted from almost every scene by a seemingly endless barrage of gunshots and explosions and rocket fire. Basically just a cheat code for making your really dumb movie seem exciting.

Story: 0/10 | Pixar's worst story to date, bar none. The twist is nonsensical for multiple reasons and comes out of nowhere as Mater uses knowledge the viewer cannot possibly have to come to his conclusion. The primary moral of "be yourself no matter what" is both wrong (public places usually require manners that Mater doesn't use) and feels unearned at the end of the movie because Lightning has no arc at all. I'm far from being a pearl-clutcher, but this move is excessively violent in ways that feel entirely unnecessary and make me wonder how on Earth it got a G rating—The Incredibles uses violence correctly; in Cars 2 it just feels gratuitous. More than anything, though, this story is just chock-full of bullshit, of stuff that makes absolutely no sense except that it has to because movie. I spent most of the movie laughing for the wrong reasons.

Characters: 2/10 | I gave Cars a 5 here and, man, that ensemble looks like Toy Story 3 in comparison to this garbage. Every returning character is written worse, Flanderized, or both. This is Mater's show, so Lightning is reduced to a supporting actor and he really just brings nothing to the table. As for Mater, he's either a total dunce or a supergenius depending on what the movie requires he be at that exact moment; I wish they didn't make him such an idiot for half of the movie because seeing a common tow truck be so useful in the movie's very uncommon scenarios is fun and honestly endearing. McMissile and Shiftwell...they sure are British spies, alright. They've got the combined personality of a cantaloupe and apparently the brain of one too given they can't figure out Mater isn't really a spy until the climax despite him botching every field mission to that point and repeatedly insisting he isn't supposed to be there. Axlerod is an F-tier villain because his motivation is crackbrained. Francesco is the most basic "racing rival" archetype ever; I could have written him. I know Paul Newman died but I really wish they would have recast Doc.

Acting: 6/10 | I thought Larry the Cable Guy was good in Cars and I think he's just as good, if not better, here; he's actively fun to listen to and, given Mater has so much dialogue, the movie is better for it. Owen Wilson's Lightning is fine but the dialogue they give him is so basic and, honestly…bad…that his acting seems worse than it really is. Michael Caine is a legend but he phoned McMissile in pretty hard, and Emily Mortimer's performance as Shiftwell is so unremarkable that Cars 2 isn't even mentioned on her Wikipedia page.

Music: 3/10 | Another nothing-burger Pixar score with almost no notable cues, followed by two decent Brad Paisley songs in the end credits. This franchise should be scored by Randy Newman and Randy Newman only.

Final score: 4/10 | The seal of A Bug's Life is finally broken, but if I'm being truly honest, while I think A Bug's Life is a better film than Cars 2, I'd be more likely to rewatch the latter because most of the runtime is in "so bad it's good" territory. It's funny on accident enough to make up for rarely being funny on purpose.

Leah

Aesthetic: 7/10 | These are the most impressive backgrounds Pixar has put out so far. Getting multiple cities to look this good isn't an easy feat. I'm still not one for the car aesthetic though.

Animation: 6/10 | The animation was fine. Nothing really wowed me. I think the character designs of the cars are limiting in how you can push them to move.

Story: 1/10 | Honestly, this story was just a huge mess. So many of the plot points were nonsensical; it felt more like this was about making a cool spy movie with cars than making any kind of meaningful narrative. I know I gave the first Cars a hard time for going easy on the oil companies, but was this really the best they could come up with? One of my biggest gripes is that this movie is ableist as hell. You're really going to make the cars with mechanical problems your main villains with the motivation that they've been marginalized by society? This is the group you want to associate with big oil? My god, think about the implications of what you're writing, Pixar. I can appreciate the moral of "don't judge people based on appearances or stereotypes" but I don't think it was executed well here. Mater did commit several social faux paus, but it never seemed like he learned from them or that he should have learned from them.

Characters: 2/10 | Eh, I didn't really care that much about anyone in this movie. The original cast was hardly present outside of Mater and Lightning, and Lightning just seemed like a vehicle for the plot. His character was bland and predictable. Mater's schtick got old real quick. The spies were completely inobservant for secret agents, and what the heck was that ending with Shiftwell as Mater's girlfriend?

Acting: 6/10 | They did the best they could with what they had.

Music: 4/10 | The spy music at the beginning was cool, and that was the only thing I found noteworthy musically. Huge step down from the original Cars.

Final score: 3/10 | Ableist themes, gratuitous violence, nonsensical plot... this movie lives up to all the complaints. All those pretty backgrounds for this?

Maddy

Aesthetic: 7/10 | Honestly a nice looking movie. Making London cloudy and grey for the final act is kinda dumb though.

Animation: 5/10 | There is inherently nothing wrong here. It’s car animation. It’s fine. Go crazy!

Story: 1/10 | Why is it a spy movie? Why is Mater the plot driver? Why is there a kill count? Why is it this poorly written and paced? Why was this made? Why?? John Lassater is a bitch and I don’t care if his name isn’t spelled right.

Characters: 2/10 | I hate everyone in this movie. Mater is dumbed down to oblivion. Lightning is an even BIGGER asshole. The spy cars are generic. The villains are villains. Who is Axlerod? No one in this movie is likable.

Acting: 5/10 | The characters sucking ass affects this ranking. Larry the Cable Guy is annoying. Owen Wilson is ???. Everyone else is okay at best. Nothing really stands out.

Music: 3/10 | It’s so generic. It’s so boring. I miss the Cars score and its western twang.

Final score: 23/60 or 3/10 | Like, it’s bad. It’s not good. It’s such an amazing misstep for this company. Some people say this would be a middle-of-the-pack DreamWorks movie. That’s disrespect to DreamWorks. This movie is hot trash.

Fun Maddy note: A car is crushed to death in this movie. Is that murder? Are there laws in this universe? Can you crush a car to death and escape any legal responsibility? I would like to know.

David

Aesthetic: Honestly? This kinda slaps. I love what they did with locations. I think some of the background characters get a little samey, but on the whole, they've taken huge jumps forward and it really becomes evident here.

Animation: It's a lot. Like. Wow. Michael Bay, is that you? I think, given the relative limitations of the world, this is actually pretty okay, but not to the level that we've seen Pixar be able to attain.

Story: Hahahahahahaha. Lol. Lmao. Uh. They kill a car? It's a spy movie involving possibly the worst spy of all time - but it's a lot less funny than say, Get Smart. I think it just missed the mark with basically everything it was trying to do - and it was trying to do way too much at that. What made Cars so brilliant was its focus on racing - but also the way it humanized the cars themselves and made a story out of Lightning's growth. This is just a terrible straight-to-DVD sequel that escaped the confines of its prison.

Characters: A Mater-centric movie is exactly as irritating as you think it would be. That said, the fancams of this movie with Russian rap are honestly phenomenal, and make me appreciate this shitshow significantly more. The cameos from NASCAR figures and people around the world of racing were neat to me when I first saw this, and they remain really neat now. It's one of the things I've always appreciated about this series - their complete willingness to embrace the sport of racing in real life, as much as the drivers themselves don't always nail it.

Acting: They sure tried! I'm not gonna ding them too hard here, because I think they did what they could with what they had - which wasn't much.

Music: Meh. Nothing really of note here, which is a massive step backwards from the banger-laden soundtrack to the original Cars film.

Final score: 3/10 | Here's the thing. This is objectively a terrible movie. It's among the bottom five in Pixar's catalog, and last of the films we've seen so far. The story is nonsensical at best, the characters alternate between papier-mâché facsimiles and terrible stereotypes, there's no real focus on the actual racing... and yet, I can't help it. I had a fucking blast rewatching this. It's so bad that it swings back around to being...not good, but fun. So, despite this getting a 3 from me, don't write this one all the way off.

Final notes

It’s not a good movie!

Next up: Brave

Six Pixar films to date (seven, if you believe the rumors for the upcoming Lightyear) are tied for the firm’s highest budget on a single film: $200 million. Toy Story 3 was the first to hold this budget and it paved the way for numerous others to come by becoming the first animated film to ever gross over $1 billion. What was so great about this movie that it made 10 figures at the box office?

Let’s get into it.

Toy Story 3 quick facts

Release date: June 18, 2010 | Director: Lee Unkrich | Music: Randy Newman

Starring: Tom Hanks (Woody), Tim Allen (Buzz), Joan Cusack (Jessie), Ned Beatty (Lotso), Don Rickles (Mr. Potato Head), Estelle Harris (Mrs. Potato Head), Jodi Benson (Barbie), Michael Keaton (Ken), John Morris (Andy)

John Ratzenberger as: Hamm, same as he ever was

Budget: $200 million | Box office: $1.067 billion

Academy Awards: Won Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song (“We Belong Together”); nominated for Best Picture (lost to The King’s Speech), Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Sound Editing

Eli

Aesthetic: 10/10 | A little oversaturated, but it's a Toy Story movie, so that's the point. The humans look much better here than they ever have in Pixar to this point; I feel like Pixar's had this in them for a while, but given that these human characters are supposed to be grounded in reality, their regular-looking designs make a lot more sense than if they looked like the humans in Up did. Speaking of Up, the background characters here are so much more diverse and interesting than in that film too. Most importantly, though, the main toys just pop here in ways they didn't in the series' first two films. Pixar took an already shiny bubblegum look and made it even sleeker.

Animation: 9/10 | I can't point to anything this film that knocked my socks off or even really anything that they hadn't done earlier in the series (except maybe the incinerator), but I also can't name a single thing I thought looked faulty.

Story: 8/10 | I agree with Leah below that I thought the Andy/Bonnie relationship needed to be fleshed out more or even introduced once before I'd believe Andy would just give her all of his favorite toys because he read her address on a sticky note. I also thought a few pretty major plot points were just a little too convenient; for example, it wasn't clear to me how anyone in Lotso's gang thought to get the intel on Woody and friends out of Chatter Telephone or how Chatter even knew exactly where they were in the first place. All that aside, this one still hits hard. Not quite as hard as the first time I saw it at age 12, but seeing Woody decide yet again to stick with his friends and Andy playing with them all one last time before he heads off to college still makes me feel things, and it's pretty hard to make a prison break boring. Finally, I'd like to praise Pixar for their adeptness at speeding through falling action in end credits sequences; the scenes that play during the credits are critical in closing out the narrative, and sticking them in the credits allows the writers to quickly move from setting to setting, tying up a bunch of loose ends at once.

Characters: 10/10 | None of the main characters notably changed, which...if it ain't broke. The exception, I guess, is Mrs. Potato Head, who changed for the better in getting less stereotypically naggy and actually having a real purpose within the group. Lotso's villainy actually makes sense here, as opposed to in Toy Story 2, where I ended not really sure why Stinky Pete was the way he was. It's great that the humans actually get some real runtime in this one, which clearly Pixar felt comfortable doing now that their humans actually looked good. Now that Andy is basically an adult, you can actually tell what his characterization is supposed to be, and I thought he was written well.

Acting: 10/10 | Man, so many memorable performances. Aside from the main cast continuing to shine (and Tim Allen basically playing two parts again), Ned Beatty's Lotso is phenomenal and Teddy Newton's Chatter Telephone is also great. Additionally, this cast just has a bunch of good voices I could recognize but couldn't immediately place. Ken is voiced by Michael Keaton, who – man – sounds a whole lot different than he did as Chick Hicks. In Bonnie's room, you have Trixie the dinosaur voiced by Kristen Schaal (Gravity Falls' Mabel) and Dolly voiced by Bonnie Hunt (Cars' Sally). All of these people and many more just turn in excellent work.

Music: 10/10 | Randy Newman used and expanded upon "You've Got a Friend in Me" perfectly again and the rest of the score is just as good as you remember it. The metallic-sounding dirge that plays as the toys slide down the garbage dump is killer.

Final score: 10/10 | The modern sheen makes this film better than its predecessors in many ways but I can't quite say it's my favorite, in part because its sheer intensity makes it a little rougher to rewatch.

Leah

Aesthetic: 10/10 | This movie was so fun to look at. Pixar has improved over the past decade, but I think this movie stands well on its own too. I love how far they push the freaky factor with the Monkey and Big Baby. I also think they did a good job making each environment distinct and conveying the emotion appropriate to the setting (nostalgia/moving on of Andy's room, comfort of Bonnie's house, horrors of the dump...) I couldn't stop noticing cool things about the visuals this whole time. Also, rejoice, the humans look good! I think these were my favorite human designs out of Pixar so far.

Animation: 9/10 | I enjoyed the way the toys moved. The plastic-y movements of Barbie and Ken stood out in a good way. Woody and Buzz got some cool action scenes throughout the movie. Pixar gold standard animation.

Story: 9/10 | This is a very touching story about growing up. It's fun to watch the prison break parody and listen to the toys' banter, but it also pulled at my heart. The toys holding hands in the face of death hit me harder as an adult than as a teenager. One minor gripe is that I wish there had been some earlier development of a relationship between Andy and Bonnie. I think it would have made the ending even stronger.

Characters: 10/10 | Every toy has so much personality and I'm here for it. We get to see more of old favorites like Woody, Buzz, Jessie, and meet a bunch of fun new characters, like Ken, Bonnie, Lotso...even Andy has a personality in this movie! It's hard to pull off having such a strong main and side cast, but this movie does it flawlessly. I remember after seeing this movie for the first time, I wanted them to make a TV show just so I could see more of these characters.

Acting: 9/10 | Another strong showing from the Toy Story cast.

Music: 9/10 | Great soundtrack; it set the mood of the movie well. You've got a friend in me.

Final score: 10/10 | Really fun movie that packs an emotional punch. The visuals are a joy to watch, and the themes resonate as an adult. A fantastic end to the arc.

Maddy

Where it should’ve ended.

Aesthetic: 6/10 | Movies from the early 2010s look weird to me. What was the hip aesthetic trend going on and why has it not aged great?

Animation: 9/10 | That said, it is honestly nice to see these characters in modern animation, and the humans looking, y’know, good. I don’t have qualms with the animation; it’s just the aesthetic of this movie that gets me.

Characters: 9/10 | Much of this rating is focused on the new additions, which are all great. Lotso is the standout in my opinion, being one of the few good twist (was it really a twist?) villains of modern Pixar/Disney. The OG cast is still great and the continuation of Woody’s arc is written well.

Story: 9/10 | I’ve admittedly had a hard time figuring out what to put here. This movie of all Pixar films, ones we've discussed and ones we have yet to, is the one I feel the most emotional connection to. Toy Story was my childhood. I had both movies on VHS as a kid and adored the films, even having a Woody doll. By the time Toy Story 3 came out I was also reaching the point of "growing up". Even watching it now, a lot of themes hit me in my core. These characters, this series: it’s my comfort food. I’m already running out of words but I love Toy Story 3 not because of its film qualities, but its impact on me and a lot of people in my age group, and what it means to us as we get older, especially now as a college senior.

Acting: 10/10 | It’s amazing how good this VA cast is, movie after movie.

Music: 8/10 | It’s Randy Newman. The classics are good, the motifs are there…it’s more comfort food.

Final score: 51/60 or 8/10 | I’ll definitely discuss this more when we get to Toy Story 4, but I really do wish the series ended here. In my heart, it’s where it ended. Ratatouille is my favorite movie, Toy Story 2 is my favorite in the series, but Toy Story 3 is the most emotional movie to me. It holds a special place in my heart forever.

Fun Maddy note: Like Up the year before, this was also nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars.

David

Aesthetic: I think this is a good build on the first two movies and on other Pixar efforts in recent years. Not much else to really say.

Animation: Is it weird to feel a little disappointed, almost? It's not bad, but it doesn't feel like they innovated much here, and after movie after movie of them hitting it out of the park, I think maybe my own expectations were set a little high. We're getting to the point where a lot of those innovations are much smaller changes, and though minor differences are obviously visible over time, I think the days of massive shifts are behind us by this point.

Story: I wasn't much a fan of this, to be honest. It all felt a little too well put-together – and yes, a story about toys is going to be surreal, but the amount of times where things happened to just click into place got to a point where I was like...yeah, this is kinda bullshit. I think it still has the punch we've come to expect from Pixar films – the emotional heft of Woody's decision is not small by any measure – but I think it's a bit muted because everything in the subplots is so cluttered.

Characters: They know what works; they continued to do that. Lotso's a far better villain than Sid or Stinky Pete, I think.

Acting: This is where I think this movie shines – maybe above every other Pixar classic. So many absolutely phenomenal performances from all corners that I think lift some of the gaps in the story and in the characters themselves, covering holes where otherwise lesser efforts may have failed to bridge those gaps.

Music: Hard to go wrong with the classic Toy Story motifs. “You've Got A Friend In Me” still owns.

Final score: 6/10 | It's weird. Objectively, I think this is supposed to be a great movie, but it's less than the sum of its parts in the end. I feel as though the pieces don't come together well enough to warrant a higher rating, despite a lot of the individual pieces sitting higher than that final rating. Incoherent isn't the right word, but it just doesn't fit. This movie came out the day after my 13th birthday, and I think being at that age put me at an unfortunate disadvantage regarding my love for this film – I couldn't (at the time) relate to either Andy nor Bonnie, and by the time I was in Andy's shoes, it had faded from consciousness. Not the fault of the movie, but I think what it does mean is that this film lacks any real sort of nostalgia shielding that other movies before it have had.

Final notes

I double-checked and yes, David was of sound mind when he wrote his review. Your funeral, buddy.

Next up: Cars 2 (oh boy)

Did y’all know this film premiered at Cannes? Pretty much every Pixar film prior premiered at a theatre in Los Angeles (usually El Capitan) – Cars is a fun exception, debuting at Charlotte Motor Speedway – but this one? Biggest film festival in the world. It was the first animated film ever to premiere at Cannes. What did festivalgoers watch that day?

Let’s get into it.

Up quick facts

Release date: May 29, 2009 | Director: Pete Docter | Music: Michael Giacchino

Starring: Ed Asner (Carl), Jordan Nagai (Russell), Christopher Plummer (Charles), Bob Peterson (Dug and Alpha)

John Ratzenberger as: Tom, the construction foreman

Budget: $175 million | Box office: $735.1 million

Academy Awards: Won Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score; nominated for Best Picture (lost to The Hurt Locker), Best Original Screenplay, and Best Sound Editing

Eli

Aesthetic: 8/10 | Where Cars is vivid for no good reason, Up is even more vivid for all the right reasons. The bright colors and striking scenery add to the journey's whimsy and make you feel like you're on the adventure of a lifetime. Pixar had their work cut out for them emulating the beauty of the real-life Angel Falls, the actual highest waterfall on Earth, and they aced it. The negative: Russell's character design looks too blobby and the dogs looked a little too uncannily realistic for how cartoony the humans looked. These characters are on screen for most of the runtime and they detract from the rest of the look for me, but all in all, still awesome work.

Animation: 7/10 | You know how Ratatouille made all of the human characters move like absurd caricatures of their obviously cartoon selves? For some reason, Up doesn't do that, and I think it's for the worse. Everyone moves too realistically for how they're designed and it just looks...off. Russell's movements in particular are super stiff. I do wanna praise Pixar's take on clouds for the second straight film: everything here - from the cumulonimbus storm clouds in the beginning, to the fog at the top of Paradise Falls, to the clouds Carl's house sinks into at the end - is done spectacularly.

Story: 9/10 | This isn't meant to be a CinemaSins style plothole nitpick or anything because I generally think those are lazy criticism, but I thought it was funny how the story kicked into motion. The construction team accidentally destroys Carl's private property so he rushes over to prevent any further damage, staying on his private property while fighting with a worker. He whacks the worker in the head in what could reasonably be considered self-defense and the courts side against him? I thought this was America! That non-sequitur aside, the story was great. Russell tries so hard to send Carl on new adventures at Paradise Falls and Carl just keeps dragging himself kicking and screaming away from them until it's almost too late. Charles' arc is a little sloppy but I think overall it accomplishes what it sets out to do, telling viewers that meeting your heroes can often end poorly. Russell's line, "that might sound boring, but I think the boring stuff is the stuff I remember the most" hits so hard in thinking back on past relationships of any kind.

Characters: 9/10 | Ellie is my favorite character because of how she's used after her death. It's a much more subtle version of what Ratatouille did with Gusteau; you can almost hear her replying to Carl in his head every time he talks to her out loud, and reading her words on the last page of the adventure book is what causes him to completely change his tone. It's like she never left him. Carl and Russell are expertly written to fill their roles. Their actions are believable emotionally touching. Even Charles' villain arc makes sense; he's been looking for that bird for literal decades, isolated from humanity, so of course he's gonna go a little crazy when he's so close to what he's been after for so long. My only real issue is that the dog characters feel very Minion-y to me, and that always puts me off (Up predates Despicable Me by about a year, but this style of background characterization was already in vogue by this point).

Acting: 6/10 | Ed Asner's Carl steals the show here. Jordan Nagai's Russell is good. Everyone else is meh except for Bob Peterson's Alpha, who is all over the place and kinda bad.

Music: 10/10 | Michael Giacchino with another masterpiece. The motifs are used and reused here to perfection, and of course, the opening sequence is an A+ tearjerker.

Final score: 8/10 | The first Pixar movie I have no real childhood connection to, as I think this is the first time I've seen it all the way through. I can absolutely see why people only remember it for the first 10 minutes, but the whole thing is worth revisiting.

Leah

Aesthetic: 7/10 | Loved the balloons, paradise falls, the house... Carl and Ellie's space showed off their characters well. I wasn't a huge fan of the character designs in this movie. The dogs were uncanny, the people were shaped oddly... Carl was well done though.

Animation: 7/10 | It was fine. The house and the clouds were visually interesting in their movement. Nothing really stood out to me that much.

Story: 8/10 | To me, this is Pixar's saddest story thus far. Carl is dealing with his grief over losing Ellie. Russell has a troubled home life. It's a satisfying arc, where Carl learns to embrace new adventures in his life and open himself up to others.

Characters: 8/10 | Carl and Russell are fantastic. Kevin and Dug are fun. Charles didn't stand out to me too much as a villain; he was overshadowed by the emotional arc Carl was going through. I didn't care much for the dogs either; their humor was a bit stale.

Acting: 7/10 | Ed Asner did a good job bringing that curmudgeon Carl to life. None of the other performances really stood out to me. Nothing bad, just nothing exceptional.

Music: 9/10 | Really gorgeous score. I appreciated the recurring motif throughout the movie; it was used very well to highlight the emotional impact of different moments.

Final score: 8/10 | Emotional impact is this movie's biggest strength. The beginning made me cry. Carl's arc is what makes this movie special to me. Other aspects of the movie didn't do much to wow me, but his journey really stuck with me, and I can appreciate a good character driven story.

Maddy

Aesthetic: 10/10 | The movie is very pretty. Everything is so colorful and nice. Mwah.

Animation: 7/10 | I know I just raved about the aesthetic but watching this feels kinda dated already? Like, Ratatouille and WALL-E have aged a lot better animation-wise to me while watching this. It’s not bad, but…I dunno.

Characters: 8/10 | Carl and Russell’s dynamic is the standout here. The villian is kinda whatever and Dug is very “kids’ movie animal character”, but watching Carl and Russell grow throughout the movie is great.

Story: 7/10 | Up's first 10 minutes is Pixar’s greatest short film. I really think Pixar should try a silent film because they are masters of telling stories without any words and letting the visuals do the work. The rest of the film is fine and feels super generic to me but it's hard not to feel invested knowing where Carl is coming from and watching his own personal journey alongside Russell. I could watch the first 10 minutes over and over again; it’s honestly amazing.

Acting: 7/10 | Another just-decent voice acting performance that has no major standouts. Rest easy, Ed Asner.

Music: 10/10 | You already know. It's “Married Life”. It’s Michael Giacchino. Mwah! Mwah! Mwah!

Final score: 49/60 or 8/10 | It's a movie carried by its first 10 minutes and that's okay. It's still a solid addition to the Pixar collection and continues the hot streak the studio was on in the late ‘00s. It might rank higher than WALL-E in my rankings but I’d probably watch WALL-E over Up nine times out of 10.

Fun Maddy note: This was the first Pixar movie to receive a nomination for Best Picture at the Oscars.

David

Aesthetic: It's beautiful. Up is incredibly bright, vivacious, and full of energy. It gives the adventure all the more sticking power, and I think the color usage plays nicely throughout the film - Carl in mostly drab tones, Russell in electric oranges, and the scenery shifting from duller tones in the city to intense brightness in the jungle. I adore the way that the characters were designed - it's absurd, and yet it's perfect for this film.

Animation: I think it's fine, if unspectacular. There are some absolutely gorgeous shots managed in the wilderness, when it comes to the clouds and the waterfalls and that scenery, but nailing down human movement still seems to elude Pixar at times.

Story: The opening is a little weird and a little disjointed - it never fully clicks for me why things unfurl as they do, but hey - we get house with balloons, and away we go. After that, it's beautiful. Charles is a fine antagonist, but a little underwhelming. I don't really mind, because I think it gives more weight and more time to the central storyline between Carl and Russell and Carl and himself - and allowing us as much time as possible with that throughout the film is beautiful.

Characters: Carl and Russell are an incredible one-two punch, with Russell dragging Carl time and time again into shenanigans and tomfoolery, much to Carl's chagrin. It's such a sweet dynamic, and getting to see Russell eventually wear Carl down into warming up to the hyper little dude is pretty precious.

Acting: Ed Asner (rest in peace) nailed this one. Outside of that, I don't really remember anyone specific, but I thoroughly enjoyed everyone's portrayals of their characters.

Music: Michael Giacchino did not need to go this hard but he did! “Married Life” makes me tear up every time I hear it!

Final score: 10/10 | It just edges Wall-E out to take the top spot, but these two back-to-back are a PHENOMENAL pairing. I love this movie so much - and even though the first 10 minutes are what tends to (rightfully) get all the fanfare, I can't believe how much of this movie I felt myself falling back into 13 years after it originally came out. As much as I love so many of these films, this is the one that - for me - objectively serves as testament to Pixar's quality as a studio, and puts together an incredibly complete profile in all the aspects we're judging on.

Final notes

Nik was unavailable this week, but we hope he’ll be back for future installments of Pixar Pints.

Next up: Toy Story 3

As with Cars, there’s a universe in which WALL-E was a completely different product. This film was among the first projects the Pixar executive team thought up, and work on it originally began in 1995 as Trash Planet, but it was scrapped because the writers didn’t really have an idea for a story, then just kinda got left on the back burner while they worked on other movies. When it eventually resurfaced as the movie we know today, it was immediately heralded as one of the best films – animated or not – of the entire decade.

Let’s get into it.

WALL-E quick facts

Release date: June 27, 2008 | Director: Andrew Stanton | Music: Thomas Newman

Starring: Ben Burtt (WALL-E and M-O), Elissa Knight (EVE), Jeff Garlin (Captain), Fred Willard (Shelby Forthright), Apple MacInTalk text-to-speech (AUTO) [no, that last one isn’t a joke]

John Ratzenberger as: John

Budget: $180 million | Box office: $521.3 million

Academy Awards: Won Best Animated Feature; nominated for Best Original Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Original Song (“Down to Earth”)

Eli

Aesthetic: 9/10 | No Pixar film has nailed its settings quite like this one. The dystopian take on future Earth is chilling (though, minor nitpick: I couldn't help but notice that all depictions of the globe ignored rising sea level projections because movie), and the sprinkles of live action hammer it in even further. Space looks great and the Axiom looks exactly like what I would imagine a futuristic spaceship utopia to be. Not a single set is misconceived. WALL-E and EVE have iconic designs, but the rest of the robots and pretty much all of the humans just blend together for me. In the latter case, I think that's somewhat on purpose, but in the former, some of the robots are pretty important to the plot and some aren't, and sometimes I had trouble discerning which were which.

Animation: 9/10 | Aside from the immaculate space dance scene, the highlight for me was the dust storm scenes on Earth. Everything, from the storm forming and barreling toward WALL-E to all of his possessions shaking around and falling down as he retreated into his home, was done beautifully and realistically. Additionally, given the lack of much dialogue in the first act, expressive character animations are crucial in helping tell the story, and these are executed perfectly.

Story: 6/10 | Before discussing the story itself, I'd like to (mostly) praise how it was told: the first act is just A+ work in showing, not telling. That's really, really easy to screw up, but Pixar didn't here. My only complaint in this regard is with the pacing. It's not clear what the central conflict is until over halfway through the film, which is partly due to the crypticity it employs in the first act, but also because I think the end of said act is a little bloated; I think there's one, maybe two too many scenes of WALL-E/EVE exposition after the latter lands on Earth. As for the story itself, I think I like it, but a lot of the human part doesn't parse to me. The Captain's arc starts after finding out how much cool stuff Earth has to offer, but a lot of the stuff he evidently learns is, like, elementary to life as a human, even on the ship. The humans are all brainwashed by Buy-n-Large tech apparently from the day they're born, which seems to benefit no one (least of all the Captain, and I'm not really sure what AUTO gets out of it either). Finally, knowing how desolate Earth is, knowing how good they have it on the Axiom if they can escape the grasp of technology, and knowing that no one any living human has ever met has any recollection of Earth...why did they not just try to rebuild society on the Axiom? An uncharitable reading of this story is that it's anti-environmentalist in that it peddles the harmful notion that no matter how bad matters get, Earth is still salvageable. I don't really agree with this – I think "an entirely new population of humans has to rebuild the planet from scratch 700 years later" is a fitting punishment – but the conflict and resolution make so little sense to me that I can't fault anyone for thinking it.

Characters: 9/10 | WALL-E and EVE make the movie, and it's great that, for each of them, their selfless actions make sense in context and aren't just there to forward the plot. AUTO's villainy is foreshadowed well, M-O and the WALL-As are cute, and I thought it was neat that Ratzenberger got to voice a character named John for once. I wish the background characters gave us a little more.

Acting: 8/10 | The VAs for the robots get the most out of the least, and the vocal effects they're given definitely help. The VAs for the humans aren't noteworthy in any way.

Music: 10/10 | With such little dialogue, the euphony lives and dies on the strength of the score, and I think it was a home run. The way they used "Sonnenaufgang" was hilarious.

Final score: 9/10 | The third act of this film isn't canon to me. It's a movie about two robots falling in love, nothing more.

Leah

Aesthetic: 10/10 | There is so much to love about the way this movie looks. Gorgeous space scenes, expressive robots, dramatic desolation... It shows the emotions around the settings. The scene where WALL-E and EVE dance in space might be the most gorgeous scene I've seen yet for this. I also thought the incorporation of live action was well done, showing the dramatic shift in the world.

Animation: 9/10 | I love the way WALL-E moves, and the robots are really fun to watch (shoutout to M-O)! There were some great effects in this movie too (so many explosions)!

Story: 9/10 | I feel like there's a charitable and an uncharitable way to read the morals of this story. The charitable way is that this is a movie about keeping hope and enjoying life to the fullest, even if it's difficult. The uncharitable way is that this movie implies that there is no point of return for the environment, and that humans will always be able to come back and fix it. I think the charitable reading is closer to how I view the movie, but there were some implications that felt weird thematically. I liked following along with WALL-E and EVE's journey and the way their love story intertwined with the story of returning to Earth.

Characters: 9/10 | I love WALL-E and EVE as a duo. They had great chemistry and complementary character development. The misfit robots were a ton of fun. The Captain worked well enough as a representation of the humans.

Acting: 9/10 | The robots may not be human, but a lot of work is put in to conveying their emotions. In animation, the visuals themselves are part of the acting, and this movie excels at that. The voice work complemented the visuals nicely.

Music: 10/10 | Soooo, am I the only one who absolutely loves Hello Dolly? 13-year-old me flipped out when I saw this in theaters and heard “Put on Your Sunday Clothes” in the opening. It fits so well with the story. I also thought the score worked well.

Final score: 9/10 | This was a really good movie! It's fun to watch, the story is engaging, and it's got a banger of a soundtrack.

Maddy

Aesthetic: 10/10 | The human world is ugly as shit, space looks amazing, and the character designs are great. I think they achieved what they wanted to do here.

Animation: 8/10 | It feels kinda stiff in some aspects, mostly with humans.

Story: 8/10 | We are in a stretch of Pixar movies that do something unique with their storytelling. Ratatouille uses a more indie film structure and pacing style. WALL-E has no real dialogue between main characters for the first half of the movie and, my god, it is one of Pixar’s greatest works. WALL-E doesn’t speak at all yet he is the most understanding character in Pixar lore. WALL-E and Eva’s relationship feels real and genuine and so well written. Pixar is at its best when telling a story using animation’s greatest strength: its visuals. The second half of this movie with more human involvement is very lackluster and the villain is whatever, and that’s what drops my score here, but the first half of this movie? Pixar masterclass.

Characters: 9/10 | WALL-E and Eva. That’s it.

Acting: 8/10 | The characters who do have voice lines are played well, but nothing astonishing.

Music: 6/10 | Kinda forgettable for me. Nothing really stuck.

Final score: 48/60 or 8/10 | If I was only judging the first half, this is Pixar’s #1 in my heart. As a whole package, it’s still really good and it’s crazy how many hits in a row Pixar had in the mid-’00s (including Cars). And it’s not ending for at least a few more movies.

Fun Maddy note: WALL-E was the first Pixar movie to get a Super Bowl ad.

David

Aesthetic: I always adored this movie because of the setting: a desolate post-apocalyptic Earth, too far gone to save from a climate crisis, and a glimmering spaceship, the home of what remains of humanity some 800 years down the line. The Axiom fit my imagined vehicle for a purpose like this brilliantly, slotting right in to my list of "big ol’ ships in SPACE" that I keep in my head at all times. There's a bit of sameness to some of the designs, but that's to be expected a bit for the background characters, so I'm not too picky over it.

Animation: The space dance scene should have won literally every award that could be given to a single scene. More on the gorgeous accompanying music down below. I think the environmental effects were also brilliantly utilized - the minor details are what has always set Pixar apart even among like studios with similar goals and budgets, and Wall-E is full of those little touches that give it the edge.

Story: This movie accomplishes everything it does almost entirely without dialogue - and what dialogue we do have comes almost entirely in the second half of the film. It is artistic storytelling at its absolute finest. The way that they make the relationship between WALL-E and EVE work despite never having the words to draw that connection is a testament to the skillful nature of the design of this film. This film will always make me so happy, so emotional - and it's all over two goddamn robots falling in love.

Characters: WALL-E and EVE are so wonderfully written. It's a case where they both have clear directives, clear purposes, and beyond that, what they do makes sense in the context of the film but also for their own personal journeys. It's one thing for the story to need them to act a certain way for it to progress, but it's another entirely that they've managed to weave a story where the characters act of their own volition and still manage to put the story together. M-O rocks, the big WALL-As always seemed cool as shit to me, and the rest of the background cast fill out the empty space nicely.

Acting: ... Doesn't really apply, I guess.

Music: Thomas Newman absolutely nailed this entire score, but the shining star, a diamond among jewels, has to be “Define Dancing”. I put it on and I'm not only immediately transported to the scene, but even now, I get chills. The way that the song takes a sweeping string introduction with the plucky melody, tying the two together in a beautiful demonstration of dance. Of movement. Of love. That's the good shit, man.

Final score: Finally, we have a 10/10 from me. This is a truly outstanding movie. To accomplish what this movie does across the board with dialogue would be impressive in its own right - but to do so almost entirely without? That's what separates it from anything we've watched so far.

Nik

Aesthetic: With the success of Ratatouille, Pixar realized that they could get away with films that were not necessarily bright and joyous-looking all the time, as long as the story delivered, which it definitely did. From the trash-filled empty world to the deep expanses of space to the futuristic ship, every scene in this movie was visually pleasing. From a setting so desolate, it is amazing how a single robot was able to give it so much life.

Animation: The way WALL-E moves is unlike any animation we’ve seen in a Pixar movie. There is something enticing to his robotic movement. Even the way EVE moves is not as thought out, and I think this is because of the futuristic aspect. We think of the future as clean and simple when it comes to technology. What this movie has taught me is the more futuristic the animation is meant to look, the less individual character it has.

Story: As already hinted at, the first half of this movie was desolate in many ways. Despite the emptiness, the individual journey of WALL-E is perhaps the best individual part of any one Pixar film. The story really only lacks once the human characters are added. They aren’t necessarily bad, but the way that WALL-E steals the show, it is hard to watch any other characters. The scenes without him are spent anticipating the return to his plot line.

Characters: WALL-E is perhaps the most intriguing Pixar character across all films. It truly is amazing how there is so much character in just one robot. Not many characters could single handedly carry half of a film, but WALL-E did that. He has so much emotion in his movements, his eyes, and his sounds. A room full of junk and the corpses of past WALL-E robots show exactly how alone he is.

Acting: Do I just leave this section blank? Obviously there were voices for the human characters but they were merely a small part of the plot. The real stars were the non speaking characters.

Music: When there are environments that are vast, or there are not many individual characters, the music is palpable in Pixar films, especially for the first half of this one. With no one for WALL-E to interact with aside from the cockroach, the music almost acted as a secondary character at times.

Final score: 9/10 | I think this movie is fantastic, and the only thing that takes away from it are some of the human parts. I just have always thought the fact humans become so fat and boneless was a bit silly. They were definitely going for that silly factor, but for a movie that is otherwise so rich with emotion, it feels out of place. As a kid I enjoyed this more, so in the end Pixar is definitely getting their best messages to the targeted age group.

Final notes

WALL-E is an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-class. Early in the process once the film resumed development, the first L was not a part of his name, and the film was titled W.A.L.-E., which is…clunky. Steve Jobs (who many forget was closely involved with the founding and initial success of Pixar) remarked that he didn’t like the title, so it was reworked to add another L and more closely resemble a human name.

Other robot characters whose names are acronyms include EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) and M-O (Microbe Obliterator).

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