Pixar Pints: Wrap-Up and Superlatives

We watched all 27 Pixar movies. What did we think?

We did it. We watched all the Pixar. Well…all the Pixar feature films, and quite honestly, that’s enough.

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.

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.

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.

This comparison excludes Lightyear and Elemental because those movies are absent from IGN’s 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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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!