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Comment by throwaway_ab | Hacker News Reader

Sure, they have not been a masterpiece factory for almost two decades now. However they were certainly a masterpiece factory at one point, that point being the first decade of the studio's life.

During that time they were certainly a masterpiece factory. From 1995 with their first film Toy Story, to 2004 with the release of The Incredibles, that resulted in consistently great films for 9 years. Their record held for 11 years until Cars was released in 2006.

I believe no other studio has had similar performance. I remember around early 2000's news of Hollywood studios in panic because investors started asking other studios why it was considered business as usual, a given, that for every successful film a studio released there would be flops too. So like VC investing, the pay off for the eventual success had to be enough to offset those films that flopped and lost money.

But then came Pixar and suddenly a studio proved you didn't have to have flops, every film they made in their first decade was a resounding success. They blew the conventional logic of Hollywood economics out of the window.

This article sort of paints a picture of how outstanding their success was at the time: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2004/nov/12/3

So I guess I disagree with the title, Pixar was most certainly a masterpiece factory in its first decade.

Reading deBoer's article I can't say I agree or disagree about the recent state of Pixar, I grew up with Pixar films and their first decade coincided with my childhood and early teenage years, so when I think to myself "yeah Pixar's recent work doesn't touch that early magic" I can't really tell is that my bias coming through?

Maybe I am overthinking this a bit.

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After 2006 they were still knocking out an extremely high rate of absolutely impressive films:

Wall-E -- if you don't love this film you are possibly dead inside. It's not only absolutely beautiful and emotionally communicative, it's a deeply clever pastiche.

Up, as observed below.

Toy Story 3 came out after Up. And it is a work of acutely well-observed cinema. A staggeringly good film that should have won the Best Picture Oscar. [0]

Brave (2012) is critically neglected, too -- that is a beautiful, subtle, yes quite elusive film, despite what the article says.

And then there are films I have not seen yet but I am told are clever, inventive and beautiful -- Coco, Inside Out, Soul.

They are by any measure still a masterpiece factory. This article is lazy, toxic and cynical.

[0] edit: when I say this, I say it in the sense that surely everyone knows now that E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial should have won Best Picture, not Gandhi. Even Richard Attenborough thought this.

I think Luca, too.

Frozen!

Frozen isn't Pixar

>And then there are films I have not seen yet but I am told are clever, inventive and beautiful -- Coco, Inside Out, Soul.

you should watch both coco and soul.

coco is beautiful. it's a love letter to mexican culture.

soul is not only quite beautiful but the soundtrack... oh! i mean it's trent reznor, atticus ross and jon batiste. it won both a grammy and an oscar!

I’m glad I have young kids because I missed most animation movies in the last 15-20 years. It’s great when a new one comes out.

Now is the perfect time to watch those old ones that you missed. I'm doing it with my son and love it, probably more than he does.

Weird because of those three movies I would say Inside Out was the most beautiful masterpiece they have created in the last 10 years hands down.

That’s a movie where the message really did change my life. I used to think a good life was one without sadness, and now I know it’s part of life, and you have to learn to cope with it. A simple insight, maybe I had always known it, but the movie reinforced it. No happiness without sadness!

I was visiting with a therapist at the time and they were encouraging everyone to watch it if they could. It touched on a number of intrinsic but commonly overlooked things that most people never think about, but also went pretty deep into our current understanding of the mind in some parts.

It's the best animated movie I've ever seen I believe.

After Zootopia, yes :)

I cringed at Inside Out. Movies where they have to explain and explain and explain all the rules of a made up world are not my thing. It’s all so contrived and that creates a distance emotionally for me. I would much rather have preferred an actual movie about teenage emotions without all the exposition necessitated by the contrived world.

+1 on soul ... especially if, like me, you're an ageing musician with a day job

Soul isn't on the same level of Coco. Coco is a clear and heartfelt message with a (mostly) beautiful backdrop. Soul is a consistently ugly meandering story with all sorts of strange crypto Gnostic and pro life themes that just confuses.

I don't know why is this downvoted, I thought that the general consensus was that Soul is not even close to Coco? Coco is one of the best cartoon in this millennia[0], while Soul is not.

[0] see for example the IMBD toplist : https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?num_votes=200000,&genres=... Coco is 12-15, on 8.4, while Soul is 29-33 on 8.0. (Okay, I tweaked the number of votes value, until the ranking matched my personal toplist. Lower numbers cause a lot of not that good shows to occupy the top, and higher numbers filter out a lot of really good shows.)

Though if you watch Coco I think you should also watch Book of Life. Book of Life got somewhat ignored in the box office because it wasn't Pixar, but of the two had far more Mexican/Mexican-American creative talent involved behind the scenes (not that I'm accusing Pixar of appropriation, but there are some questions to be had there if you are feeling cynical), tells the more complete cultural story, and I think is very much the better movie.

We like both in our house but have to agree that Book of Life is the better movie.

Inside Out was great too.

I never really got the love for Toy Story 3, especially from parents. The first time we saw it, we thought it was unnecessarily dark and also designed to cause children to have separation anxiety from disposing of old toys.

Don’t watch the Brave Little Toaster then!

It is surely not a lightweight film with the same kind of peril as the first movie -- it's perhaps like a later book a series might be aimed at a slightly older reader. Not sure I'd show it to the youngest kids.

But it could be scarier. It could be Coraline.

IMO, Toy Story 3 was a perfect movie for the people who saw Toy Story 1 as a child and were now young adults, having recently left home and moved away. The heart of that movie is in the parents having to let Andy go. They tell the story through the Toys, but flip it over to the parents in a few small scenes.

I've never been so compelled to call my parents than after watching Toy Story 3.

I saw Toy Story 3 with a group of longtime friends when it came out in the summer between high school and college. Definitely some wet eyes in the group during those final scenes. I don't think I could have chosen a more appropriate time for that movie if I tried.

I went to see it with my mom. I had just recently returned from living out of the country for a couple years and I was only home for a month before leaving again to school in another state. Definitely an emotional ending for us both.

Indeed, my children love Toy Story 3.

Dark? Separation anxiety? What age are we talking here?

"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

Look at all the "adult" men today, especially in America for some reason, whose desks are littered with action figures and whose offices contain a shrine to comic book superheros and Star Wars/Trek that would put the Sistine Chapel to shame. (Or women who seem to live in some alternate universe about their biological clocks, indulging infantile behaviors and attitudes, perhaps only to realize sometime in middle age the consequences, if not the cause, of their predicament.)

These are people who do not take their lives seriously. Someone clearly never told them that they're not 10 years old anymore.

One of the most valuable lessons you can teach a child is the ability to suffer. All who live suffer, and developing the correct attitude and orientation toward suffering is important lest you become soft and weak. Those who don't learn, those who flee from the suffering that the pursuit of the good often entails, suffer all the more and become depressed, miserable, and mediocre. A story in which the main character loses his toys can be a very mild, age-appropriate, narrative way of presenting the subject matter of sacrifice or loss. Growing up means parting ways with childish ways for the sake of something greater: adulthood. We do the same thing with pets. The death of a pet fish is a way of introducing a child to the reality of death in a way that's appropriate for the child's level of maturity. Maturation can be unpleasant, even painful, as the childhood attitudes and attachments and their familiarity are loosened. Film can also be cathartic in this respect.

(This is not an endorsement of Pixar or Toy Story, btw, only a general response to an apparent presupposition. Call it a rant, if you want. I vaguely remember watching the first Toy Story on TV, but I do not recall the ending and have only a vague recollection of the plot. For all I know, Toy Story may enable unhealthy dispositions.)

You know what's so great about adulthood? You can live it as you wish if you are not harming others, you might not have unlimited freedom due to all responsibilities you are now under but for the most part, it's your choice, it's your path. If one wants to have action figures, or read comics, or whatever their heart's desire: you may, it's your life, it's your adulthood.

Trying to paint adulthood as some kind of suffering we have to endure, we have to be serious, we have to be whatever you think one needs to be as an adult is... Just sad.

Life is best lived when you can have fun, love, and a sense of accomplishment, some people have that by doing research and pursuing great new discoveries, some by starting businesses and products they envision, and some others find other ways to fulfill the yearning for living.

Don't be a sad, serious adult, trying to tell other adults how to live their lives. It's a waste of your life, go be fulfilled without having to project your insecurities unto others.

Disclaimer: I own no action figures and have no interest in comics, so no direct offense taken, just feel that this seriousness is exactly the pressure that harms so many people who don't feel they fit the mold you are trying to put everyone in.

Life without action figures and comic books isn't supposed to be suffering, it's supposed to be a realization that such things are childish for a reason. Adults deal with responsibility, and have their own joys that children can't share.

> Life without action figures and comic books isn't supposed to be suffering, it's supposed to be a realization that such things are childish for a reason.

And the reason is that you personally want to be superior to others, and the best you can come up with is insulting their hobbies and taste.

I didn't invent the conception of comic books and action figures as childish. It's very much worth considering why it exists and where it came from.

It exists because you want to feel good by looking down to others, and this is the best you can come up with. I don't know where does it came from. The church, probably? Does it matter, tho?

edit: you are bullying people for their hobbies and taste, it is bad, please stop.

It came from people organically reacting to the flood of juvenile comic book stories put out in the 50s. Nothing to do with "the church" at all.

Yes, and the audience mainly consisted of young adults. Now that this is settled, I think you should stop insulting people because of their hobbies and taste.

If you'd explain why such things are childish we can have a conversation about it, just calling things names to evoke certain aversion based on some black-and-white worldview that categorises them in "correct" and "wrong" is anti-intellectual, and so certainly childish.

I can try and explain it. The definition is not going to rely on any kind of hard values or studies, because it is a soft cultural term used for name calling.

Passions that are seen as childish usually tend to lack any sort of practical utility. Action figures and games are ultimately just timewasters. Kids learning to build stuff with woodworking tools would seem less childish because that is a useful skill compared to building things out of legos. Often, a skill that would otherwise be practical becomes childish when it is simplified to be impractical, and thus, easier for kids to learn.

Even in the world of fiction and literature, which can easily be argued to be a timewaster regardless of quality, the stuff that is childish is also generally seen as overly simplified. Explicitly this is done by ratings boards that don't let certain content be present in kid's movies and books. Implicitly, writers and directors can and do simplify and dumb down their work when creating something made for children. It is possible for someone making a work for children not to rely so much on simplification, but the reality is that this happens far less often then proponents of the "Young Adult" genre would suggest. Just go look at the shit you find in a bookstore if you think I'm wrong.

I wouldn't call being anti-intellectual childish by this definition, though, because there is a practical value in realizing that intellectuals can say incorrect things at any time.

> Passions that are seen as childish usually tend to lack any sort of practical utility. Action figures and games are ultimately just timewasters.

Please read up on cognitive rest. Doing nothing is important.

And there are various ways of doing nothing that are still judged for being childish or not. I already mentioned the differences in fiction.

> Action figures and games are ultimately just timewasters. Kids learning to build stuff with woodworking tools would seem less childish because that is a useful skill compared to building things out of legos.

As a grown-ass adult, I'm both into building things out of wood and of building plastic model kits.

Either is, on paper, a foolish uneconomic conceit. I can spend hours turning a wooden bowl, making a small table, or making shop furniture; but I can buy the items for cheaper than what I could sell my time for.

Doing a good job of building and painting the plastic figure can be as difficult as turning the bowl. And if someone is particularly adept at either making the action figures or turning the wooden bowls, they can eke out a comfortable living from that alone.

For me, either activity is restful and produces objects that I like having around.

I have a different reading of GP. It’s not that being an adult involves pain, but that growing up almost certainly involves pain; changes, uncertainty, giving up stuff, all of this causes pain.

And I certainly agree that people seem to be afraid of growing up. Last time I met with my friends from college for a trip, I enjoyed the first few days, yet I became unnerved by the idea that they seem frozen in time. And I don’t think I’m being judgmental of they having a good time, because they didn’t seemed to be having a good time. Most of the talks were about them having problems to keep doing the same things as 15 years ago, dealing with the consequence of trying to do the same things and overall misery about the fact that they are not in their 20s anymore. I mean and don’t say that they need to grow up, have kids and “act like adults” but they definitely seemed to just refuse change. If this is what people mean when they talk about the infantilism in current generation, I agree with them and also find it worrisome.

> Look at all the "adult" men today, especially in America for some reason, whose desks are littered with action figures and whose offices contain a shrine to comic book superheros and Star Wars/Trek that would put the Sistine Chapel to shame. ...

> These are people who do not take their lives seriously. Someone clearly never told them that they're not 10 years old anymore.

Growing up / moving / progressing / changing is important. But a fear of being childish is not the same thing-- indeed it's something more that was a feature of my childhood than my adulthood.

When important stuff is going down, I'll buckle up. Even in other times, I'll face big issues and think and consider. I will mentally temper myself into someone who understands more things and is a broader person. I will have adult conversations. I will-- reluctantly-- confront the ephemerality of so many things in life.

And I will still come back and play with toys and enjoy video games.

I have absolutely no idea why you were downvoted for this, unless it was just too on the nose. It might be a pointed remark but it's not an unusual one.

Adults have always quite enjoyed childish things in moderation; there's no harm in enjoying something for the sheer childlike joy of it. And there's value in retaining feel for a childlike approach to thinking; naïvete is a useful filter.

But it is impossible to ignore the recent mass infantilisation of media generally, and the amount of self-justification that goes into it. The MCU is just one example of it. Grown men arguing vociferously that childhoods are betrayed when the Little Mermaid is not a white girl is another consequence of it.

(edited for clarity)

I think you're reading their intent WAY too kindly, especially when you see them in essence say "stop having fun, life is suffering, & also women should be making babies instead of having fun." (see their part on bio-clock and maybe look at how they switch wording from childish for men, to infantile for women...).

They're attacking people for trying to find a little joy in their short lives on this rock. And maybe there's more a percentage of "childish things" enjoyed now. But when you can't do the things you were told you'd be able to as an adult (get a good paying job, go on holidays, own a home, settle down with some stability), is it any wonder there's some regression?

I don't think that is a particularly fair interpretation, but again it's not an unreasonable one.

No. You can enjoy yourself, god knows we have the good life compared to 200 years ago. But joy doesn’t actually satisfy you on a deep level, and it is a childish thing to pursue.

Doing really hard and responsible stuff doesn’t make you happy. I have two children, trust me, it would be way easier and happier to lie on a beach and drink cocktails all day, and I could actually do it from past successes.

Is that really worthwhile though? Does that add meaning to my life? How many happy moments will I ultimately have from these, and will I look back and be happy I spent my life drinking cocktails? And it’s not just cocktails, it’s all the infantile pleasured that we can indulge in, from Star Wars collectibles to activist politics.

These things just won’t fill you up ultimately. And so few people “get this” these days. It’s delusional and it’s childish, and it’s reinforced by the current capitalism and leadership. It’s the wrong path. And 30-40 years from now many many people will realise and will have extremely depressed retirements.

> And it’s not just cocktails, it’s all the infantile pleasured that we can indulge in, from Star Wars collectibles to activist politics.

Hard disagree with this one. Being engaged with politics is one of the most responsible things one can do for the future of their children.

If we’re talking about things that make life worth living versus empty calories, then might as well dump all movies, shows, paintings, books, and music alongside those cocktails.

Otherwise, consider that maybe op just doesn’t understand comic books and animation as mediums, and has some weird hangups about them. (Their loss?)

> And maybe there's more a percentage of "childish things" enjoyed now

At some point we have to adjust the scales and say that since so many adults are enjoying "childish" activities and media that those things are just for adults now, and maybe always have been if there wasn't so much shame around it. Adults enjoy Bluey more than their kids do. Craig of The Creek and Gumball are some of my friend's favorites. Ted Lasso took all the formulas from children's media but put them in adult situations and it won like every award. Marvel is now more a hit with adults than kids.

If I see someone with a little shrine to kids movies, I think, "I have different tastes than this person." If I see someone write a comment like this, extrapolating that to some sort of general societal ill wherein children don't adequately suffer, I think, "this person might be very difficult to get along with."

C. S. Lewis: “When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/84171-critics-who-treat-adu...

Eh. I've adulted plenty, sir. I've started companies, I'm the father of 3 boys, and now I run a program at a nonprofit and I'm responsible for the safety and well-being of a lot of youth.

But I still like watching Mobile Suit Gundam, building plastic models, and playing SNES games on my MiSTer. And that's OK: maybe you don't find meaning in it and maybe you view it as childish. But I find enjoyment in these simple things and don't need to eviscerate them to prove how grown up I am.

(And now and then, my boys catch enthusiasm for these things, and we can experience them together which is really awesome, too).

In my interpretation they cure the separation anxiety by making sure the toys go to a good home at the end. It's a lot easier to get rid of something when you directly know and can see someone enjoying it. It means a lot to me when I see my friend wearing my old clothes for example.

Pixar is a blockbuster churning powerhouse with a very specific style. Granted the last 5 years the pandemic, writers’ strike, and the PC movements affect the process and the outcome. Also the tricky balance at executive level to try to appeal to a broader audience and be more inclusive and take fewer risks etc etc etc…

Whenever I think of Pixar, honestly, I think HQ graphics, storytelling which is imaginative and new — Finding Nemo, Monster’s Inc, Wall-E, Cars, Toy Story 2, Inside Out, Incredibles, and Soul… all these my favorites and I love Partyssaurus Rex!!

Don't forget UP! That opening scene is heartbreaking

> But then came Pixar and suddenly a studio proved you didn't have to have flops, every film they made in their first decade was a resounding success. They blew the conventional logic of Hollywood economics out of the window.

I think this is the key point that a lot of people nowadays are forgetting.

Part of why Star Wars was such a phenomenon is that there were three films in a row that were all good. This was so rare (even into the early 90s) that there was even the "movie trilogies as bar charts meme" [0].

Then Pixar came along and it was hit after hit after hit. Even for movies that WEREN'T sequels and it kind of blew everyone's minds.

I would argue Marvel went one better and put out 10+ movies in a row that were also, at a minimum, fun and good movies. I remember saying to someone in the early 2010s "what a cool time for movie making that there are just strings of great movies". What's even more amazing to me is that Kevin Feige took over Marvel studios when he was 34!

Which in turn leads me to believe that maybe the "small studio, dedicated people, mostly young but fanatical about the material" is how you kick off the series and then try as hard as you can to keep the big corporate interests run by older folks away.

0 - https://www.reddit.com/r/entertainment/comments/7y90h/movie_...

Was nodding along until you brought up Marvel, I’ll never understand how so many people like them. I can’t get past how incredibly cheesy and overly dramatic they are.

The first few are quite enjoyable flicks. I watched few randomly but it quickly became boring. They quickly became copy and paste with bit of a different paint movies.

I would suggest to watch Logan, its excellent.

Was Logan Marvel Studios, though, or Fox? (I know I could easily look this up, I'm just making conversation).

In the 00s I really liked the Marvel movies. Then came Marvel Studios to ruin everything. But even in the beginning, the first couple of films were really good: Iron Man, Captain America and Thor. But once they started to expand the "MCU" I quickly lost interest in the films. I like character driven stories that focus on the person behind the power. Batman is interesting because of Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is interesting because of Peter Parker etc. When you start doing these big mash-ups and team stories, like Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers, you lose focus on the individuals and it becomes lots of long, drawn-out & boring action sequences.

But if I remember correctly, Fox held the film rights to the X-Men property. So when Marvel Studios got off the ground, they did everything but X-Men. I don't know if that ever changed.

In any case, I agree. Logan was really good. And it was really good, in my opinion, because it was character-driven and not just 13 hours of drawn out, boring as hell, CGI "porn" action sequences. And I figure it was like that because it wasn't made by Marvel Studio.

Logan was produced by 20th Century Fox.

To the best of my knowledge the X-Men films made before Disney acquired the X-Men rights in 2019 (along with the rest of Fox) were made in partnership with Marvel Entertainment (the publishing and licensing company) and not Marvel Studios (the Disney "cinematic universe" subsidiary).

> But if I remember correctly, Fox held the film rights to the X-Men property. So when Marvel Studios got off the ground, they did everything but X-Men. I don't know if that ever changed.

Early on they were planning to adapt Inhumans as their replacement for Mutants, but it flopped badly when they finally got around to making something focused exclusively on them (as opposed to when they were just a part of the Agents of SHIELD plots).

It's a ton of action, high quality CGI, good acting, and a host of "source material" which means the MCU movies/series don't have to invest valuable time to boring worldbuilding - the material is the world.

In my opinion a lot of comic book worlds are quite ludicrous and lazy.

A man with the power of... ants. Spider man. A man that wears tight underwear on the outside of his pants... A man that pretends he is a bat.

Compare this with backstories from Japanese manga which clearly some are targeted at more adult levels of intelligence I'm flabbergasted a hollywood exec would decide to pour millions of dollars into some backstory aimed at children from the 1940s.

> In my opinion a lot of comic book worlds are quite ludicrous and lazy.

Which is precisely why they have such a large following. Most people are mentally drained after 40+ hour long work weeks.

"Why is this media that's made to be entertaining so popular?"

There's so much media that is entertaining but not dumb

I'm fairly certain the reason is Marvel is Disney and they are pandering to a wide audience that includes children, because it's much more profitable to take the whole family for their tickets than just the adults.

Marvel was aimed at teenagers and twentysomethings of the '60s, actually, facing fairly complex moral challenges. Their practical motto was "superheroes with superproblems". And most of the cinematic material actually leverages storyarcs published in the '80s, when the industry chased grown-ups (at that time Batman gets called a "fascist" and actually kills the Joker, SpiderMan is involved in dark assassinations and then gets married, Ant-Man abuses his wife, etc etc).

> SpiderMan is involved in dark assassinations and then gets married, Ant-Man abuses his wife, etc etc

Maybe I'm behind on the MCU movies but I don't remember those things happening in the cinematic material!

> Compare this with backstories from Japanese manga which clearly some are targeted at more adult levels of intelligence I'm flabbergasted a hollywood exec would decide to pour millions of dollars into some backstory aimed at children from the 1940s.

They know their audience of wannabe eternal children, and so they invest for the only reason they ever do: a fat return on that investment.

I'd also point out that a HUGE amount of anime, manga and ln content is beyond cheesy, it's just cheesy in a different way.

Yeah, they are the apex of cheesy action-led movies.

The first Avengers is so perfect that even Marvel had to change their theme after it. What then changed to light-comedy action-led movies.

There are a ton of good Marvel movies. It’s suffered from the fate all franchises do where they run out of ideas and the original writers are replaced by hacks, so it goes to shit. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was good, but it will probably be the exception.

Also Harry Potter—8 movies in a row that were, at their worst, merely good. I was amazed they pulled that off, given as you point out, how many series are utterly terribly by the 3rd title (anybody see Jurassic Park 3?).

Harry Potter had phenomenally good source material such that they would have had to try really hard to mess it up.

I'll hold my breath for the TV series...

Jurassic Park had two books, from which they've now made five (or is it six? Jeez who cares by this point) movies.

It also helps that Harry Potter is really a single story divided into 7 books/8 movies. Jurassic Park was a story told in a single book that was later expanded because it was profitable.

> Harry Potter had phenomenally good source material such that they would have had to try really hard to mess it up.

I wish that were true, but there's too many terrible movies with outstanding source material.

Cars wasn't a critical darling but has absolutely dominated Pixar revenues for years based on merchandizing.

It's really hard to get accurate (or recent) data about these things but at one point was 4x Toy Story merchandizing revenue.

https://www.therichest.com/most-popular/10-movies-that-sold-...

I loved Cars 1 (theme: It's nice to be important but it's more important to be nice) and Cars 3 (a time comes when you need to step aside, make peace with it, use it). I don't understand what went wrong with Cars 2 (theme: Idk, some short story expanded by chatGPT ;) to a long story) but I find it a very bad movie, really unwatchable almost.

> I don't understand what went wrong with Cars 2

Cars 1 was a cute fish out of water movie where a self-centered braggart is humbled and finds true friendship and how to be a better person. Cars 2 is a kids movie full of gunplay and violence that opens with a torture scene, progresses towards murder, and finishes with the protagonists escape a death trap to prevent mass murder for profit. I mean, I don't know what anyone was thinking with this one.

Yeah man that torture scene, really, wtf. Since it happens off-screen my kids probably didn't really get it, but it's just... crazy. Imagine this conversation:

- What's happening dad?

* Oh, they are forcing this car to keep driving until, until ... yeah until he confesses something.

- Why?

* Well, if they make that car uncomfortable enough, like, when he almost dies, he will confess to anything.

- So it's useless?

* Yeah torture is useless, barbaric, something I hope you will just never come across in any shape or form in your life. It's a thing done by genuinely evil or very mislead people.

- Jeez, that's quite something dad.

* Yup, enjoy the rest of the movie matey. Let's hope they won't rape Sally next.

- Wut?

* Never mind bud.

Jesus christ. Did you at least let them believe in Santa for a few weeks?

They wanted to make a James Bond movie with cars.

My son loved Cars, so we ended up getting him Cars 2. When he (probably about 4 at the time) saw cars being tortured in Cars 2, he got so upset that he started screaming and punching the TV screen. We turned it off immediately because it was just too intense for him (found out later that he had autism). He didn't end up watching Cars 2 until he was about 10.

He still often watches the first and third movie, but rarely the second.

I have a complicated relationship with Cars 2. I'm southern, so Mater as a character represents a lot of stereotypes for better and for worse. They went over-the-top with his "stupid" moments so that he could have an internal character reckoning about tactfulness, while also being the hero of the movie. If they had just made him more normal, he wouldn't have had to be so shamed, and it's the shame aspect that made me feel weird. I just feel like the weakest part of the plot was the fake gasoline conspiracy. I haven't seen Cars 3 yet but my friends have told me "it's the sequel Cars deserved," and I'm hoping they're right.

They’re right.

> Cars wasn't a critical darling

Cars 1 was good. Cars 2 was absolutely terrible. Cars 3 was very good. Cars 2 suffered when Paul Neumann died, since the relationship between him and Owen Wilson was the heart of what Cars was about. But Cars 3 made it about his passing, and what he left behind, in a really moving way.

At some point in the 2000s Pixar shifted from making movies for everyone to making movies for certain demographics, or people with certain issues in their life. Moving, strained relationship with parent, a purpose in life etc. Not every movie resonates with everyone, but almost every movie has its defenders. Maybe Brave doesn’t work for you if you and your mom don’t have trouble. Maybe Soul doesn’t work for you if aren’t a bit down.

They are also perfectly ok making simpler movies like Luca, that aren’t trying to be some sort of epic treaties.

What Freddie is getting wrong here is projecting his ranking onto everyone else, even when he is calling out the critics as being the wrong audience for the movies. A lot of the movies aren’t made for critics, but because the director or storyteller has something really personal to say to a subset of society.

Cars 2 and The Good Dinosaur (which I’m not sure I’ve even ever finished) are their only real true misfires. A lot of their whelming movies (Onward, Lightyear) feel that way because they feel like a waste of premise and opportunity more than actually bringing bad.

This comment hits the head on my biggest criticism of this article, where because a given movie doesn't resonate with him, it's therefore terrible. For me, Onward is one of Pixar's best and made me rethink how I was interacting with my brother now that we're both adults.

I think this quote from the author sums this up:

> It’s also great because it affirms my own views on human life, as all great art does.

The movies don't fit his worldview and doesn't resonate with his past struggles and are therefore terrible.

A similar example, not from Pixar, would be I watched Big Fish with an ex and she couldn't finish it do to her complicated past with her dad, which I didn't have with my own dad. Good movies need not appeal to everyone and I think it would be a loss if we don't support Pixar in making movies that don't.

I agree several of their movies ARE masterpieces. I think the problem is when they tried to get too preachy and sacrificed the "soul" of the plot to the message you're supposed to get out of the movie. Wall-E was a good movie, but it feels preachy. Incredible 2 was a nightmare because all it did was preach. I haven't seen most of the newer ones. Ratatouille came out post-Cars, and I feel like Ratatouille does one of the best jobs balancing the message with the plot, and giving you an aesthetic experience you will not forget: perceiving the world from the point of view of a rodent. Ratatouille genuinely changed my life. And yeah even if you grew up with Pixar, you can watch those movies again and they're still solid, soulful film.

I mean studio ghibli has to be in that conversation too.

Do they? They are from Japan, not Hollywood. Very different business culture. And while they are successful and beloved, compared to Pixar they only made small money. They only have one movie who made comparable money to a Pixar movies, which was Spirited Away in 2002/2003, and it "only" made as much as Toy Story in 1995, and a bit more than "A Bug's Life" in 1998.

So even if investors in Hollywood knew about Ghibli around that time, they probably didn't consider it as a relevant investment.

I'm very confused right now, I replied to a comment talking about the quality of films made by a studio and you're responding with investment stuff.

Didn’t cars end up making the most money despite the poor ratings? They were able to cash in on merchandise sales too. I think once they did cars they realized (their definition of) quality didn’t matter as much as broad market appeal.

My then 4 year old son forced me to watch Cars 50 times and I still think it’s a good movie.

All I’m saying is, critics gonna critique but theres plenty people who absolutely adore Cars. I mean it has 100% refridgerated air!

> Didn’t cars end up making the most money despite the poor ratings?

That's because the critics view of what a 4 year old wants to see doesn't actually matter.

My son put me through hell at that time with almost daily viewings of cars, a merchandised Disney Cars bed, stacks of toys, clothing, hats, etc.

Cars is one helluva good movie if you're in the correct age range. Hell, the first time I watched it I loved it :-)

I wonder what I would have thought if I watched it at 4.

I saw Cars in the least favorable way possible, so my hatred for that movie should be entirely understandable, but it is still a fun story to tell: It was the height of "Wii Mania" and my brother desperately wanted a Wii. (We were both in college at the time, for age context.) Being a good older sibling I agreed to help line stand in the local Wal-Mart's crazy rule-filled queue to buy one as soon as the truck pulled up with fresh stock the next morning.

It's one of those worst kinds of "sleepover" situations where you are trapped inside a Wal-Mart with underpaid retail workers who obviously don't want to be there that late/early either so they give you a lot of rules and restrictions and marching orders in part as much to keep themselves entertained as to keep things "orderly". That's part of why we needed two of us to keep a single spot in line, because they were trying to exhaust people and hope they leave.

One of the other most exhausting things about it, and I still mostly think it was intentionally a torture decision, was that near the place where the line spent most of its hours over night there in that Wal-Mart was a TV with the volume on. That TV was left in an endless loop of the movie Cars. Every time it ended it went right back to the beginning of the movie.

(When the fresh members of Wal-Mart's morning shift finally arrived we eventually did convince one of them to change movies on that TV and turn the volume down, to cheers among us. I still believe it mostly proved it was always possible, the late shift just hated us.)

Cars will always be associated for me with late night exhaustion and torture. I feel for all the parents that got versions of that from well-meaning kids rather than spiteful retail employees retaliating at crazy customers.

> I believe no other studio has had similar performance.

Studio Ghibli?

John Lasseter was a big fan.

Also, early Disney.

Hmm, so ever since the takeover by Disney in 2006 we saw a decline in quality.

Call me biased, but I might see the problem.

I guess. If you call Wall-E and Toy Story 3 evidence of a decline in quality.

It takes awhile for strong culture to erode. You can see a similar thing with Apple after Jobs, the products still make money, but the magic is gone.

I think it's just as easy to see it as evidence that Pixar is too large -- trying to focus on too many things.

But the reality is that most creative endeavours peter out a bit, because all long-lived creative endeavours exist in the context of nostalgia for their halcyon days. It's impossible for everyone to unsee what went before.

And all creative endeavours eventually stray somewhat from self-reflection towards navel-gazing. (Like the Vision Pro, which is so completely a product of the totality of Apple culture that it is basically white cider, when what everyone is really keen to see is a very good scrumpy.)

This right here

Cars was pre-Disney and one of John Lasseter's pet projects (some say being the original idea before Toy Story even).

John Lasseter in general is an interesting thread to pull there at that point because there are many competing narratives. When Disney bought Pixar Lasseter moved in charge of all of Disney animation. So there are the narratives that Pixar didn't see a noticeable change because the boss was still the boss and the boss was still reporting directly to the C-Suite, even if the C-Suite changed dramatically. There are also the narratives that because Lasseter originated at Disney Feature Animation and may have felt that Pixar was always the "mistress" and DFA the "wife" that Lasseter "sabotaged" some of Pixar's efforts in favor of the marquee brand, the historic brand, DFA.

(There's some evidence for the "sabotage" narrative: after the expense of The Princess and the Frog failed to impress the C-Suite and DFA turned to primarily 3D animation DFA was encouraged to compete with Pixar, built a very different renderer and something of a different tech stack in general. It seems easy to argue that DFA's tech quickly got superior to Pixar's. There are environment and crowd shots in Wreck-It-Ralph and Big Hero 6 that Pixar still seems to struggle to match years later. Personally, I thought it most noticeable in Soul where most of the wide establishing shots consist of "empty clouds" and its version of New Orleans feels both empty and claustrophobic. At nearly the same time Soul released to Disney+ DFA released a lovely short of a digital New Orleans with gorgeous establishing shots and crowd work and it felt almost a direct flex on Soul and exactly what Soul was lacking in its characterization of New Orleans. [This was Us Again, which was theatrically attached to Raya, as much as theatrical attachment of shorts mattered in that strange year.])

It's probably one of those cases where both narratives are "true" in their ways. Pixar never really saw a different boss and seemed to continue down a lot of the same path, including two Cars sequels because Lasseter loved Cars. Lasseter likely did see the competition with DFA as a part of Pixar's success pre-buyout, so continued it hoping it would keep Pixar hungry and innovating. Lasseter seemed to try to genuinely juggle obligations to both DFA and Pixar

(The "mistress" versus "wife" analogy being an especially cruel one, but seemingly quite appropriate, for me to pick because the end of the thread was that Lasseter was eventually fired from Disney for being a sex pest; though don't feel too bad about how "canceled" Disney tried to make him because he still heads an animation company. Ironically one again with weird Apple connections because Apple TV+ has been buying most of their streaming rights. [The goofy Luck was the first notable one from that company.])

(Further aside: I also don't think A Bug's Life has aged as well as some think it has. It had great quality compared to its competition at the time, but outside of that context, it's "fine" and hasn't aged well. I think that is also evidence that maybe Pixar was "never" a masterpiece factory, not even pre-Disney buyout.)

Pixar's best run ended when Steve Jobs stepped away as CEO after selling to Disney. I wonder how much his leaving influenced this change.

You might be onto something. Pixar isn't what it used to be, but I find AppleTV (when it works) captures a lot of that early Pixar magic.

But that's Tim Cook, not Jobs. What shows in particular have that magic to you?

Right, I meant to suggest there might be some "culture" bleed. Another commenter suggested it had more to do with key Pixar figures leaving for Disney, at which point Disney's own offerings improved and Pixar's suffered.

I'm not very good at articulating "feelings" so bear with me: Early Pixar movies (to me) are timeless, positive, almost fairy-tale like. They're centrist, middle-of-the-road films that don't offend or validate anyone, just faithfully follow the Hero's Journey as they try to resolve some issue in the ideal world where we're all in this together. Toy Story is the best example-- literally every single toy could not be more different, but the entire point of the movie is about all of them finding ways to leverage their differences to advance the journey for all of them, not exploiting their shortcomings to hold everyone else back. Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles, all are the same pattern. Pixar's money printer used to be endless asset-swaps of "Diversity: The Movie" (the secret to Sesame Street as well), and it was a beautiful thing before the concept was perverted by the same children who grew up watching these movies.

I don't have kids' show equivalents to name from AppleTV, but I do get the same feeling ("Diversity: The Show") from their regular shows. Ted Lasso is the obvious frontrunner. For All Mankind, Invasion, Foundation (caveat: I was really high when I watched this one). All of these beautifully weave together the themes of diversity and unity into a shared journey.

As someone that doesn't have the bias and nostalgia for Pixar movies that someone growing up with them does, I would say that your assessment is fairly accurate.

Masterpiece factory is clickbait hyperbole. Pixar has made at best, 2 masterpieces, and I'd argue 0[1], but that's a matter of preference frankly. What isn't subjective, is regardless of my or your feelings on the movies, that first 10 years period you mentioned? Yeah. Pixar fucking killed it. They were box office darlings for sure that could do no wrong for a while there.

[1]: The intro to up, as a standalone: Masterpiece. The rest? Good movie but it wouldn't have been near as memorable//enjoyable if not for those first few minutes.

No one ever talks about A Bug’s Life. Has that movie beeb Mandela effected out of half of our universe’s existence?

I'd say the masterpieces ended after Up in 2009. They started doing sequels after that.

It was a masterpieces factory until they sold to Disney and the people in charge of the masterpieces moved to revitalise the animation part of Disney. Everyone knows it but you won’t read it in an American newspaper because of the fall from grace of said talents.

Edit: While I enjoy the usual downvotes, I find it hilarious to read all these articles about Pixar not mentioning Lasseter and Bird despite them clearly being a huge part of Pixar initial success with Lasseter being part of why Pixar mostly produced good movies. Disney Animation started making good movies again (Zootopia, Frozen) once he moved there. It's clear that the quality control suffered once he started splitting his time more and Disney had more influence.

The iron giant is amazing. Bird is a genius.

I didn't know Inside Out was a sequel.

> the masterpieces ended after Up in 2009

And yet Inside Out came out in 2015, Coco in 2017, and Soul in 2020.

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