I suspect that if Ayn Rand had written the screenplay then Syndrome would have been the hero. He’s a self-made billionaire genius who can’t be bothered with the petty moral codes which govern the little people! What’s not to admire?
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Wall-E is also damn subversive. Except for a robot toy, Disney seemed to be at a loss as to how to exploit its IP.
There was a spoof Buy n Large website up and running for a few weeks after the movie’s release. Done by the fine folks at Pixar, apparently.
It was merciless. A fine piece of world building-through-satire, showing what the corporate-dominated world was like before humanity abandoned the Earth.
Eventually the address linked to a lame “explore the spaceship” web page.
I openly cried when I watched Wall-E at home, while that utterly brilliant history-of-art montage showing the resettlement of Earth was rolling. Partly out of relief that in-story humanity had survived, but also out of despair that an ending as happy as that one could be pulled off and wondering whether we deserved it.
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Just last week my son asked me to explain why they all started holding hands, and I had a hard time explaining. Then a couple of days later he said we don’t want the baby to get hurt because then we have to bury him in the ground. I’m not built for this.
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I love most of them. I couldn’t begin to rank them.
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The premise of “The Incredibles” always struck me as a hybrid of “Watchmen” and “Harrison Bergeron.”
That Cars and Cars 2 are not the bottom two spots is a travesty. The magic of Pixar films is that there’s this notion that behind the veneer of every day life there’s something special, maybe magical, just waiting to be discovered. Maybe it’s talking bugs, maybe it’s toys that come to life when you’re not looking, maybe it’s the monsters under your bed or the fish in the ocean outside your window.
But Cars? Fuck that shit. There’s no magic there, just a bunch of bullshit marketing “Hey what if we came up with a movie with cars that talk!” ploy to sell toys to kids. They are so utterly different that they only merit inclusion on a list like this by pedigree alone.
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Because it needs to be part of the discussion context 
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#1 The Incredibles
#2 Toy Story 2
#3 Brave
#4 Wall-E
Objectionablism?
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- Ratatouille
- The Incredibles
- Toy Story Series
Brave was certainly the most disappointing Pixar movie ever. It could have been so great and I was excited for it. It starts out fine, then – nothing.
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I disagree. Maybe it’s dependent on your level of appreciation for 20th century American car culture and/or NASCAR, but that movie really spoke to me and my family. When I was growing up, we never had enough money to fly anywhere, so family vacations were spent driving around the American Southwest, including many small towns and run-down desert tourist traps just like Radiator Springs. And the only sporting events my family ever watched happened to be car racing and the occasional Kentucky Derby. The Doc Hollywood plot is the least interesting part of the movie (though better-executed than it was in Doc Hollywood, if you ask me), but the performances of Paul Newman and Larry the Cable Guy (of all people) really make this movie special.
I tend to put Cars high on my personal Pixar rankings, not their best but up there. I’m a car buff, which doesn’t hurt its standing, but it was bold to work with a theme no other studio making animated features would have even attempted, and a theme that gets short shrift in our culture as well. Lightning pushing the wrecked King across the finish line is one of Pixar’s finer moments. The message there is pretty good, showing what Lightning has learned about the value of community, real and social, compared to celebrity culture and winning at all costs. It’s not a simple description or mere flourish that he comes to refer to the trophy as an “empty” cup.
Brave was awesome and all human beings need to watch it.
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I watched Cars once in the theater and once at home in HD. It’s a cheerful and earnest, but kind of a formulaic and predictable story, mainly meant for kids, and I’d never consider it a top 10 Pixar film, but . . . oh, man, is it lovely to look at. Not so much the googly-eyed car characters, but everything else. The town, the “props,” and the lovely landscape. A tribute to the sublime, austere American west.
I watched Inside Out this morning. Not in the top 5, but an interesting and novel concept that is splendidly executed.
What I found especially interesting, and laudable: Even though Inside Out is about a kid, and spends a lot of time exploring her (mostly) happy childhood memories, the movie doesn’t worship or idealize childhood. In fact, it is about the beginning of emotional maturity and complexity: In the closing act we see that very nature of the globes representing memories have changed, and that she has more “islands” of personality.
We also get brief looks inside of the parents’ heads; they too have a cast of characters representing emotions, but they act as team rather than than having a (as the girl does) a “boss” emotion, happiness.
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More to the point would be the wonderful Herman’s Head, which had head-characters representing emotions.
But “novel concept” I had in mind was the whole interior world that Inside Out lays out. Memory spheres, different “lands,” and the changes to it all that came with growing up.
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I know Beano was / is a British comics newspaper, but I always giggle when I see the title because it’s also the name of a flatulence remedy.
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I have a different problem with Brave as well…scared the shit out of my girls and gave them nightmares for weeks. A lot of little girls who wanted to see a “princess movie” were frightened…i probably i should have know from the title BRAVE…
Am I going to be the only one that ranks Finding Nemo outside of the top 10?
For me, the Toy Story trilogy is the best. Too bad Toy Story 3 immediately joined the list of awesome movies I’ll never be able to watch again, right next to Dancer in the dark and The boy in the striped pijamas.
It’s not like Syndrome’s plan would have worked though, even without the Incredibles.
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