30 years of Pixar movies: poll II (2005-2014)

Do'h. Copy and paste fail - that should read poll 2 of course. Maybe a mod could change it.

Thanks.

Previously: 30 years of Pixar movies: poll 1 (1995-2004)

Ratatouille is the most consistent. One of their very best movies.

Wall-E & Up both start off strong and become different movies halfway in. I could not tell you what happens in the back half of Up. Something about a talking dog and a big goofy bird.

Toy Story 3 is terrific. I think I'm burnt out on the characters so I have a hard time getting excited about them.

Toy Story 3 is the best Toy Story

Wall-E hands down. First half is unmatched and brilliant, but I'll also vouch for the second half - it may have a different setting and a new (enormous) set of supporting characters, but it still carries on the tradition of silent slapstick comedy that was in the first half and the climax is heart-wrenching.

Guess I'm a big Brad Bird fan because my vote goes to his film here, Ratatouille

Kind of a fascinating slate of a lot of Pixar films I either outright don't like or think are very flawed. This slate has lots of great or even iconic sequences in movies that don't quite meet/match those moments. But I guess I would go with Wall E, for the first half or so and for the Peter Gabriel song.

Second half of Up is if I recall correctly a bunch of nonsense. Second half of Brave, something about her mother turning into a magic bear for some reason? Second half of Wall-e, fat people in space. Ratatouille I remember being ok but sticking the landing with the speech about criticism.

Monsters U, Cars ... these movies are just sub mid.

A lot of people love toy story 3. I don't remember it doing particularly much for me, though it is particularly sentimental, if I recall correctly. I don't know how to link to it from my phone, but someone should post Pixar's 22 rules of storytelling.

When I saw Ratatouille, the whole audience laughed out loud at the restaurant critic Proust gag. Likewise I can still recall turning around in my seat after the opening sequence of Up and seeing an entire theatre of people weeping and sobbing loudly. Those moments of uncynical public togetherness really feel like a thing of the past, sadly!

The films themselves are hella mixed. Ratatouille is a banger but I’ve never felt like seeing it again. Cars is unwatchable, then and now. Wall-E and Up both start well then morph into stupider, shittier movies. Brave looks incredible and I wish I could show it to my plucky redheaded daughter but it’s so *boring*. I think Monsters U is underrated — not as good as the first one, but it’s still a gentle, fun hangout movie — it’s not a Great Pixar Statement and that’s fine.

Toy Story 3 is deeply affecting and funny, but I absolutely hate the conveyor belt sequence. It’s way, way too much - almost like it borrows the language of a Holocaust movie. It’s the point where (imo) the wrong lesson gets learned from Up, and the big emotional moments in Pixar films start to feel manipulative and tokenistic.

Ratatouille is their big masterpiece of traditional (in the storytelling sense) animated movie magic.

Less difficult than the first poll. Never seen Cars, nor the sequels. Wall-E, Up, Monsters U and Brave are all nice enough (can't really remember anything of Brave though) but it has to be TS3 or Ratatouille. After going with Toy Story 2 in the first poll, I feel very boring going for Toy Story 3 now but the ending hit me like few films ever did.

"Please be my prisoner!"

Up.

I don't have strong opinions between Wall-E, Up, TS3, and Ratatouille. Voted for Up. At first also thought the 2nd part was deeply flawed but the last time I watched it it didn't bother me as much and the whole thing conveys a beautiful idealistic Pixar spirit.

it has been a long time since I saw it, I remember being really disappointed that they get to the end, to this exotic imaginary location, and as I remember there is like one weird bird that lives here and that's it. this big empty waste of imagination.

Ratatouille. The best comedy of the 00's.

We have a Ratatouille poster in our kitchen

also inspired the funniest moment in a recent best picture winner

I voted Ratatouille. Wall-E is pretty marvellous too, though the fatphobia is def a sour note.

Dividing this into three decades is interesting. If instead you divide into halves, 1995-2010 is an impressive streak of ambition and quality, while 2011-2025 is super uneven with few highs and a general embrace of formula and retreading that mars even some of the best films from the period (e.g., Coco's "artistic aspiration versus family tradition" theme that's in roughly 10m other kids' movies). TS3 being the hinge works well too — it's good iirc but stretching to a third entry was an ominous sign in retrospect

cars was their first bad movie. then 3 good ones.
tben the toy story sequel that took the premise too far, where 99% of every toy's life is in utter misery, like a bad black mirror episode where people get turned into old phone models or something
then cars 2 which i will never watch, then the mediocre brave (which is virtually a remake of brother bear, the disney 2D flop) and then the terrible monsters u, some 80s college bullshit movie where all that matters is sports and frats.

I just rewatched the first ten mins of Ratatouille to see if it would work for my five-year-old. (Answer: Nope! But I'll finish watching it myself.)

Is Ratatouille the origin of the "[freeze frame] this is me" comedy introduction, that's now so characteristically '00s?

up isn’t perfect but i laughed and cried harder during it than any of the others. i am a simple man and a sucker for dumb jokes about dogs being distracted by squirrels

“I’m not Alpha, he- oh.”

In any other context I would say "which one will win, and why will it be Toy Story 3". But that's one heck of a run from 2007-2010. Those people were on crack. They were on super-crack. In years to come if not already people will say "I was there". It is the doom of people that they forget.

Having said that, I had completely forgotten that Monsters University existed. And for some reason I always thought that Brave was a Disney film, perhaps because Merida is a Disney Princess. I mean, technically they're all Disney films. Because Disney bought Pixar in 2006. Which had the side-effect of making Steve Jobs Disney's biggest shareholder. But they're Disney•Pixar films, made independently within the Disney machine.

I had also completely forgotten that two whole films (Luca and Turning Red) were basically released for free because of the COVID pandemic. Wall-E and Up remind me a bit of Saving Private Ryan, in the sense that the second half is a breather rather than a let-down.

Wall-E is uneven in tone and pace but not quality. I love the second half almost as much as the first. I never really thought of it as fat-shaming -- the people being fat stands in for just letting the machines do everything for you, I don't recall a lot of laughs at the expense of their bodies specifically -- but I can understand how some would experience that way and I'm sympathetic to that. The message, though, is great, and the flow into the closing credits rebuilding civilization to the Peter Gabriel song is sublime.

Up has the opposite situation -- I don't find the second half too jarring in terms of tone, but it is a step down in quality imo. Becomes more of a cookie-cutter adventure film with the bad guy. The dogs in particular seem like they wouldn't be entirely out of place in a Dreamworks joint.

The fat-shaming is pretty explicit imo. The humans in Wall-E have essentially devolved both physically and intellectually. That their bodies physically represent both of these trajectories is one reason it's off-putting. Their fatness is used to signify passivity, complacency, and a lack of curiosity, ambition, and drive, choosing a life of leisure and convenient consumption over a natural state of work, self-sufficiency, and tackling real problems. Automation is not a good enough reason to make them fat — there are other ways to signal that life on a spaceship could have long-term effects on the humans. It's done to advance the social critique of over-consumption presented in the first part. The big box store is called *Buy n Large*, I don't think it's very subtle.

I won't vote for it in this company but I'll throw some love at Cars. It was my son's favourite movie when he was about 6 and there's a lot to like about it. The plot is pretty generic sure but the characters are fun and there's some genuinely funny (and touching) moments as well as the usual Pixar cleverness.

xp
fwiw all that doesn't make me hate the movie, and it's a testament to the creators that this stuff is actually worth thinking about rather than blatantly hateful or offensive. not to mention that fatphobia in the 00s was absolutely virulent, and you can find its taint in other work that is also similarly broadly progressive, e.g., Parks & Recreation

have to admit I have never seen the Cars movies

I have to admit I only saw Up once, and in a theater (so not distracted) but damned if I can remember anything after the whole courtship to death segment, which killed me.

Tom Scharpling had a funny rant about Up. “They want us to watch their funny cartoon?! After that horror show?!”

I love Up for hitting us so hard at the start and then in the denouement the old man actually has to battle his childhood hero who turns out to be evil like 'here have more bleak shit'.

I only saw Ratatouille about a year ago, but it's my favourite here, followed very closely by Wall-E. I could take or leave TS3 tbh.

Although it's never been considered the artistic high point of Pixar, the Cars franchise was absolutely HUGE for a generation of boys.

I revisited Up last year and the one negative that really stuck out for me was the inconsistency in how they depict the main character’s frailty. Sometimes he is very much an old man but then other times he’s doing action stunts out of an Indiana Jones movie.

Re: Wall-E, I personally didn’t take it as fat shaming partly because they do show what happened to these people over time, with something like anatomical drawings that show a transformation that goes beyond putting on weight - even their bones shrank and their anatomy became extremely cartoonish whereas their previous physical appearance had actual grounding in reality - in fact, it WAS reality. (Remember we see Fred Willard as himself, not as a drawing.) Pixar had a sly sense of humor where they often did send-ups of old cartoon conventions (see how the concept of talking animals is handled in Up), and this seemed in line with that where humanity was no longer the humans we see in real life and more like the cartoons we accept in animated shows of the past.

I don’t think we have to pretend the fatshaming in WALL-E isn’t fatshaming in order to think it was a good movie.

Like, of course it was fatshaming. It was a bunch of other stuff too but it was also fatshaming. I think you do analysis of the movie a disservice if you refuse to acknowledge that.

On a similar note, I recently heard someone e on NPR talking about how the treatment of rats by humans in Ratatouille was meant to be an allegory about the treatment of Jews by the Nazis, which I really can’t get on board with as a reading because it means the movie casts Nazis as people and Jewish people as rats, which seems like accepting a Nazi premise more than upending one.

Well we've already established from The Incredibles that Brad Bird is a fascist so it all fits

Rob's description above is spot on, but that's not what I'd call fatshaming. Everyone understands that what is depicted is a fallen society that mirrors the US as a fast-food / automated nation. I see it as critique and satire, not at the expense of the people, but at the force of habit, unhealthy choices being sold as convenient, brave new world society, etc. You can totally see them as victims, and the end of the story supports that. I thought the idea that the whole system can collapse when a cog gets jammed (and the people snap out of their lethargy) was kinda funny - the old idea of capitalism stumbling on itself, that's a nice reference.

It's "funny" that they're fat. Ergo

Is Ratatouille the origin of the "[freeze frame] this is me" comedy introduction, that's now so characteristically '00s?

On a similar note, I recently heard someone e on NPR talking about how the treatment of rats by humans in Ratatouille was meant to be an allegory about the treatment of Jews by the Nazis, which I really can’t get on board with as a reading because it means the movie casts Nazis as people and Jewish people as rats, which seems like accepting a Nazi premise more than upending one.

That just sounds like someone got Ratatouille and Art Spiegelman's Maus confused?

You can totally see them as victims, and the end of the story supports that.

Plenty of fatshaming views fat people as victims of an industrialized society pushing unhealthy food on them.

I thought that was the scientific consensus.

So what if it is? Doesn't stop it from being nonsense.

It is not, anyway.

Would watch Art Spiegelman’s Ratatouille or alternatively Pixar’s Maus.

Up's first 20 minutes is so deeply sad and upsetting it eclipses the entire rest of the film, which was just a bit silly for the most part

That just sounds like someone got Ratatouille and Art Spiegelman's Maus confused?

Yeah, my primary objection is that the humans and rats are emphatically NOT the same species down to not being able to communicate with each other in the fantasy world of the movie, so I find the thesis literally dehumanizing. Movies like Zootopia or Elemental sidestep that entire landline by not having any human characters at all and leveling the playing field across the animal/elemental beings that they are the focus of the story.

Is Ratatouille the origin of the "[freeze frame] this is me" comedy introduction, that's now so characteristically '00s?

I feel like this was done in 60s/70s screwball comedy at least once or twice. What's Up Doc? or something similar.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly sort-of has a freeze-frame comedy introduction, or at least it has one for Eli Wallach - he bursts out of a saloon holding a chicken leg. I always assumed that the 2000s use of the idea was a deliberate throwback to those 1960s lots-of-stars films, like Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Etc and It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Etc. Didn't The Producers open that way?

Two things strike me. I didn't realise until earlier today that Buy N Large is a pun. By and large! Buy'n'large. By and large! It's a pun. I think I didn't notice because I mentally replaced it with B&M, an actual US-style warehouse-sized store.

Secondly Wall-E has almost the same plot as Zardoz. "Abandoned worker drone seeks truth; encounters decadent society; they crave death, but cannot die; he is happy to oblige". Imagine if the second half of Wall-E consisted of Wall-E (a) demonstrating to Eve that he can sustain an erection (b) searching for The Tabernacle (c) throwing semi-naked women into bales of hay.

A freeze frame to introduce a character is nothing like the "you're probably wondering"; the latter telegraphs "this is your identification figure, this person will lead you through the story", the TGTB&TU thing establishes "here, this is one of the important characters, we are looking at him from a distance".

I haven't quite seen all of them, but I think Ratatouille is the best Pixar movie.

Cars 2 won't get any votes but it's the first movie theater experience for my 3 year old son and he loved it. It was a Saturday afternoon showing packed with 3-7 year olds running around all over the place. All those kids loved it. A unique movie-going experience. So I do have a bit of a sentimental attachment to the movie, even if I know it's not actually good.

Secondly Wall-E has almost the same plot as Zardoz. "Abandoned worker drone seeks truth; encounters decadent society; they crave death, but cannot die; he is happy to oblige". Imagine if the second half of Wall-E consisted of Wall-E (a) demonstrating to Eve that he can sustain an erection (b) searching for The Tabernacle (c) throwing semi-naked women into bales of hay.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf)

This is brilliant, how have I not connected these two together before?! Definitely inspiration or "echoes" there. And my goodness that erection scene is so hilarious and amazing, along with the scene where they argue in their virtual world at the round table that is expressed as abstract moaning and yelling in physical reality. It's honestly one of the more realistic depictions of our dystopian future (along with the Wool/Silo book series) I've seen in scifi.

I am always glad to hear Zardoz chat but I am not responsible for that post, it is Ashley Pomeroy's doing.

Voted Ratatouille as the most well-rounded thing here, though I don't love the "critics are snoots who've forgotten joy!" idea, and I think the big payoffs of Toy Story 3 are pretty undeniable. What really got me with TS3 wasn't the climax but the coda, with Andy saying farewell and Woody getting one last play session with his child-god. Agreed that the actual plot business of TS3, though very entertaining, does start to take the magic out of imagining toys coming to life; it's funny realizing that day-care toys just get run into the ground, but not really delightful. The fourth film then ran this further into the ground by trapping them in an antique store (again with its own local power elite, etc.) with its own horrors and even less color. Plus the suicidal spork.

Regarding Brave, to be fair, the entire premise is that her mother gets magically turned into a bear - the movie is about their relationship, the daughter feeling like the mother doesn't support/appreciate her, etc., daughter wishes for her mother to be different, result is a bear curse, this forces them to go on an adventure and learn some lessons, etc. But JiC is right that this setup actually does come kinda late in the movie and then gets rushed through to the end. The movie had a problematic development history with a late director firing/replacement, and just doesn't feel very well honed for what it's trying to do. I do feel like any families who went and saw it probably felt like they had a good time at the movies.

Also agreed with everyone saying Wall-E and Up both have incredible parts. I can well up just thinking about the beginning and end of Up, but have never had the slightest desire to rewatch the actual movie that lies in between. The fatshaming in Wall-E is a huge problem, yes (rob summarizes it very well), and in general I just don't recall much that grabbed me about the entire spaceship sequence, after the lovely, striking, near-silent movie about robots becoming friends in a blasted, junk-filled earth.

I really like the middle of Up - yes, it's a different movie from the amazing first ten minute, but that's like "why don't they make the whole airplane out of the same stuff as the black box?" - in fact it's (sorry) literally metaphorically that: it would be too heavy to fly.

*minutes

I'm curious what's so disliked about Monsters U, it seemed like a fun, highly rewatchable hangout movie to me. I haven't seen it in a long time, though - maybe it's one of those so-so movies that needs to catch you on a good day.

I'd probably rank it worst of these that isn't called Cars 2, but I did really like one thing about it (and was about to post on it!)

It's 25% "what if Animal House but they're actually animals monsters". It makes sense that Mike's a hardscrabble striver, starry-eyed about making it to Monsters Inc, and I really liked Sully as a legacy student, intending to coast straight through. Within that setup though, it does colour within the lines a lot - gang of misfits, the dean would love to expel them, there's a misfit in all of us, etc etc.

And then at the end, they cause a crisis, and they resolve the crisis by both being good at the thing and thinking outside the box, and the dean admits that they've changed her thinking about who is and isn't suited for this - but what they did was massively illegal, they are very expelled (but not sent to jail). And so they wander off, and one of them mentions that you know, Monsters Inc is hiring for the mailroom... and then over the closing credits you see them working their way up to where we met them

And I thought holy shit I have never seen that elsewhere!

To be brutally honest, as I much as I enjoy Ratatouille and for that matter The Incredibles - they're arguably the most technically accomplished in terms of action and movement, perhaps due to Brad Bird - I've never been all that invested in the characters either. There's something kind of broad and thin about the way they're depicted, to the point where they feel a bit generic like they pulled out some stock characters.

What really got me with TS3 wasn't the climax but the coda, with Andy saying farewell and Woody getting one last play session with his child-god.

Whenever I referred to the Toy Story 3 ending this was of course exactly what I meant.
I disagree with the magic of the concept losing ground with the sequels. All movies take different aspects about toys being part of someone's life and do excellent takes on it. It certainly gets a bit more dark and sinister with the prison-element of 3 and the secluded society of 4 but I don't see the fun of it all diminishing. Instead, they hit hard with those deep emotional scenes. TS3 has that coda: the grown-up kid deciding to pass on his beloved toys to give them a new life with a child full of imagination who he trusts will properly play with them, and then that kid even says something like 'Look mom, they're playing together!' to make it certain that Woody and Buzz will remain together as a team. The latter part doesn't hold with Toy Story 4 of course, but it develops the story well. And that film has two grand moments: first is the scene with the lost child finding comfort and solace in a toy; then there's the farewell between Woody and Buzz, with the context that lost toys will also find their happy end.

My issues with the middle of Up aren't really that it turns into a silly "plucky kid and grumpy old man" adventure - I just don't think it's a very good adventure. The stuff with the talking dogs and the evil old adventurer just seemed weak, versus all the things a floating house could run into. But maybe James and the Giant Peach already claimed the best options.

One detail I love about Toy Story 3 which would've made it a perfect end to a trilogy...

It had to be WALL-E for me - that gorgeous opening section, right up there in the cinematic canon, and which could not have existed if Pixar hadn’t happened.
As for the second act - the corpulence is there as an extrapolation of population obesity trends in North America across six decades. Pointing out where it’s heading isn’t “fat-shaming” or “fatphobia” (huh?) and the film sides with those people. Its anger is directed at convenience and allowing ourselves to be lulled for profit.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I’m surprised by the love for the Incredibles here, which I found entertaining but nothing special. But I need to realize not everyone is like me!

As for the second act - the corpulence is there as an extrapolation of population obesity trends in North America across six decades

Forgot about this, but Wall-E also came out in the wake of a huge public backlash against (as Daniel put it) industrialized society pushing the consumption of unhealthy food. Super Size Me helped make that a bigger public debate when it came out in 2004 - I can't say it was a great film, but until it came out, I think most people I knew brushed off the impact something like McDonald's had on people's health and how fast food portion sizes had become much bigger. Per one study, "a typical serving of French fries from McDonald's contains three times more calories than when the franchise began, and a single 'super-sized' meal contained 1,500–2,000 calories, i.e. all the calories that most people need for an entire day...research shows that people will often eat what's in front of them, even if they're already full...we're also eating more high-calorie foods (especially salty snacks, soft drinks, and pizza), which are much more readily available than lower-calorie choices like salads and whole fruits. Fat isn't necessarily the problem; in fact, research shows that the fat content of our diet has actually gone down since the early 1980s. But many low-fat foods are very high in calories because they contain large amounts of sugar to improve their taste and palatability. In fact, many low-fat foods are actually higher in calories than foods that are not low fat." Same studies will also cite that people can be large due to genetics, but changes in the food industry did contribute to a rise obesity.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

As someone torn between WALL-E and Ratatouille I guess my vote stopped this being a tie. Ratatouille is a brilliantly entertaining film, very hard to fault but in the end the emotional pull of WALL-E was undeniable. As I said on the Coco thread, I rewatched it with my son recently, and found the spaceship section much better than I remembered.

Tried watching Up again this week and my problems with it the first time around felt magnified and I stopped shortly after the house gets to Paradise Falls.
And despite the fact that I'm a big cry baby in films I was again dry-eyed at the famous first 10 minutes. That's not really a criticism: it's brilliant, but to me there's more of a stately beauty to a life passing that quickly.

And now:

30 years of Pixar movies: poll III (2015-2024)