Screw It, Let's Rank All The Pixar Movies
Separating "Elite Pixar" from "Lesser Pixar" and "Shitty Pixar."
Welcome to The #Content Report, a newsletter by Vince Mancini. I’ve been writing about movies, culture, and food since the late aughts. Now I’m delivering it straight to you, with none of the autoplay videos, takeover ads, or chumboxes of the ad-ruined internet. Support my work and help me bring back the cool internet by subscribing, sharing, commenting, and keeping it real.
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When I first started this newsletter, one of the things that most excited me about the subscription model was never having to do a shitty listicle to juice page views. Anyone who looks at the analytics understands the truism that the human brain simply cannot resist articles with numbers next to the paragraphs. But building a trusting, long-term relationship with a readership always seemed more appealing to me than trying to juke numbers to please advertisers. It was nice to be able to say “screw the numbers, they’re all fake anyway!”
Then a weird thing happened to me when I was writing my toddler dad review of Elio: I realized that it’s nearly impossible to write about a Pixar movie without naturally comparing it against the previous ones — most of which I’ve seen ten times, because again, toddler dad. And if my brain is already naturally listicling, I figured, screw it, let’s listicle. What am I afraid of, success???
By the way, about Elio: a few days after I published my review, the Hollywood Reporter dropped an exposé of sorts about its troubled production. The film eventually listed three co-directors — Adrian Molina (Coco), Domee Shi (Turning Red) and Madeline Sharafian (Burrow) — which is generally a sign of turmoil and/or turnover behind the scenes. According to the article, Molina’s original version of Elio had a much more explicitly queer-coded protagonist, and when the higher-ups kept sanding down this vision of the character, Molina eventually left the project. America Ferrara, who had originally voice Elio’s aunt Olga, left with him, to be replaced by Zoe Saldaña.
According to multiple insiders who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter, Elio was initially portrayed as a queer-coded character, reflecting original director Adrian Molina’s identity as an openly gay filmmaker. Other sources say that Molina did not intend the film to be a coming out story, as the character is 11. But either way, this characterization gradually faded away throughout the production process as Elio became more masculine following feedback from leadership. Gone were not only such direct examples of his passion for environmentalism and fashion, but also a scene in Elio’s bedroom with pictures suggesting a male crush. Hints at the trash fashion remain in the released film, with the boy wearing a cape decorated with discarded cutlery and soda can tabs, although without any explanation for the unusual attire. [THR]
As I wrote in my review, I thought the film was decidedly “lesser Pixar,” but mostly solid and a good time. Its major weakness was the title character. The design didn’t look great, and Elio was “outsider”-coded for reasons that were a little convoluted. When I was watching it, it felt like maybe they’d wanted to make him explicitly autistic at some point, but then chickened out and could only go partway there, giving us yet another precocious STEM kid (please stop). At one point, Elio’s aunt pulls out a well-thumbed copy of a book about parenting “the spirited child.”
“Spirited!” Okay, sure!
Turns out he was supposed to be gay. That didn’t come through in the final product, though there was a general sense that the film was holding something back. It can be hard to put your finger on what, exactly, separates “Elite Pixar” from “Lesser Pixar,” but having a title character who feels like some aspect of his character got left on the cutting room floor seems like at least one possible point of distinction.
Meanwhile, the larger point here is that over the course of watching all these movies over and over, I’ve already reflexively sorted them into categories, like elite Pixar and lesser Pixar, sometimes without even really acknowledging it. The internet loves list? Fuck it, let’s list.
The Underrated List (aka Lesser Pixar)
1. Luca (2021)
Telling the story of a fish creature who teaches Italians to be less racist, probably the hardest thing to define is what makes Luca “lesser Pixar.” I remember a slightly lukewarm reception and never hear anyone discuss it in the same breath as the recognized Pixar classics. The character design is arguably more simplistic than a lot of their movies, but all that being said, I liked this one okay when it came out, and it’s only grown on me in the years since. My son adopted it as one of his favorite rewatches and I find myself appreciating it a little more each time. Silencio, Bruno!
It’s not life-changing, but it’s sweet and funny (the way the fish-boy Alberto tries to “blend in” with human Italians by shouting insults and gesticulating always hits), and there are bits of surreal humor that stick in my brain. Like Luca’s Uncle Ugo visiting from the deep sea, and Luca having to punch his heart to make it beat again:
God, that’s such a good bit.
2. Lightyear (2022)
Would you believe that Lightyear is the lowest-rated (per RottenTomatoes) non-Cars Pixar movie? What, were people mad that it didn’t tie in to Toy Story more? It’s time to stop letting obsessive completionists dictate culture (continuity is overrated! fuck you!).
To be fair, the opening crawl definitely felt like a stretch: “In 1995, a boy named Andy got a Buzz Lightyear toy for his birthday. It was from his favorite movie. This is that movie.”
I guess if you interpreted that as face value and went in expecting something that… uh… deepened your understanding of the Buzz Lightyear(?)… you might be disappointed(?).
…But if you interpreted like I did, as a tongue-in-cheek joke about how Lightyear mostly has nothing to do with Toy Story, it was actually pretty good. Lightyear is essentially Pixar’s Interstellar, which is charmingly weird on the face of it but arguably even better in practice. The lantern-jawed old space cowboy travels through time and space only to find himself, and realize that all his uprightness and honor codes were kind of a a figleaf for him being an asshole.
Every kids’ movies tells kids to dream big and shoot for the stars and blah blah blah. Lightyear is the rare one that says look around and appreciate what you’ve got before it’s gone. Plus it looks great and there’s a good bit about how we’ve been doing sandwiches wrong:
3. The Good Dinosaur (2015)
And now our list brings us to the second-worst non-Cars Pixar movie, The Good Dinosaur. The hare-brained pitch for this one is that it’s set in the present-day of an alternate universe in which the giant meteor that wiped out all of the dinosaurs never hit Earth. Weird? Cool? Mostly it’s just a road trip story about an effinate dinosaur child and his loyal feral dog who is a human boy.
I’ll admit that I never saw this one when it came out, and it looked very maudlin and twee, like they were trying to make The Perks of Being a Wallflower or Beasts of the Southern Wild for kids. I ended up watching it over and over since becoming a father, and while it is definitely one of the most maudlin Pixar movies, it’s grown on me every time and always makes my wife cry. I’m on the record as saying animated movies need more professional voice actors and fewer celebrities in the cast, but Jeffrey Wright as a stern-but-loving dinosaur father is about as good as it gets.
Uh, exception that proves the rule, dude.
4. Brave (2012)
Another Pixar movie I didn’t see when it came out or for many years after — probably it just seemed a little on-the-nose that they made a Braveheart for kids and called it “Brave.” Can we stop it with the vague, one-word titles already?
Anyway, this one is about a strong-willed tomboy who gets so mad at her mother for trying to get her to be more ladylike and push her into an arranged marriage that she turns her mom into a bear. The story isn’t especially inspired as far as Pixar goes, but the voice actors (Kelly MacDonald, Emma Thompson, Billy Connolly) are wonderful — that’s more celebrities, fuck! — and the songs are great. You can always do a lot worse than Scottish actors playing Scottish. I would run into traffic for Kelly MacDonald.
5. Onward (2020)
The best lesser-Pixar movies always have the most universal stories, like “Maybe you should be nicer to sea monsters” or “what if your dead dad was pants?”
I gave this one a middling review when it came out, and it’s not as if the problems I noted at the time don’t exist. It’s hard to escape the basic fact that Onward looks and feels cheap compared to their others. There was another Pixar movie released the same year that they clearly put more resources into (more on that in the next section). There’s an obvious sound-alike version of “More Than A Feeling” during a pivotal scene (Disney couldn’t spring for the rights to a Boston song?) and Chris Pratt’s entire character in this feels like a sound-alike version of Jack Black. I still don’t love the ending, where after all that work the kid doesn’t even get to see his dad at the end, though I recognize that it’s certainly a choice. Perhaps a story about the importance of great siblings is somewhat lost on us only-children. You guys get all the good stories.
That said, it has probably grown on me more than any of the others, and the premise, about living in a magical world where everyone has gradually forgotten that magic exists because of capitalism hits harder the more I watch it.