The story goes that the Disney execs, flush with the excitement of direct-to-video sequels (a hellish new revenue stream they first discovered with 1994’s bland but inoffensive The Return of Jafar, though the Pandora’s box of inanity was really opened with 1997’s Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas), commanded John Lasseter and his Pixar […]

It’s almost hard to remember, but in 1995, Disney Animation Studios was still a pretty well-regarded brand name. They were fresh off the run of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King that had resulted in some of the biggest box office receipts and most glowing critical acclaim of the company’s nearly 70-year […]

The wave has broken and rolled back, finally: Up is the first film by Pixar studios in three years that does not fundamentally redefine what animated cinema is capable of achieving in the hands of modern filmmaking’s greatest collection of geniuses. It is merely an example of what modern filmmaking’s greatest collection of geniuses are […]

I have seen the future of cinema, and it is a bug-eyed, box-shaped robot. That’s not meant to be a pun about how Pixar’s miraculous ninth feature, WALL·E, is set in the year 2800. Though I’ve certainly made worse puns. No, what I mean is that WALL·E the movie and WALL·E, the obscenely cute star […]

What I’m about to say will be a whole lot more meaningful if you know me well: after thinking about it for a few days, I think – think, mind you – that Ratatouille might just be my new favorite Pixar film. That’s a fairly enormous statement to make, but rather than getting into a […]

Reports of Pixar’s demise have been exaggerated, although perhaps not greatly. You’ve probably heard by now that Cars is the least of the seven feature films produced by that animation studio. I’m not going to dispute that. However, given the enormous quality of the six films Pixar made between 1995’s Toy Story and 2004’s The […]