Pixar

[kubrickshines 15]

Assume the Canon only gets one (and ONLY one) Pixar film. Which gets your vote?

[SiSquires-Kasten 37]

Toy Story v. WALL-E.

[JimmyMecks 49]

Toy Story, Finding Nemo, Up and The Incredibles should all be locks. If only one could get in for some odd reason, then it'd have to be the one that started it all, right?

[HoldenMartinson 221]

Though it's the weakest of the trilogy, the first Toy Story has to be in the discussion. So, that's my pick. If I had to pick another film to go against it, I'd pick Up or The Incredibles, which are the two that I think aged the best.

[MadScientist 12]

The first ten minutes of Up.

[AbeFroman 70]

The first ten minutes of Up are devastating.

 

My wife and I could not believe this was a kids film.

 

Up all the way or Inside Out. Both films transcend animation.

[Ryan L 57]

I love Pixar so much, but I honestly would only offer two of their films for canonization: Toy Story and WALL-E. Toy Story's place in the canon should be obvious, but why WALL-E? I argue that it is one of the most consequential films of the past 10 years.

 

Let's flash back to WALL-E's Oscar season. Remember how Disney was pushing hard for its nomination as Best Picture? It wound up being nominated for 6 categories - tied for the most for an animated feature with ... Beauty and the Beast. Two factors were in its way for a Best Picture nom: there were only 5 slots, and there was an opinion that since there was a Best Animated Feature category that these films were already being recognized (see also the treatment of foreign language films over the years). The non-nomination was a big impetus for the expansion of the field to first 10 nominees than a floating max, which allowed for the nominations of Toy Story 3 and Up. Without that expansion, it would still just be Beauty and the Beast and a number of smaller pictures wouldn't have been nominated and gained exposure.

 

I mean, that's also beside it being one of the best that Pixar has produced, a fantastic usage of silent film techniques in an amazing script that fully fleshed out a machine who only says maybe 3 different words in the movie, and a masterwork in sound by Ben Burtt.

[JimmyMecks 49]

Wall-E never regains the heights of it's opening, silent 30 minutes and it's environmental themes are barely fleshed out, instead opting to instead just call people fat and lazy. Definitely the most overrated Pixar film and one of the more disappointing ones when you take into account how great those opening scenes are.

[phred2321 57]

Ratatouille or Toy Story 3

[kubrickshines 15]

I love Pixar so much, but I honestly would only offer two of their films for canonization: Toy Story and WALL-E. Toy Story's place in the canon should be obvious, but why WALL-E? I argue that it is one of the most consequential films of the past 10 years.

 

Claim.

 

Lot of people going to bat for 'WALL-E', but has anyone watched it recently? Saw it last week and it does not hold up. It's cute, but has some troubling (not to mention insulting) politics and the script isn't as tight as Pixar films usually are. Also, Dark Knight held more sway over the Best Picture rule change than 'WALL-E' does (not that the change mattered, as expanding the nominee pool hasn't affected voting practices or race outcomes).

 

I'm shocked no one has brought up 'Finding Nemo' or 'Monsters, Inc.', the one-two punch that established Pixar as household names and made clear that 3D animation was not just a passing fad.

[Muthsarah 124]

(I had a longer post, a MUCH longer post, but the browser "Back"ed me, so I lost it all. So I'll summarize with the short, short version, a la Spaceballs)

 

WALL-E and Up!: Good films, but both peak near the beginning and run out of steam the longer they go. Each has legitimately great scenes, but neither is a great film.

 

Toy Story: Good at the time, sucks compared to the sequels. Not that influential. All non-Pixar films after 2001 patterned themselves after Shrek. Shrek is the most influential CGI animated film. Even if you don't like it, it's true.

 

For Pixar and The Canon: Either Toy Story sequel (fans seem to love 3 most) or The Incredibles, which is my personal favorite, but which is probably too derivative to make the cut.

 

Some Pixar, somewhere deserves inclusion. It's just not clear which one it should be. Toy Story 1/2/3, Nemo, Incredibles, those are the only movies I'd even consider. And I'd boot Nemo out in the first round if I could. It's good. Not great.

 

Thus, the shortening ends. Mercifully. I still weep over the length of the previous post.

[HoldenMartinson 221]

 

Toy Story: Good at the time, sucks compared to the sequels. Not that influential. All non-Pixar films after 2001 patterned themselves after Shrek. Shrek is the most influential CGI animated film. Even if you don't like it, it's true.

 

Except Shrek doesn't exist without Toy Story, or even Luxo Jr. So, I don't know if that holds up.

[Muthsarah 124]

Except Shrek doesn't exist without Toy Story, or even Luxo Jr. So, I don't know if that holds up.

 

That's.....really impossible to say. Could/would a film like Shrek have come into being without Toy Story? Maybe. Shrek was a reaction to Disney, especially to their 90s work, not a reaction to Pixar. Toy Story just proved that the medium of a feature-length CGI movie could exist as a real thing

 

When I say that every non-Pixar studio copied off of Shrek, I meant that they tended to copy off of it the pop-culture referencing, genre-bending, borderline-tasteless irreverent, Fractured-Fairy-Tale of it all. I really do feel that, not only Dreamworks, but Illumination, Blue Sky, were all thinking Shrek when they were putting their films together.

 

Personally, I feel Shrek (ONLY the first) and all the Toy Storys are wonderful films. I just don't see recent films as true Toy Story clones, y'know? Pixar went with old-school sentimentality combined with modern SFX-led scenes and basic boring-ful plot notes. Shrek went for broad genre satire, mostly shallow, easily recognizable. And, hence, it captured the market. Is the typicaly non-Pixar, non-Dreamworks film no more like Shrek?

[SiSquires-Kasten 37]

Monsters Inc. is super underrated. I think it would be a great episode for debate because I don't think it's a slam-dunk, but for my money it's better than Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Up, Inside Out etc.