With the release of Pixar’s underwhelming 26th feature, “Lightyear,” there’s enough reason to look back on not just the former glory days of the Disney-backed animated company. Vulture has done just that ranking all 26, many other outlets have been doing the same all weekend.
I’m going to go ahead and reboot my “Best of Pixar” list from a few years back. You can read it here — 24 of their 25 films released are ranked (I haven’t updated it with “Turning Red” yet).
Absolutely any list of Pixar rankings should have the following ten films firmly planted inside the top ten (in chronological order):
Toy Story (1995)
Toy Story 2 (1999)
Finding Nemo (2003)
The Incredibles (2004)
Ratatouille (2007)
WALL-E (2008)
Up! (2009)
Toy Story 3 (2010)
Inside Out (2015)
Coco (2017)
I’m tempted to just stop ranking them. The days of Pixar’s golden age are long gone. However, we all agree that Andrew Stanton’s “WALL-E” is the masterpiece of the Pixar library?
I do find like we’ve hit a standstill with the animation medium. There have been no groundbreakers this decade to the degree of a “Toy Story” or “Spirited Away.”
Ever since “Toy Story” emerged in 1995, a “golden age” of animation occurred both in the US and overseas. There was surely a fierce but amicable rivalry between Pixar and Miyazaki’s Ghibli. Both toon companies kept trying to one-up each other with every other release, it was one of the most exciting things to follow at the movies.
Alas, that is, more or less, gone — consumerism has yet again entered the fray in the animated field. Miyazaki hasn’t released a movie in over 8 years and Pixar has become a shell of its old self.
This isn’t a post-mortem, another great animation movement will resurface again. For the time being, a sort of “bottom line” mentality has invaded US animation, and we’re starting to have to look more and more at foreign releases for any kind of artistry in the field.
A few years ago I took a look back on these last 25 or so years of extraordinary animation. The three crowning jewels for me of this era couldn’t be more different in tone and animation style: Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away,” Andrew Stanton’s “WALL-E,” and Wes Anderson’s “The Fantastic Mr. Fox” are the absolute peaks.