Has Pixar Lost Its Way, or Have We?
In a rare moment of transparency from the head of a major studio, Pixar Animation’s chief creative officer Pete Docter spoke to Variety about the less-than-stellar critical response to their latest film, Elemental, following its premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. “That was a confusing half-hour there,” he tells reporter Jazz Tangcay. “The film played, we got a seven-minute standing ovation, and you could feel the love beaming down from the audience to Pete [Sohn, the film’s director]. They really responded to it. Then the embargo lifted and some of the reviews were pretty nasty.”
Docter’s right and I’m glad he said it. In hindsight, it’s borderline shocking how negative the response was and how quickly the narrative steamrolled. Elemental not only premiered to the aforementioned “pretty nasty” reviews at Cannes – The Hollywood Reporter likened the film to something AI-generated – but also a similarly middling response in its wide release. Despite its A CinemaScore (a metric used to survey audience response to major films that is widely considered comprehensive), some outlets formally declared Elemental as one of Pixar’s worst films ever. After its disappointing opening weekend at the box office, widely considered the worst in the company’s history, Pixar fans returned to the longstanding question that has plagued them for the last decade: has their favorite animation studio lost its way?
Ever since Cars 2 opened to the weakest reviews for a Pixar title ever, a record it (rightfully) holds to this day, many longtime fans have asserted that the studio’s newer output has failed to reach the heights of what came before. Pixar has always bounced back from these claims with the occasional all-time great film – Inside Out and Coco prove there are exceptions to every rule – but no hardcore animation lover would deny that the studio’s consistency has been in question, now more so than ever. The company’s straight-to-streaming treatment had many believing Disney was unconsciously training families to expect their films at home, which was followed by Lightyear flopping at the box office and its director and producer both being laid off.
Thankfully, Pixar has, again, bounced back, though in a quieter way than usual. After less than two months in theaters, Elemental’s box office cume crossed $400 million, making it not only one of the year’s most financially successful films but a bonafide profitable product for Disney after a string of disappointments. The same content factories churning out headlines that called the film a prophetic “disaster” were quick to reverse their stance, but staunch fans and even stauncher critics have yet to comment. It appears that audiences have begun to reform a bond with the trusted Pixar brand, but if the company remains resilient, what has actually changed? Has anything changed?
The answer is yes, but it isn’t Pixar’s reputation. Every film in Pixar’s history has received at least an “A-” CinemaScore. Every Pixar film is fresh on the Tomatometer excluding Cars 2, and only four of them are in the yellow on the more widely-approved aggregate Metacritic: the two Cars sequels, Lightyear, and Elemental, the latter two of which being the studio’s most recent films. Before the pandemic, all but one Pixar film, The Good Dinosaur, had grossed far more than double its original production budget – four of them grossed over a billion dollars.
Even the company’s reputation post-pandemic is mostly clean. Soul won an Academy Award. Luca was the most streamed original film the week it came out and went on to become the most-streamed original film of 2021. Turning Red sits at a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes and an 83 on Metacritic (considered “universal” acclaim). Lightyear is the only organic failure of the bunch, which can be chalked up to its poorly communicated take on a spinoff, so hilariously confounding that it has since become a meme.
Turning Red ©2022 Disney/Pixar. All Rights Reserved.
This would usually be enough to silence the naysayers, but it’s clear their problem doesn’t conform to concrete stats or general consensus. This is about perceived originality, creativity, and thematic depth. It’s important to remember that, to a certain set of fans, Pixar’s Golden Age is a string of untouchable classics: well-realized characters with challenging arcs, highly-detailed animation that was at the height of technological innovation, universal themes that children could learn from and that adults could resonate with. It’s a standard to be judged against not just for animation as a medium, but for Pixar as a company. In fact, Docter sensed this in a lot of Elemental’s early criticism. He saw many reviewers unfairly comparing Elemental to their “favorite Pixar film,” which he graciously described as “a tough position to be in and very tricky.”
Very tricky indeed, perhaps because overt nostalgia does not make for effective criticism. Almost no review for Elemental came without the kind of preface Docter is describing, accompanied by a history lesson over how far the mighty Pixar have fallen. No matter how genuine the criticism afterwards, how can we expect a film to be treated fairly when critics begin by bemoaning from atop Pixar’s once tall pedestal? Nostalgia goggles always bring bias with them, but now it’s to the point that every newer Pixar film is at an inherent disadvantage. But what makes these newer films so much more different? To break that down, we need to go deeper into the evolution of Pixar as a company, which has seen a dramatic turn since its change in leadership just five years ago.
During the reign of previous chief creative officer John Lasseter, the majority of Pixar’s most beloved films were inspired by high-concept story pitches. What happens when a child abandons their toy? What if the monster in your closet was afraid of you? What if the fish in my dentist’s fish tank longed to be free in the ocean? These all produced traditionally-plotted adventure movies that, while personal to their creators, were so abstracted by their otherworldly settings and characters that just about anybody could relate to them. I mean, the entire moral of Ratatouille is that anyone can cook. Remy, despite being a rat, is a surrogate for any viewer with hopes, dreams, and setbacks.
That being said, it isn’t much of a coincidence that every film during this era was either centered on themes of male friendship or fatherhood (WALL-E is the one exception, though that film is about as old-fashioned a romance as you can get). The majority of Pixar’s senior creative leadership were fathers to children, men slowly approaching middle age who felt nostalgia for their small town childhoods and the nights spent cutting their teeth together studying at CalArts. Though these were incredibly talented storytellers, their perspectives were a bit homogenous and, eventually, monolithic. Several Pixar films during Lasseter’s reign changed directors when newer voices just couldn’t cut it, including Golden Age films like Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille. However, the most notable was director Brenda Chapman’s ousting from Brave; she was set to be Pixar’s first sole female director, but following creative differences with Lasseter, she was replaced by Mark Andrews. Thankfully, she still received a final directing credit along with Andrews.
Despite this, Brave showed promising signs that Pixar was beginning to expand their rolodex of creative voices and welcome diversity. Soon, new talents would assist in pushing the company forward: Dan Scanlon directed the superb Monsters University, Peter Sohn took over for Bob Peterson (another Lasseter directorial shift…) with The Good Dinosaur, and Adrian Molina would go from story artist to screenwriter to co-director (!!!) on Coco. It’s worth noting that Sohn was Pixar’s first Asian-American director and Molina was Pixar’s first Mexican-American co-director. However, many of these stories are still thoroughly fantastical and broadly appealing.
It was during Onward’s development that Docter took over for Lasseter and began championing more personal, diverse stories at Pixar. Onward is based on a singular experience from director Dan Scanlon about receiving an audio tape of his then long-deceased father at 16 years old. Soul was co-written and co-directed by Kemp Powers, the first black man to be designated in either role, and his experiences would mold Pixar’s first Black protagonist. Luca is director Enrico Cosarosa’s love letter to his childhood spent growing up in Genoa, Italy. Turning Red is unmistakably inspired by Domee Shi’s late ‘90s/early ‘00s adolescence and her experiences being raised by immigrant parents. Compared to Toy Story, these are far more specific, autobiographical stories from filmmakers with vastly different experiences and upbringings and artistic inspirations.
However, it is around this time that a disconnect begins to appear with many Pixar fans. Onward had already been labeled as a “good, not great” addition to the Pixar canon before it fell victim to a pandemic-laden box office crash. When Luca was first released on Disney+, many reviews noted that its story, while charming, was not up to Pixar’s usual standard of galaxy-brained existentialism, especially after Pixar hit their ponderous peak with Soul. However, things really came to a head when Turning Red’s strong cultural influence alienated some of Pixar’s audience. CinemaBlend critic Sean O’Connell’s review of the film, which called the film’s Asian specificity “limiting in its scope,” made the rounds on social media before being pulled offline over strong backlash. He doubled-down in a now deleted tweet, claiming the film is not meant for “universal audiences.” O’Connell has since apologized, but the film’s review bombing and parental backlash proves that O’Connell is not alone in his thoughts. Elemental, another deeply autobiographical film, was criticized for its thinly veiled allegories for interracial relationships and first-generation immigrants.
There’s a clear correlation, in my eyes. As Pixar gets more and more specific in its storytelling, its first generation of fans engage with them less and less. This is only natural, I suppose. The less broadly appealing your stories are, the less people will actually enjoy them, and a story starring toys or fish is simply more accessible than, say, an interracial relationship, or a young girl going through puberty. In a strange way, O’Connell was almost right: Pixar still makes films for everybody, they just no longer make films about everybody. Much like other companies under Disney’s umbrella, Pixar is no longer interested in maintaining its culturally narrow and normative storytelling voice. It wants to be diverse, and specific, and, most importantly, personal.
The first generation of Pixar fans were trained to view stories through a high-concept lens, that it was never just about toys or fish or whatever. It’s why the fanbase has forever been obsessed with outsmarting the projects’ own creators about their deeper meanings: Toy Story is actually about religious doomerism, Monsters, Inc. can be decoded as a “Marxist fable,” Brad Bird and The Incredibles was secretly an argument for Ayn Rand and Objectivism. Pixar movies are never free from the millennial’s power of analytic hindsight, which is likely why that audience has forged such deep connections with those original films. But it also means they’ve been trained to see them as that and just that. Once they’ve decoded a new entry, suddenly it’s not as clever as Pixar’s heyday. What they forget is that every film will become easier and easier to decode the older you get, the more stories you experience, and the more tropes and cliches you internalize. Just because you’ve grown up to see through the facade of the family film, doesn’t mean Pixar should stop constructing it.
In reality, you can glean detailed and unique insight from each of Pixar’s newer films, even with experience in Pixar’s corner. Luca’s aquatic metaphor for intolerance was quickly embraced by the queer community as a coded, though unintentional, coming out narrative. Turning Red is cited by many Asian writers and commentators as a strong narrative deconstructing the generational divides embedded within the second-generation immigrant experience. Even Lightyear, a film that many of us (myself included) will likely shrug off as a misfire for years to come, is still a film about searching for meaning in a world that renders you obsolete – you know, the very arc that defined Buzz Lightyear as a character back in 1995.
Elemental fits neatly into this category as well. In fact, it’s maybe Pixar’s most autobiographical film to date. Sohn has spoken about his difficult relationship with his parents, specifically in the context of his marriage to an American woman. Perhaps this specificity makes the film’s allegory easier to predict, or more “limiting” to those who have never experienced it, but it doesn’t make it any less meaningful or valuable as a story for families to experience together. It’s a powerful, personal story that also features plenty of Pixar staples: gorgeous animation, a breathtaking score, a memorable voice cast, and a beautifully emotional ending. Whether or not you enjoyed Elemental is one thing, but to suggest this movie makes you uncertain about Pixar’s future is simply living in the past. Years from now, children who grew up watching Elemental will likely do the same kind of dissections we’ve done with Toy Story, and they’ll likely shut up about them even less.
All of this reminds me of the ending to Toy Story 3, in which Andy gives away his beloved toys to the younger and more impressionable Bonnie. It’s an ending many consider one of Pixar’s best, yet it appears many of us haven’t learned from it. It’s time for Pixar’s older generation of fans to let go of perceptions that the studio is actively evolving past. We need to stop holding Pixar’s cultural cache to our outrageously nostalgic standards and allow a new generation to discover these powerful stories and make their own impressions. If Elemental’s newfound box office glory is any indication, this new generation is already responding.