Though "the critics" are an everpresent entity in the film conversation, the only exposure most moviegoers have to actual film criticism beyond just checking a film’s score on Rotten Tomatoes is on the yearly “For Your Consideration” ads that start popping up around bus stops when studios go bowling for Oscar nominations.
Take this ad for Damien Chazelle’s awards frontrunner La La Land, which includes excerpts from reviews by various film critics, including Owen Gleiberman. The ad spotlights this passage from Gleiberman’s review:
“That’s why it feels so right, in ‘La La Land,’ to see a daring filmmaker go whole hog in re-creating a lavish studio-system musical, replete with starry nights and street lamps lighting up the innocence of soft-shoe romance, and two people who were meant for each other literally dancing on air.”
There is a lot we can dig into with this tagline criticism that generally dominates the reception of film and film criticism: all this snippet indicates about Gleiberman’s feelings toward La La Land is that he likes how Chazelle made a proper singing musical. Now Gleiberman does say those exact words in his review for Variety, but the selected passage doesn’t share that in this same review Gleiberman also calls the film “a little discordant,” saying,
And yet, all the world remembers about the movie's critical legacy is that La La Land earned 91% on Rotten Tomatoes (and that little mishap at the Oscars). The world sometimes remembers how La La Land has a “daring filmmaker go whole hog in re-creating a lavish studio-system musical,” but it doesn’t remember “but it is a little bit discordant.” Our stilted view of the critics leaves the masses with a stilted view of what criticism means. Criticism isn’t just thumbs up or thumbs down. Just as our own responses to a film are complicated, the critical discourse surrounding a film is multi-faceted.
Still, some studios have a legacy of producing exclusively “thumbs-up” films. Some studios seem to produce only classics and have from their very beginnings. Yea, some studios carry a reputation so prestigious, so weighty, so divinely sanctioned, that their very name denotes the actualization and deification of the film medium itself.
At a glance, Pixar has one of the most clear-cut reputations of any film studio. Of their currently 22 films, 10 of them have walked away with the little golden statue for Best Animated Film of the Year. The Pixar name behaves less like a studio name than a brand name denoting a full library of treasured feature-films (Pixar no doubt learned this trick from its sponsor, The Walt Disney Company), and this brand dominates the popular discussion around each new entry into the Pixar club. Coco might be good, but is it ... Pixar Good?
And this is where things get interesting to me.
It would surprise many to find out that some prominent critics, like David Erlich (Indie Wire), don’t think so. Erhlich says of Coco, “Once upon a time," he says, "the company’s animated offerings were genuine cultural events, the best of them (‘Ratatouille,’ ‘Finding Nemo’) even meriting comparison to the masterpieces of Studio Ghibli.”
But then . . . Erhlich himself probably wasn’t thinking of David Edelstein’s review of genuine cultural event Finding Nemo for Slate, where he specifically mentioned that the film “won’t open your mind the way a masterpiece like the Japanese Spirited Away (2002) will. It’s a corporate product.”
Calling a masterpiece like Finding Nemo a "corporate product" feels like heresy these days, but when the movie first premiered, it was just business as usual. Even as their early films were each well recieved, no one really anticipated that Pixar movies would become the pillars of western animation. That all mostly happened after the fact. You might be wondering, then, why do critics today expect films like Onward and Coco to be "Pixar Good" when they weren't willing to bestow those titles on films like Toy Story?
Or maybe you're
wondering ... who cares? After all, Coco was just fine after
Erhlich's review. It still walked away with the Oscars, three years on, no one
calls its classic-hood into question in or out of the Pixar realm. What harm
does this actually do to Pixar's library or the film world at large?
 |
| It's a Wonderful Life (1946) |
Which brings us to this new series: “There’s No Such Thing as Pixar Good,” an in-depth study of Pixar’s deceptively complicated history with the critics. When you think of the film that convinced you Pixar would be a leader in animation, and you look at what critics were actually saying about the film before it became a "classic," using the studio's own preeminence as a sharpening tool starts to feel hollow. That is not the realm in which thoughtful criticism thrives, and that is not the realm in which new Pixar classics are recognized.
THE GOLDEN AGE
When Toy Story premiered in ’95, there was no studio reputation to uphold. It was just this fancy new toy in the animation sandbox. These new kids from Emeryville just had a cool new project they put together in their garage that they wanted everyone to check out. Check it out everyone did, and overall everyone loved the film.
Barbara Shulgasser (SF Gate) said “The film will intoxicate children and charm the parents in their company.” Chris Hicks (Deseret News) said ". . . there isn't a funnier, faster-paced movie around.” When the film needed to be contextualized, Toy Story was compared against not past Pixar glories but the animated films of its day: Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, and the like. Critics noted how Toy Story differed not just for its change in medium but also its genre. After half a decade of adventure musicals about royalty and magic spells set in far-off lands, this intimate buddy-comedy taking place mostly in one kid’s bedroom was a breath of fresh air.
“‘Toy Story’ is not as inventive in its plotting or as clever in its wit as [Who Framed Roger Rabbit] or such Disney animated films as ‘Beauty and the Beast’; it's pretty much a buddy movie transplanted to new terrain. Its best pleasures are for the eyes. But what pleasures they are! Watching the film, I felt I was in at the dawn of a new era of movie animation, which draws on the best of cartoons and reality, creating a world somewhere in between, where space not only bends but snaps, crackles and pops.”
Notice a few things up front. Ebert’s review, while unquestionably positive, only praises the film by first establishing a status quo of class films and stressing that Toy Story doesn’t quite meet their marks—the film works, but mostly as its own thing. Setting a ceiling like this gives the critic permission to express his or her admiration for the film without sounding like they’ve fallen for the film’s marketing campaign. And I’m not calling him out for it, this is commonplace among professional critics across most genres of film, but this pattern will define how reviews of Pixar films will behave.
Three years and one film later, Pixar still hadn’t quite cemented itself as a brand. a bug’s life was compared less to Toy Story than it was to Dreamworks’ Antz which had premiered less than two months prior. Still, Russell Smith (Austin Chronicle) favorably likened the film to other Disney films when he said “The characters, however, are classic Disney in style and attitude, creating an intriguing effect of old wine in a new bottle that should be accessible even to those who've been slow to warm to computer animation.”
When Toy Story 2 premiered, by far the most common line was some variation of “the rare sequel that actually improves upon the original.” Toy Story 2 was met with wide acclaim, but it was celebrated mostly in the context of the original ’95 film, not as part of a team of stories united under one banner.
Finding Nemo was roughly the same. Michael Sragow (Baltimore Sun), for example, praised the movie’s originality, but docked some points for its didacticism:
“The moviemakers go through their own 12-step program when it comes to teaching their lead characters some lessons. But for each revelation that's a bit too on-the-snout, there's a rush of originality - like the surging, swift transmission of Marlin's quest saga from species to species, until it acquires the irresistible magnetism of a heroic myth.”
Reservations over how Finding Nemo would sit next to the perennial Toy Story dissipated next year as The Incredibles went up to bat, as seen in Michael Compton’s review for BG Daily News when he says “[The Incredibles] may not rank up there with Toy Story or Finding Nemo as a slam-dunk classic . . .” But never fear, The Incredibles would soon join the greats on its own time.
Cars was a rare exception to this pattern. This movie never really graduated past the “good but not great” phase. Even retrospectives on the film from the reviews of its sequels will contextualize Cars as one of Pixar’s lesser efforts. The film’s premise of talking cars struck many as bizarre not only for its bewildering universe applications (where do baby cars come from?) but also its blatant commercial visions. Brian Lowry sums up “Where ‘Cars’ works best, frankly, might be in oiling the synergistic wheels of the Disney-Pixar marriage — offering the enticing prospect of theme park tie-ins, battery-powered toys and other assorted merchandising.” That it never shook this reputation is due in no small part to its first sequel which we will definitely be talking about later . . .
Pixar’s hiccup didn’t last long though. Pixar followed the merchandise-crazy premise of Cars with its three most adult films Ratatouille, Wall-E, and Up, with Toy Story 3 capping off what has retrospectively been dubbed Pixar’s golden age. These installments took after the best of Pixar’s films, garnering critical acclaim, bounteous box office returns, and the yearly Oscar award for best animated picture.
It was during this period that praising Pixar made you the coolest critic on the block, as seen with critics like Marc Savlov (Austin Chronicle) who said of Wall-E, “By turns sad, hilarious, exciting, and, ultimately, hopeful, this is a film of Great Truths masquerading as child's play.” During this age, Pixar also overtook the record for highest grossing animated film from Disney's own The Lion King with Finding Nemo in 2003 and then again in 2010 with Toy Story 3, which was also the first animated film to break the billion-dollar threshold at the box office. Pixar had replaced The Big Mouse itself as the thing you compared other animated movies to, and this standard of “Pixar good” snuck up on film critics until it was a regular part of the discourse.
The golden reviews? The ones loudly proclaiming “the masters at Pixar have done it again!”? Make no mistake, those do show up. Kirk Honeycutt declared that The Incredibles was Pixar’s best work yet in his review for The Hollywood Reporter, for example. But those bolder reviews were far more rare than Pixar wants you to think, and usually came from freelance writers as opposed to larger publications like The New York Times, the kinds of venues that usually find their way onto FYC ads. Even Honeycutt sneaks in a concession about how the film could have been a wee shorter, lest we imagine that he thought the film was perfect.
The standard format for a Pixar review typically comes with a positive summation that praises the film’s strengths (usually the animation, the storyline, and the cast, in any order) with a few extractable quotes that look good on a FYC ad. The review saves face by smuggling in a concession about how the film has one or two small but important flaws that make it not quite as good as its older siblings, but we’ll still acknowledge that they’re related. It’s good, but we've seen better. No one really cares about this part of the review. It never makes it onto the side of the bus, it's just there for insurance purposes.
So why hold back? Do film critics not like movies? I've only been reviewing films myself for a short time, but long enough that I can begin to appreciate a comforting protective bubble afforded to those who are selective with their praise.
In my review for Scoob! earlier this year, I noted that certain aspects of the film felt contrived and juvenile, but I gave the film the greenlight as a fun flick that complimented the larger Scooby-Doo mythology. I wrote this review, as I do all my reviews, sequestered from the larger film critic conversation to keep my review uncontaminated by peer pressure.
Imagine my embarrassment when I realized most other critics hated the film. The movie limped to a 49% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 5.7 on IMDb. One of my favorite critics, Scott Mendelson of Forbes, outright contradicted my assessment when he said Scoob! “fails to distinguish itself from the deluge of already available Scooby-Doo content.”
This was nightmarish because giving a thumbs-up to a bad film can taint your reputation as a critic. Your readers start thinking “well if this guy likes X film, and X film was certified bad, how much does this guy know?” For a brief spell, I honestly considered burning the evidence and taking my review down.
However, I quickly realized something: If I never dared to add my own perspective, even when that perspective ran counter to the current, I had no business pretending to have anything to say at all. (Also, my following was nowhere near as large as Mendelson's, so I doubted I would even have the opportunity be canceled to begin with ...) So I just made peace with the fact that I responded to the film in a way few else did, and left it at that. (The review in question is still available and can be found here if you feel like assessing my competency as a critic.)
I share this anecdote to illustrate that the pressure to sheathe your thumbs as a precaution is a very real part of film critic culture, particularly if you are an emerging film critic. Being the first to call something a classic is risky, and for whatever reason, the reciprocal isn’t true. Calling a film—even a classic film—bad or even “just okay” doesn’t make you seem incompetent. If anything it makes you ahead of the curve, so it’s just easier to call something “fine, I guess” and move on down the line. That's another thing we need to establish in this discussion: there's seldom, if ever, any consequence for the critic who downvotes a movie that we later decide is "good, actually." There is safety in indifference.
This begs the question, who has it right? The critics, or the fanboys?
Well ... I think there’s an inherent danger to assigning outlandish praises to anything or saying a thing is beyond reproach. This is especially true as it pertains to whole brands, like Pixar, which stand to gain much from such unquestioned loyalty. Very few things in life are actually flawless.
Even so, Pixar does make fantastic films. They’ve consistently shown excellence in the fields of animation and plotting, and all while giving shape and color to emotions and yearnings not easily articulated. I think it's telling that critics are usually quick to drop their own reticence and welcome new entries into the club after a brief trial period. David Edelstein, who you may recall referred to Finding Nemo as "a corporate product" that couldn't meet the heights of Studio Ghibli, fondly recalled the film in his own review of Finding Dory, this time calling the 2003 film "deep" and "wonderfully complete."
My own list of 100 Greatest Cinematic Achievements of All Time would have more than one or two Pixar films on that list. Debating whether or not a thing is perfect is ultimately a distraction from deciding whether or not it is excellent. (Also, the insistence to find fault in something where there isn’t any leads to shallow criticism, as we will discuss in detail in sections upcoming.)
Writing about film is such a complex beast because criticism must be both empirical and sentimental, but also, neither of those things. A good critic has to second-guess their gut reaction to what they're seeing onscreen while also leaning into it. I'm not writing any of this to throw film criticism as an institution under the bus. I obviously have enough admiration for the field to try it out for myself.
But I'm also very mindful of the specific challenges presented by trying to objectively assign worth or merit to something that by design is deeply personal, especially when the specific subject being assessed already carries a certain stigma of being crafted for an undiscerning or young audience. And so, I think that maybe it's worthwhile to occasionally question if sometimes certain scores don't get handed out less because of a film's merit, and more because a critic doesn't want to look like a sucker.
Part of what preserves this glass-like image of Pixar's golden age was their insistence on following the art of the thing rather than just the profit of the thing, rising above the commercial pursuits so common among Pixar's competitors and their sixteen "Ice Age" films. This perception of the studio was rattled by the studio's shift in strategy throughout the 2010's. Part 2 of this series follows that ten-year period we spent in the Twilight Zone where Pixar went from two sequels in fifteen years to seven sequels in ten years. Welcome to . . . The Sequel Years.
To Be Continued . . .
Thanks for teaching this novice. I would not have picked up on the stuff you shared here. Great insights and very valid perspective! Looking forward to reading the second and third installments on this same subject.
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