Last time in this critical history of Pixar films, we discussed how even in Pixar’s golden age critics were stingier with their stars than retrospective praise would have you remember. Critics said movies like Finding Nemo and The Incredibles were "pretty good," but were hesitant to commit to anything more than that. But time has been very kind to the films of the first fifteen years of Pixar's reign, films whose reputations have reached the legendary proportions we recognize today.
We're only fresh out of this most recent decade of Pixar movies, so it's difficult to ascertain how this next batch will age, but the early signs for this run of Pixar sequels are less promising than they were for their predecessors. While there was still a modicum of courtesy afforded to the most acclaimed animation studio in the West, critics during Pixar's decade of sequels will receive these films with more uncertainty and recall them with less enthusiasm. And who knows, these films might have fared better critically had they not started off on such a commercialized foot . . .
THE SEQUEL YEARS
“Don’t tell the kids, but Santa Claus isn’t real and Pixar is fallible.” Such was Leah Rozen's pronouncement of Pixar's first critical misfire, Cars 2. Other critics agreed with her assessment.
Thomas Caldwell (Cinema Autopsy):
“The storyline is convoluted, the action is unengaging and
the jokes in the film never succeed in provoking much more than the occasional
smirk and roll of the eyes. The results are resoundingly mild. Cars 2 is not
only the weakest Pixar film to date, but it’s the first one that can be sadly
dismissed as not particularly worth seeing.”
“It’s difficult to insert scatological humor into a film
devoid of human bodily functions, but Cars 2 nevertheless manages to smuggle
some in via Mater ‘leaking fluids’ and at one point ending up in a lavatory
truck.”
But even Rozen could not have anticipated how her assessment of Cars 2 would prophesy the critical reception of not just this movie but animation's greatest champion as a whole for the next decade.
Pixar’s next act, Brave, was received favorably by comparison,
but it was still chided for being overly juvenile compared to other Pixar
films. The next summer launched Monsters
University, which saw a similar step forward from its predecessor but also
saw similar overall ambivalence. Richard Corliss said in his review for Time that the prequel was a “minor
film with major charms,” but conceded that Pixar “now seems to be in its
post-masterpiece era.” Dana Stevens (Slate) gave what is probably the kindest assessment of the movie, saying,
“Monsters University doesn’t truck in that kind of rich,
fairy-tale–like symbolic meaning—in essence, it’s a sports movie, a simple,
inspirational story of monster friendship, teamwork, and pluck. I’m not sure I
needed to revisit Mike and Sulley’s world 12 years later (or, looked at from
their point of view, earlier). But once you find yourself whisked over the
threshold, it’s a colorful, funny, charming place to spend an afternoon.”
Meanwhile Erik Kohn (Indie Wire) lamented
“The world-building approach puts the franchise ahead of
the story — it’s like a Saturday morning cartoon spin-off. That shouldn’t come
as a surprise by now. The outliers of Pixar’s legacy have become its new normals:
Nearly everything about ‘Monsters University’ reeks of inoffensively average
commercial entertainment.”
The public could permit a single slip-up. We could forgive Cars 2 because even Pixar must have bad days. But this uninterrupted sequence of mediocrity was just frustrating.
Critics and audiences got their reprieve
with 2015’s Inside Out, not only an original film helmed by Pixar veteran Pete Docter, but one wholly interested in the introspective questions classic Pixar was known for. Note how differently our friend Erik Kohn responded to this film compared to Monsters University:
“Once an ever-reliable source of sneakily mature dramas in
kid-friendly cartoon guise, Pixar has stumbled in recent years, with nothing
since 2010’s ‘Toy Story 3’ that fully epitomizes the studio’s compelling
approach to layered storytelling. Thanks to ‘Up’ director Pete Docter, the
company manages an overdue bounceback with ‘Inside Out,’ the most imaginative
example of world-building since Docter’s own ‘Monsters Inc.’ . . .”
Inside Out premiered
to what may have been the most unanimous praise any Pixar movie has ever known
right out of the gate. There were still some questions of whether it was "Pixar Good." Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian) wrote for example, “It hasn’t anything as
genuinely emotionally devastating as Up, or the subtlety and inspired
subversion of Monsters Inc and the Toy Stories,” while still conceding “it is
certainly a terrifically likeable, ebullient and seductive piece of
entertainment, taken at full throttle.” But that critical ambivalence was significantly dialed down for Inside Out. Critics were just happy that Pixar was back to doing what it was best at.
The film owes some of this adoration to its highly conceptual premise, like candy for film critics. But even more influential, I’d wager, was the public knowledge that this sort of film would be a rarity for Pixar in years to come. With Finding Dory, Cars 3, The Incredibles 2, and Toy Story 4 still on deck, critics were learning to not take original films for granted. (Original features The Good Dinosaur and Coco would also come out during this time frame, but we will cover their reception in the last section.) Roger Moore makes this connection explicit in his review when he says Inside Out “isn’t designed to sell toys, like much recent Pixar product. It isn’t an out-of-ideas sequel.” You just know this guy was bracing himself for what was coming next.
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| One of these things is not like the others |
Faced with a phalanx of franchises, critics loyal to Pixar developed yet
another template for reviewing these sequels, one that helped them reconcile Pixar's legacy of greatness with its newfound commercial gluttony. Let’s look at the introduction of Rob Carnevale’s review for The Incredibles 2 for Indie London as an
example:
“It’s hard to believe that Pixar’s Incredibles is
now 14 years old. But it remains one of the company’s greatest films.
“This belated sequel, while perhaps not as game-changing
or original in this new age of superhero domination, is no less
enjoyable. Indeed, it’s a blast. Returning writer-director Brad Bird has
maintained the energy, the humour and the intelligence to ensure that this is
on a par with Pixar’s Toy Story sequels rather than the more
run-of-the-mill Cars or Monsters University follow-ups.”
Let’s
highlight a few patterns within the reception of Pixar sequels.
First, the throwback to the original film. The original is a classic—the
original has always been a classic. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this
narrative, but this kind of rhetoric has the public forgetting that the voice
of Zeus did not pierce through the heavens to declare that Nemo would join him
on Mt. Olympus when his mortal conquests were accomplished. This will have significant impact on how the films we discuss in the next episode will be received.
Second, the concession that the film isn’t quite as good as the Pixar
brand would have you hope with the accompanying insistence that the film
is still worthwhile. Maybe the movie isn't amazing, but does every Pixar movie have to be amazing? We'll return to that latter half, again, in the
concluding episode of this series.
Third, the bolstering of the second point by comparing this sequel to
other, lesser sequels. Sometimes the sequels are from other companies,
sometimes they’re less successful sequels from Pixar itself, but there’s an insistence that Pixar even panhandles with more artistic integrity than
other, lesser studios.
With this formula, most critics were able to persuade their readers, and
themselves, that this train of sequels wasn’t so bad. Maybe we actually did
want Toy Story 4 all along. These can’t just be cash-grabs. Pixar doesn’t do
cash-grabs. There has to be something different about these sequels.
I have to imagine that some critics sincerely liked these sequels, and maybe still do. Even so, patterns suggest that many critics were willing to give the sequels a pass mostly out of denial. "Maybe Finding Dory isn't as good as Finding Nemo, but hey, it's not their fault that Finding Nemo was so good, right?"
It's especially revealing that the retrospective dialogue for these sequels is flipped from what we saw in the classic era. Out of the gate, Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc. were dubbed honest efforts but became “classics” with little time and distance. We saw the opposite trajectory with Finding Dory and Monsters University. It was almost like critics were developing a sort of coping mechanism, self-soothing themselves with assurances that "well, it could be worse," only to call out these sequels and their laziness next year when assessing today’s leftovers.
For some, the bubble burst right after leaving the theater, and critics
couldn’t ignore how these sequels seemed “driven more by commercial exigencies
than by vital creative impulses.” Todd McCarthy (Hollywood Reporter) wrote in
his review for Finding Dory,
“Its heroine may suffer from short-term memory loss, but
viewers with any memory at all will realize that Finding Dory falls rather
short of its wondrous progenitor . . . its thematic preoccupation with ‘family’
is so narrow, and its sense of narrative invention is so limited compared to
Finding Nemo, that impatience surpasses enjoyment well before the predictable
climax.”
Owen Gleiberman (Variety) similarly said of The
Incredibles 2:
“Each story point hits us with its overly calculated ‘relevance.’
Bob’s awkwardness as a nurturer in the brave new world of dads-as-homemakers;
Helen’s proud post-feminist advancement over her husband; the ominous threat of
whatever comes through the computer screen — it’s all a bit too thought out,
and maybe a tad behind the curve. In 'The Incredibles,' the thriller plot was the vehicle through which the Parrs discovered the meaning of using their powers: of being themselves. In 'Incredibles 2,' they save the day once more, but emotionally they’re just going through the motions.”
More frustrating than the mediocrity of any one of these sequels was that they all came on top of each other. The 2010's saw only four original films embedded between a Finding Nemo sequel, an Incredibles sequel, a Monsters Inc. prequel, two Toy Story sequels, and two Cars sequels. And despite the studio's insistence that this sequel barrage was all an artistic accident, and that the studio just happened to have a whole bunch of good ideas for sequels at the same time, it became harder to defend the studio's creative loafing. In 2014 original Brave director, Brenda Chapman, even casually referred to Pixar as a sequel machine.
The studio naturally deployed damage control during these years. A few weeks following the release of Finding Dory, Pixar started assuring audiences that there were no more sequels in production except those that had been announced (the public would still have to sit through Cars 3, The Incredibles 2, and Toy Story 4 before they made it out of the bog) and the studio spent the intervening time attempting to assuage unease about the company’s sequel addiction. From a 2015 interview with former Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter and President Jim Morris:
John Lasseter: “When any other company has a hit it madly
starts developing a sequel to capitalise on it. We don’t. We only start
developing a sequel when we have an idea that’s good enough.”
Jim Morris: “If you look at it we’re pretty pitiful at
exploiting the possibility of sequels. Finding Dory is coming out 10 years
after Finding Nemo! . . . We’re
not conforming so well to the Hollywood sequel model.”
Ignoring the inherent nationalism within this rhetoric (Dreamworks makes good movies too, John), Pixar hid behind the narrative of “at least we’re not as bad as other studios.”
A week before the release of Cars 3, Christopher Orr offered his
own take on Pixar’s sequel obsession with his article for The Atlantic “How Pixar Lost its Way,” an article that lamented how "The painful verdict is all but indisputable: The golden era of Pixar is over." Like many others, Orr cast Disney in the role of Palpatine
to Pixar’s Anakin Skywalker, and linked the sequel rise to Disney compelling its
young apprentice to keep the properties relevant for theme park rides and other
franchising development.
“Disney has played a central role in the marketing and
merchandising of Pixar films since 1991. But when you become a division of the
largest entertainment conglomerate in the history of the world, commercial
opportunities multiply exponentially. . .”
“Pixar has promised that after the upcoming glut of sequels, the studio will focus on original features. But we’re grown-ups, and though the once inimitable studio has taught us to believe in renewal, it has also trained us in grief and loss. I’m not sure I dare to expect much more of what used to make Pixar Pixar: the idiosyncratic stories, the deep emotional resonance, the subtle themes that don’t easily translate into amusement-park rides.”
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| Luca, due Summer 2021 . . . hopefully |
Again, we’ve only just poked our nose out from this forest of sequels, so it’s difficult to determine how earnest the studio is in their commitment to new stories. Still, between Onward and Pixar’s next two films announced, Soul and Luca, original films appear to be the vision, at least for the time being. Maybe they just haven’t formally announced Inside Out: Bing-Bong’s Revenge.
Again, the dominating narrative around the Pixar sequels generally settles on The Walt Disney Company as the supervillains in this story, the corrupting agent that reduced Pixar into sequel territory, and I have mixed feelings about this assessment. The public's obsession with Disney's franchising, while certainly not without root or merit, has become sort of a catch-all for anything and everything wrong with Hollywood. Who needs to delve into the complexities of the cinematic landscape when Bob Iger's just within reach, right?
Moreover, it's not just that these sequels existed, but that were all below-average, and that is where Pixar should be expected to answer for its own shortcomings. Disney may have commissioned The Incredibles 2, but Pixar was the one who didn't bother to give Helen a proper character arc. Pixar just started to believe its own fanbase telling them they could do no wrong, and there were creative casualties.
Either way, this era taught critics a few things about Pixar. Most
notably, even the illustrious Pixar was susceptible to its own calculated cash harvests. Much in the same way the direct-to-video sequels poisoned the reputation of Walt Disney Animation (a point
I argue extensively in my Treasure Planet essay), Pixar’s sequel obsession left
stains on the brand. In the future we’ll see Pixar referred to as a “machine”
and its films as “products.”
The frustrating thing
is that this skepticism among critics will remain constant even as Pixar’s creative
aspirations improve. The dismay Orr expresses in his piece will more foreshadow how critics respond to Pixar's original endeavors than the sequels that broke our trust with the studio in the first place. We’ll break into that in
this series’ final episode: Modern Pixar.
To Be Concluded ...
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