Is Pixar Going Through a Renaissance?

If you’ve seen the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty on Disney+, you’ll be familiar with the fact that animation studios tend to have ups and downs. Disney Animation studios proves that. After pioneering the animated feature length film, Walt Disney faced a series of flops. Although many consider his films following this period as being the gold standard in animated film making– films like Pinocchio and Bambi, for example – they were not commercial successes. Walt then moved onto more lucrative enterprises, and left the animation studio he had once loved up to largely its own devices. Years and years later, Walt Disney Animation Studios would go through its “renaissance” period where it would produce such classics as The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. However, that period did not last forever, and Disney Animation eventually slumped again before returning with incredible vigor. Films like Tangled, Big Hero 6 and Frozen are proof enough of this.

Likewise, Pixar also had a golden era. In fact, it dominated the early to mid 2000s, with Bob Iger, former CEO of Disney, himself noting that most of the recent characters beloved by fans were coming out of Pixar studios. Pixar’s reign pretty much lasted up until Disney finally bought the studio in 2007. After that, much of Pixar’s considerable talent was redirected towards making a succession of sequels that while fun, did not really match up to the classics they were derived from.

More than a decade has passed now since Disney purchased Pixar, and although many see Pixar’s heyday as long passed, in a strange way, now freed from the yoke of financial burden and promise of making cumbersome sequels to its classics, something new and very exciting seems to be happening.

Now Part of Disney, Pixar Struggles to Differentiate Itself – and That Could be a Good Thing

The hallmark, 3-D computer generated animation that Pixar pioneered is now what backs the tremendous films coming out of Disney Animation Studios. For this reason, it’s a bit harder to differentiate what makes a Pixar Movie a Pixar Movie. Is it the themes of parenthood? Well…Disney Animation Studios also deals with these themes.

In a way, however, being freed from some of these expectations, and indeed vying with other studios now doing 3D animation has allowed the animation behemoth to expand and explore more original ideas and stories. These stories transcend anything you would expect to come out of Hollywood, reminiscent even of some of the more director centric stories that come out of Japanese animation studios, like the works of Miyazaki.

Whereas some of the earlier “classics” from Pixar are weighed down by their need to be about topics easily grasped by children and the adults that bring them, Pixar has grown to deal with themes of adolescence, and even very adult themes, as seen in quality films like Soul. Ironically, during the heyday of Pixar when the studio was still trying to make it on its own and establish itself as a brand, taking risks on less marketable but more original stories would have been impossible.

Now that Pixar Has Paid its Sequel Dues, It’s Free to Be Creative Again

Given the string of massively high grossing sequels Pixar, a company once devoted to doing less sequels than originals, has done shortly after being purchased by Disney, it seems quite likely that Disney purchased the animation studio in large part due to the opportunity of relaunching some of the studio’s most successful films afforded. However, most of those sequels did not live up to the originals.

Monster’s University, for example, drops all of the elements that made Monster’s Inc work and focused instead almost entirely on Mike Wazowski. Cars 2 is legendary for how badly it was panned by critics. It took a similar route, foregoing the charismatic Lighting Macqueen, voiced by Owen Wilson, in favor of a confusingly annoying Mater voiced by…Larry the Cable Guy? Okay…

Original Storytelling Dominates Pixar Films Moving Onward

Undoubtedly, storytelling has been a core component of Pixar’s classics. But it seems that the largely unmoving, sequel driven days of its middle years seem to be over. Instead, what we are getting are perhaps not commercially successful, easily merchandise-able blockbusters – but we are getting more intimate, quality, character driven stories.

Three movies that stand out in this vein – Onward, Soul, and Luca.

It seems evident when watching Soul that Pixar studios is nothing like what it used to be. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. As an adult, nothing in Pixar’s roster, even from its glory days, that hits home as hard as Soul does. Sure, it isn’t as much of an easy classic for younger audiences to digest, but that’s fine. They have enough shows to watch already. They’ll appreciate a story like Soul that explores what life is all about.

From an artistic standpoint, Soul is something akin to the fabled Tree of Life from auteur Terrence Malick. And while certainly films like this will never compete toe-to-toe with horrendously marketable films like Toy Story, intimate stories about the meaning of life done artfully like this one should always be welcome to hardened entertainment fans.

Onward, meanwhile, explores Pixar’s tried and true theme of parenthood with a strange twist – that its not always your actual parents that raise you.

Lastly, Luca seems to be more about adolescent longings and what happens in a world without parents all together.

All of these stories are intimate, original takes on new stories, not boring, tried revenue only driven creations that are as refreshing as they are entertaining.

Alright. So Pixar had to pay some dues to Disney after it was bought. And although those movies were basically legal license for Disney to print money, they did nothing in terms of telling great stories.

It seems that, however, now freed from the yoke of generating profits for themselves and freed from the obligation put on them by their overlord Disney to generate sequels, Pixar is once again free to do what they do best – creating thoughtful, compelling, artful stories for the next generation of animation lovers.