[COLUMN] Can Pixar Be Saved? | by Darren Mooney  (Patreon)

This weekend sees the release of Inside Out 2, the latest film from the Disney subsidiary Pixar. The film is a sequel to a beloved animated classic that has garnered strong reviews and is already performing very well at the box office. However, it’s also a reminder of how far Pixar has come in the past decade-and-a-half, and not necessarily in a good way.

There was a time when Pixar was the gold standard of Hollywood studio filmmaking. For 15 years, between 1995 and 2010, the studio had a run of films that would make any studio envious: Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Wall-E, Up, Toy Story 3. Sure, the company occasionally released a project like Cars to provide merchandising opportunities, but it’s no exaggeration to say that this initial run of computer-animated hits redefined what was possible in Hollywood filmmaking.

However, it’s no longer 2010. In 2024, things look very different. Late last month, it was announced that the company would lay off 175 workers, about 14% of its workforce. This is a very sad state of affairs for a company that built its reputation on valuing its staff, with its luxurious animation campus and the lists of “production babies” in the credits of each of its films. However, this news was not surprising to anybody who had been paying attention to the company’s shifting fortunes.

Shortly after the announcement of the lay-offs, studio head Pete Docter gave an interview to Bloomberg. Although the article didn’t quote Docter directly on the subject, it did say that the studio had been trying to figure out what had gone wrong, apparently settling on “mentoring Pixar's upcoming directors to focus less on autobiographical tales”, specifically citing recent films like Luca, Turning Red and Elemental as examples of what the studio wanted to avoid going forward.

This is, of course, complete nonsense on a number of different levels. We’ll return to the three specific films cited in a moment, but the truth is that Pixar’s success was largely built on autobiographical tales. For example, Brad Bird’s work at the studio – most obviously The Incredibles and Ratatouille – is very obviously informed by his own experiences as a young animator at Disney; they are both stories of gifted individuals being told that they cannot demonstrate their abilities, reflecting Bird’s own frustrations at Disney.

More than most people, Docter should understand this. Docter’s films are similarly autobiographical in nature. Docter has talked about how Monsters, Inc. was “a very personal story” for him, as he tried to balance his work at Pixar with the birth of his first child. Inside Out was inspired by Docter’s daughter entering her teenage years, prompting her father to wonder “what’s happening in her head.” Even the jazz motif in Soul reflects Docter’s personal (and familial) interest in music.

With this understanding – that the most successful Pixar movies have always been autobiographical to a certain extent – there are two very cynical readings of that quote to Bloomberg. The first is that a story drawn from personal experience only becomes too “autobiographical” if the perspective isn’t that of a white American man. Luca came from Italian director Enrico Casarosa. Turning Red was directed by Domee Shi. Elemental was the work of Peter Sohn, the son of Korean immigrants.

The other, marginally less cynical, reading is that this messaging is just to appease the market. It’s a way of laying the blame for Pixar’s commercial woes on the creative team rather than criticizing the company’s leadership or their corporate owners at Disney. In this sense, it is very similar to Bob Iger’s recent comments about how creatives at Disney had lost sight of “what their number one objective needed to be.” Blaming the artists is a useful framing for executives answerable to shareholders.

After all, it’s worth asking why Pixar is in the state that it is. The article specifically cited Luca, Turning Red and Elemental as examples of the kinds of films that the company would avoid making going forward. Without any larger context for that observation, any casual observer would assume from the article that those three movies had been catastrophic box office bombs that had collectively tanked the studio, that Pixar had endured three movies equivalent to Heaven’s Gate.

To understand the context for this, it’s necessary to understand the relationship between Disney and Pixar. The two companies were originally partners, until a dispute over the Toy Story franchise led to Disney just buying Pixar outright. Although Disney insisted that Pixar would retain artistic autonomy, it is notable that the years following the acquisition found the company producing a large number of sequels and prequels: Cars 2, Monsters University, Finding Dory, Cars 3, Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4.

These movies were financially successful. Most of them were fairly decent, and some were even very good. However, the studio lost some of the spark of that incredible early run. Pixar was past its peak. This issue was compounded with allegations against founder John Lasseter and reports of an unhealthy and unwelcoming working environment. In June 2018, Pete Docter (along with Jennifer Lee) took over the day-to-day operation of Pixar.

Under Docter, the studio moved away from sequels and spin-offs. Following the release of Toy Story 4, the studio released four consecutive original films for the first time since that original run: Onward, Soul, Luca and Turning Red. These movies were definitely “post-peak Pixar”, but they were also fun, interesting, ambitious and novel. However, none of them got a chance to compete at the box office. The global pandemic hit shortly after the release of Onward, and the movie was rushed immediately to streaming.

Luca and Turning Red didn’t premiere in cinemas. They were sent directly to Disney+ as a way of boosting the streaming service’s cachet. As such, they never had a chance to compete at the box office. Sure, they were recently re-released in theatres to fill holes in the schedule left by the recent strikes and didn’t perform particularly well, but why would they? Why would families that could watch these movies at home as part of their Disney+ subscription make the effort to go to the cinema to see them?

The streaming gold rush was an illusion. What was obvious to any rational observer at the time is now an undeniable fact. However, the major studios invested heavily in the belief that streaming could be profitable and sustainable. In many cases, these companies sent their best brands to streaming in the hope of enticing customers: Universal put their Ted spin-off on Peacock, Warner Bros. sent Peacemaker to Max, Paramount flooded Paramount+ with Star Trek spin-offs.

Disney sacrificed three of its largest brands at the altar of streaming: Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar. Pixar produced shorts and even television shows for Disney+, a major coup. The idea was that the prestige of these brands would buoy the nascent streaming services. In reality, it seems like the opposite has happened. Studios teach audiences how to consume and how to value media. Disney convinced viewers that these brands were “free” with a monthly subscription.

Marvel Studios only truly began to falter once its output pivoted to streaming. Viewership of the Star Wars streaming shows seems to decline from one instance to the next. It is no wonder that Disney seems eager to move away from this release model, hoping to send Star Wars back to cinemas and vowing to cut the amount of Marvel streaming content. As such, it is worth acknowledging that the news of the lay-offs at Pixar also confirmed the studio would no longer make Disney+ content.

So, if the argument that Luca and Turning Red failed is just a smokescreen for the fact that they were never given an opportunity to compete, what about Elemental? Unlike those other films, Elemental was actually released in theatres. It opened weakly, with many observers declaring it dead on arrival. However, it proved to have legs. Over the course of the summer, Elemental attracted family audiences and morphed from a complete flop to a modest hit.

To any outside observer – including Docter – it seemed fairly clear what was happening. The strategy of sending these movies directly to streaming had devalued the brand, and Elemental had needed time to rebuild trust with the audience. Families had spent years being told that these movies were a “value add” for a Disney+ subscription, and so needed to be convinced that it was worth paying money to see a Pixar movie in a theatre.

It’s worth acknowledging the company’s only actual recent theatrical flop was Lightyear, a Toy Story spin-off that grossed about $220m on a $200m budget.With this in mind, it would seem like Lightyear is the sort of movie that Pixar should avoid making. Not only was it the studio’s only spin-off or sequel in this recent run, but it was also easily the most impersonal of this run of films. If there is a lesson to be learned here, it is to be more autobiographical and less corporate-minded.

Of course, studios rarely learn the right lessons from their failures. Pixar’s upcoming slate includes Toy Story 5 and there have been hints that the studio is working on Cars 4. In that Bloomberg piece, Pixar president Jim Morris suggested that the studio would consider reviving Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. This is a grim but inevitable example of “cultural fracking”, the urge to extract maximum commercial value from a brand with little regard for long term sustainability.

In some ways, the decline of Pixar is the tragedy of modern Hollywood played out in miniature. It’s the story of a company that succeeded due to its creativity and talent, but which was swallowed by a larger conglomerate that sought to exploit the brand as ruthlessly as possibly, with little regard for what actually made that brand appealing in the first place. After a series of terrible business decisions that devalued the company’s work, executives responded by blaming the creatives.

It is possible that Pixar can recover from all of this. After all, the studio could still produce a film like Inside Out even in the midst of all those sequels and prequels between Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4. However, such a recovery would require some measure of self-awareness from the company’s owners and leaders, an understanding that Pixar is more than just an intellectual property farm to be exploited. It has always worked best as a home for artists.