Interesting; I feel it depends on the movie - they have a large portfolio now so some sort of averaging is inevitable.

I feel e.g. Cars franchise has limited vision. They're "allright", but not spectacular. I'm OK never seeing any of them again, even the first one.

On the other hand, I find Monsters Inc. a unique movie with a unique premise, and I can rewatch it regularly - with or without the kids 0:-). I also don't find it particularly sad. Inside out does indeed have a large dose of melancholy, but again I feel is a unique idea taken quite far without dilution.

(there are absolutely movies that are way more avant garde or quirky or surreal or even "creative" inasmuch as that can be objectively compared - but Pixar has two distinct audiences to cater to and they HAVE to be entertaining and attention-occupying to children; while inserting content that also keeps adults interested and even thoughtful - that's a specific set of constraints that e.g. "Love Death + Robots" does not have)

And if we look at their entire portfolio, the Pixar Shorts again have some absolutely brilliant, touching, "single idea executed to perfection" entries.

Around the time of Wall-E and The Incredibles, I was very much a fan of their work and felt like they could do no wrong. Now I’m not so sure- I did love Coco but they have been absorbed by Disney at this point and are satisfying investors. Also, I find the low key arrogance about having mastered storytelling more than a little obnoxious. You can see a bit of this in Andrew Stanton’s Ted talk.

Before they sold to Disney, they were going to start making more mature films alongside their children’s entertainment. I was very curious about Ray Gunn. I think if Disney wanted it then Pixar could definitely make an incredibly compelling animated movie with mature themes. I mostly find myself disappointed with them these days.

(I find whenever I bring this up online quite a few people come at me with this idea that they are making mature films, and that the line between children’s entertainment and adult is imaginary, as though most kids could sit through something like The Rules of the Game or Tokyo Story.)

But to be clear, I’m still mostly a fan of their work but mostly for their technical mastery.

> "I feel that Pixar’s mastery of storytelling is overrated."

me too. the incredibles was pixar's high point of storytelling imho. of the first six films, i liked the toy stories the least. a bug's life, monsters, inc., finding nemo to the incredibles was like a crescendo of animation, reaching a satisfying zenith of art. cars, which came next, was ok (but unoriginal for storytelling, the characters were mostly great!), but then ratatouille through inside out were all groping for relevance while nakedly harvesting their reputation. of the last 8 movies, only coco has been worth watching so far (i haven't seen the good dinosaur or soul yet). so perhaps a quarter of their 23 films have been good enough to watch again for me; contrast that with the studio ghibli collection, nearly all of which are imminently re-watchable (spirited away is an absolute masterpiece).

Maybe the whole mastery of storytelling is overrated per se. They were talking about how they build on their own experience, an epiphany - which is the essence of what they try to express. When I think of the great books and movies that I love I hardly remember the whole stories, but more a certain idea, scene or mood.

And thus doesn't that mean that the stories are merely vehicles, like mechanical means to transport.

i’d say a good story is the culmination of various intriguing ingredients (characters, motivations, circumstances, etc), which hopefully blend together into a rich and layered whole. that we can’t hold it all in our heads (like only remembering an idea or mood) but yearn to experience it again could be considered indicative of a good story, and creating that yearning indicative of storytelling mastery.

fwiw, ‘Storytelling’ is just one node of the larger ‘Pixar in a Box’ offering from Khan Academy.

Most of the other nodes are more technical in nature. Might be closer to what you were hoping to find.

https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar

Thank you for that. I wasn’t aware they went into their production pipeline on this course. I will definitely be checking it out!

Hmm, no I disagree strongly. I quite like Pixar's stories. In particular I appreciate how differently they come off to adults vs. children in ways that feel meaningful to both. As a kid, I completely missed what were obviously concerns of Mr. Incredible's infidelity. In the emotions one, kids see the obvious narrative that the emotions control the child, whereas adults are likely to see the emotions as a metaphor for feelings and growth rather than zany cartoon accidents.

Up's primary theme was the importance of letting go of the past to focus on the future. Soul was that you don't have a divinely foretold purpose in life other than living your best life. Inside out was about recognizing the importance of negative emotions- and that while joy is good, sadness is not bad. A lot of these are heavier and more mature than you'll find in a randomly chosen piece of fiction intended for adults, but I wouldn't say they're sad so much as thought provoking.

Some of it is really bleak. I mean, a fair bit of soul is a guy realizing he wasted his life, and then died right before doing the thing he thought would give his life meaning. But like... Grappling with that feels like a really meaningful conversation to have.

edit: although I don't feel as strongly for their sequels. To some extent I find they phone some of them in...

Recently I have been watching a bunch of pixar movies that have been blockbusters, but I really haven't seen before. I like their themes and story telling, but something that bothers me for their major pictures is it feels like they all follow a very similar overall narrative:

- some sort of "buddy" movie

- some sort of "we only have x amount of time to solve our crisis we got into"

- the two buddies have some sort of big fight

- the two buddies make up

- stronger than ever, they overcome this crisis right just before the buzzer.

Maybe its because they don't do it in their shorts (or its because they can explore ideas more), but I think their shorts they have are really some of their best story telling.

Tropey story beats do get a bit tiresome, but they're there because they work. Fiction that flaunts defying these tropes tends to be pretty great, but its still rare, and probably doesn't feel very good unless the viewer is already tired of the original.

Buddies fight and, having acknowledged their primary character fault, reconcile, is one that is everywhere in children's fiction. I also find it boring.

Fiction that flaunts the tropes are a good example of “you have to know the rules before you can break them”.

These tropes aren’t new inventions, they go back into thousand year old myths, so it does seem like they really do appeal to the human brain, ie the Campbell monomyth/hero’s journey.

I like Pixar a lot. But maybe it’s just a matter of personal taste.

Letting go is a unifying theme in Up but my problem with the movie isn’t that it’s bad but that you had a table of all the guys at Pixar spitballing scene ideas and then glueing them all together. The result just feels episodic, in a bad way, and commercially manufactured. Up is a really good movie but I don’t want every CG film to have the Pixar preproduction process. (And I still think they are a bit overrated and that the technical side of their creative teams are doing most of the heavy lifting.)

'Up' is one of the best films of all time, followed by an additional hour and twenty minutes of pretty-decent movie.

I like this. The feature film brings me to tears every single I watch it without fail, and then I am always thoroughly entertained back to a pretty good moood by the following movie.

This is how I've felt about Disney and Pixar for a long time. As a kid, I liked them for action, adventure and comedy. But as an adult I like them for the animation, storytelling, and good emotional/moral lessons on top of everything else. As a parent who sees lots of content for kids, it's not easy to find things that legitimately appeal to multiple age groups like that.

I cried after watching Soul. It made me go through my own life when I was a "lost soul" and I somehow recovered. I loved the person who was carrying the sign board and kept a photo of him for me to recollect.

That's the impact that I recognize with Pixar, a movie a like Soul and an Auteur like Pete Doctor.

Storytelling is frequently done as a collaborative process. Spielberg famously likes to take his screenplays through 14 drafts and meticulously drafted storyboards put together by a creative team. Large television shows are written by rooms full of writers, and on reality television shows a big chunk of the writing happens in the editing room, often with a committee in the editing room picking at and debating every little detail before a final cut is produced.

Yeah, it’s worth pointing out that ditching the auteur for storytelling by committee is a choice, and often a commercial one.

You can write a lot of good stories that way, but you’ll never produce, say, Aguirre.

A heavily structural approach is also better suited to teaching in a video series. Much easier to teach craft than vision.

I agree about Aguirre and I’m glad you mention that because you very quickly got to the core issue I have with Pixar. They have “mastered” crowd pleasers which are marketable to any age group. That’s fine- but artistic vision is also so crucial. It’s the reason they look up to Miyazaki in the first place.

You have to remember that as pixar got bigger, more people had a say in the story.

The original pitch might have been absolutely groundbreaking, but for what ever reason one of the producers didn't like a character, and pushed for it to change.

All movies are a collaboration. there is no such thing a single "author" on a movie, its always team work. Sometimes that team is aligned to the same vision, other times not, and a compromise has to be hashed out.

> Their technical chops are probably best in the world.

They were ground breaking, but up until recently they insisted on making their own version of everything. This was fine in the early 90s when there was no other option. But now there are better tools out there. Thats not to say that all their tools suck, far from it.

I think The Incredibles has singular vision. I get what you are talking about though.