The studio literally reinvented the genre with Toy Story, the first computer-generated 3-D-animated feature film. This thriving expansion of high-quality animated storytelling would not have been possible without Pixar. Pixar perfected a kind of crossover cinema that appealed equally to kids and adults. Pixar’s Finding Dory was shut out altogether. One need only look at this year’s Oscars: Two Disney movies, Zootopia and Moana, were nominated for Best Animated Feature, and Zootopia won. And, in a stunning reversal, Walt Disney Animation Studios-adrift at the time of its 2006 acquisition of the then-untouchable Pixar-has rebounded with such successes as Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen, and Big Hero 6. The stop-motion magicians at Laika have supplied such gems as Coraline and Kubo and the Two Strings. Since then, other animation studios have made consistently better films. It was a 15-year run of unmatched commercial and creative excellence, beginning with Toy Story in 1995 and culminating with the extraordinary trifecta of wall-e in 2008, Up in 2009, and Toy Story 3 (yes, a sequel, but a great one) in 2010. The painful verdict is all but indisputable: The golden era of Pixar is over. And if Cars 3 isn’t disheartening enough, two of the three Pixar films in line after it are also sequels: The Incredibles 2 and (say it isn’t so!) Toy Story 4. Cars 2, which followed five years later, was panned as even worse. You may recall that the original Cars, released back in 2006, was widely judged to be the studio’s worst film to date. Yet here comes Cars 3, rolling into a theater near you this month. But it is surely relevant that these observations were made by Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar, in his best-selling 2014 business-leadership book. More pointedly, he argued that if Pixar were only to make sequels, it would “wither and die.” Now, all kinds of industry experts say all kinds of things. A well-regarded Hollywood insider recently suggested that sequels can represent “a sort of creative bankruptcy.” He was discussing Pixar, the legendary animation studio, and its avowed distaste for cheap spin-offs.
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