That Old Pixar Magic: Reframing our Perception of Computer-Animation’s Beloved Studio
Fig. 1 - Pixar's Luca (Enrico Casarosa, 2021).
Undeniably, Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) changed the global animation industry forever, properly introducing the world to Woody, Buzz, and a studio that would come to define the childhoods of millions of people. Following an unprecedented streak of beloved crowd-pleasing computer-animated films, Pixar Animation Studios made a name for itself with a brand built on a gold standard of quality, a reputation that has since become both a blessing and a curse. Ever since the start of the 2010s, and tied to the lacklustre reception of Cars 2 (John Lasseter, 2011), the common refrain that the latest Pixar release is missing that “old Pixar magic” has become a staple of most new releases from the studio . Film bloggers and audiences alike have used some variation of the phrase as a catch-all encompassing a broad range of sentiments ranging from the good or mediocre to the outright negative. Regardless of whether the sentiment holds merit or not, it has become pervasive enough to create the impression that the company’s newer offerings have been on a steady decline since their apparent golden years in the 2000s. It is important to note that the studio’s most recent theatrical release Inside Out 2 (Kelsey Mann, 2024) has received considerable acclaim, averaging a 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes – and perhaps more importantly for the future of the company – has become a juggernaut at the box-office, becoming the worldwide highest-grossing animated film of all-time. Yet, this achievement has been clouded in recent days (Fig. 2). An IGN report citing ten anonymous employees on the film details an environment with animators “working seven days a week” for a couple months and being subjected to “the largest crunch in the studio’s history,” with an all hands on deck approach to production as the film’s success became “a life or death situation for the studio.”
Fig. 2 - Inside Out 2 (Kelsey Mann, 2024).
The same report claims a hesitance on the part of Pixar to take risks; a stark contrast from a period beginning in 2020 and lasting until the financial failure of Lightyear (Angus MacLane, 2022), in which the company was actively investing in new talent and personal stories. This period saw the release of, in my own opinion, a string of high-quality features, each of which has received their fair share of critical and fan acclaim, including Soul (Pete Docter, 2020), Luca (Enrico Casarosa, 2021) and Turning Red (Domee Shi, 2022) (Fig. 1). It seems however that financial struggles have made Pixar leadership hesitant to deviate from familiar formulas, the antithesis of a studio previously so renowned for its creativity. The idea of the missing “old Pixar magic” has returned again and again as a criticism against Pixar’s modern features. In the light of the studio’s recent successes and controversies, it is worth asking whether the vagueness of that statement can be deciphered, as its use has been applied as an equal parts financial and critical complaint, and not always in good faith. The aim of this article then is to decipher what exactly people mean when they refer to the old “Pixar magic,” the key factors that have contributed to the troubles the company finds itself facing now, and whether or not there is any validity to the statement that the magic has truly gone away.
What Pixar achieved at the height of its cultural domination is nothing short of a magic trick. Over half of its first eleven features won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, a fact even more impressive when you consider the category did not exist at the time of release of its first three films. Beyond even the commercial and critical acclaim of specific films, the studio essentially kickstarted the modern era of digital animation with its computer-animated technology and a style of hyper-reality became the basis for most animated films released since the start of the new millennium (Telotte 2010, 203-222). Such a legacy can paradoxically cast large shadows over the modern image of Pixar as a studio. A glance at the negative reviews for a number of modern Pixar films will immediately reveal headlines asking “where did the magic go?” Magic implies an otherworldly quality, not simply the act of achieving something, but achieving it as if it were effortless. As if that quality flowed from the creators and into the work like a force of nature. Magic is not quantifiable, however, and nothing exemplifies our modern film culture more than the way in which we strive to define what that magic is. Often, Pixar’s magic is spoken about analytically, as if each film were a freshly cleaved cadaver, and the media the coroner tasked with discovering what makes it tick. Pixar even collaborated on an exhibit with an article describing it as a chance to discover “The Science Behind Pixar’s Magic”. As a culture we can be obsessed with discovering why someone or something is so successful, to the extent that we cheer when said person or thing eventually stumbles, even slightly.
At the turn of the decade, Pixar began to focus its efforts primarily on producing long-awaited follow-ups to some of their most beloved films. Between 2010 and 2019, the studio released six sequels including new Cars and Toy Story instalments, and one prequel, Monsters University (Dan Scanlon, 2013). While this was not necessarily a period where Pixar abandoned original films, of the four that were produced, only two, Inside Out (Pete Docter, 2015) and Coco (Lee Unkrich, 2017), have since become warmly embraced ‘classics.’ Though many will defend the company’s Disney fairy tale homage Brave (Brenda Chapman & Mark Andrews, 2012), the company’s increasingly franchise-oriented output raised criticism for lacking the originality of its early era of films, fuelling the claims that Pixar was losing its magic. This has left the company stuck between a rock and a hard place. Its recent original endeavours – while often well-received – have been perceived, rightly or not, as not having a large financial or cultural impact. Its recent sequels, on the other hand, have produced wildly differing results from both crash-and-burn failure like Lightyear to smash-hit success like Inside Out 2, with no clear pattern as to why some have immediately clicked with audiences and others have not. Yet there must be an explanation for these differing results, and discussing the contexts around these individual films may give us the best insight into discovering the troubles Pixar is facing.
It is near impossible to discuss Pixar’s modern era without mentioning streaming, and specifically Disney+. Since its introduction in 2019, the streaming service has become vital to the company and indelibly associated with Disney’s brand image. Audiences have come to expect new productions from not just Pixar, but Marvel Studios, Lucasfilm and even 20th Century Fox (since Disney’s acquisition of the company in the same year) to debut or eventually find their way to the service. As Bob Iger has since admitted, part of the company’s plan to expand Disney+ into a viable competitor to Netflix involved a mandate to each of its studios to produce as much content as possible specifically for the platform. Furthermore, any new theatrical features from each studio would be released a matter of months – as opposed to years – later on the service, another by-product of Disney’s strategy of building up more content to incentivise customers. This strategy, while effective in the short term, clearly contained within it a crucial financial downside for Disney. If audiences could just wait a few months for a new Pixar film to release on streaming, why should they spend $10 (at best) per family member to see it in theatres? Pixar’s CCO Pete Docter has said as much, stating that Disney+ has been “a bit of a mixed blessing” that has “trained audiences” to expect new releases on streaming.
Fig. 3 - Turning Red (Domee Shi, 2022) was the third consecutive Pixar film to debut directly on Disney+.
Then another factor multiplied this problem by an enormous extent: the pandemic. With no viable manner to release its new films in theatres and a need for the larger Disney company to continue earning money amid an economic crisis, Pixar’s early 2020s offerings – Soul, Luca and Turning Red – were sent straight to Disney+ (Fig. 3). At the time the company had experimented with Premier Access, a service within the Disney+ platform that charged an additional fee of $30 to view new releases during the pandemic including Disney’s Raya and the Last Dragon (Don Hall & Carlos López Estrada, 2021) and Marvel Studios’ Black Widow (Cate Shortland, 2021). Yet, for no given reason, all three of Pixar’s pandemic-era films were dropped directly onto Disney+ at no extra charge. Whether intended or not, this had the effect of underselling the quality of these films to audiences and devaluing the importance of the work achieved by the thousands of artists responsible for bringing these pictures to the big screen. Now they were unceremoniously plunged into a sea of content designed to keep customers entertained during the pandemic, with no thought to the long-term consequences to the brand’s image or the livelihood of their creators.
The fallout of the streaming wars and the pandemic have all lead to the contraction of output that has become widespread in a post-pandemic entertainment industry. As I have written about previously, the animation industry is in significant crisis, having become a major casualty of this contraction. Pixar has found itself on top again with the success of Inside Out 2, and yet that old magic criticism has remained in the public consciousness as reviewers like those at Polygon claim now that the Pixar magic has been revived. Meanwhile, Docter has noted that it can be disheartening to have its new releases like Elemental be judged for not living up to a perceived standard of quality: “for some reason, we seem to be critiqued not only based on other movies but on our own stuff. So, people will say, ‘Oh, it’s not as good as my favorite Pixar film’, whatever that is.” For a company whose films are often concerned with our relationship as humans with nostalgia and the excavation of the past, it is ironic perhaps that nostalgia has fed so heavily into sentiments that Pixar has declined.
Fig. 4 - Pixar's upcoming original feature Elio (Adrian Molina, 2025).
Maybe those sentiments are correct; Pixar no longer holds the cultural omnipresence within contemporary family entertainment that it once did, and it is undeniable that the company remains defined by the strength of its early work. At one point Pixar had become focused on a desire to recapture the glory days, much as Mr. Incredible romanticises his past in the Pixar classic The Incredibles (Brad Bird, 2004). Now, the company appears set to repeat the mistakes of its recent past, settling for new instalments of familiar proven hits, with new Toy Story and Incredibles films on the way. Meanwhile, the company cut 14% of its staff in May, denying them a bonus from the film’s success, and leaving the rest of its workforce exhausted and demotivated. Docter himself however has argued that audiences “deserve” original films, they need to be challenged in a world where audiences crave the comfort of the familiar. Pixar may never recapture that “old Pixar magic,” but it never will if it does not continue to remain loyal to the spirit of its creators, rather than tethered to the legacy of its creations. It’s time we the audience, alongside Pixar itself, reframe our understanding of the studio and accept that its films exist within a new context. If we do not, then new original films such as the upcoming Elio (Adrian Molina, 2025) may become a thing of the past (Fig. 4).
**Article published: October 4th 2024**
References
Holliday, Christopher. 2018. The Computer-Animated Film: Industry, Style and Genre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Telotte, J. P. 2010. Animating Space: From Mickey to WALL-E. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Biography
Oliver Vigni is a writer and recently graduated student from King’s College London, where he studied a Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies from 2021 to 2024. He is an avid fan of animation; his areas of interest revolve primarily around computer-animated films with a focus on the increasing formal and aesthetic experimentation within the medium.