Pixar Problems

Is anyone else increasingly disappointed with the direction that Pixar has been heading recently???

I didn’t really care for Brave when I finally got around to seeing it in the theater last week, but at least it was an original story. It wasn’t a very good original story – at least not of the caliber that I hold the makers of Toy Story and The Incredibles to, but at least it wasn’t a movie in which they ride the coattails of a previous success and simply place a number at the end, assuming that the franchise will continue to crap out cinematic masterpiece just like the original did.

That’s why this article bothers me because apparently the exact thing that John Lasseter said he wouldn’t do when Disney bought Pixar is becoming a flash in the pan, with Toy Story 3 and Cars 2 already in the books and now sequels for both Finding Nemo and Monsters, Inc. to come as well. No sequels is a far cry from four sequels!

I guess the thing is, I’d be ok with them if they could actually do a good one – Pixar actually did a really great job with the Toy Story franchise, and even though I was a super skeptic when I heard about Toy Story 3, the end result was such a nostalgic tear-jerker that I was happy to eat my own shoe by the end of it simply because of just how perfectly they had capped off the series.

But now there are rumors of a TOY STORY 4 somewhere on down the pipeline as well?!?!?!

It’s the difference between artistic integrity versus simply doing something to make a quick buck. I personally can’t bring myself to watch Cinderella 3 or Pinocchio 47 because I think all of those straight-to-DVD movies are a bastardization of the animated classics that so many generations have grown up on, and yet Disney continues pounding them out because most kids under 10 don’t give a shit about the story because more Cinderella is “better,” and parents don’t give a shit because it shuts their kid up for another 90 minutes.

But me, I’m a huge fan of Disney animation and I don’t want to see them churn out garbage simply for the sake of a little extra profit. I’m a Disney shareholder, and I would much rather see this company be about quality instead of quantity, because even the less successful Pixar films like Wall-E and Ratatouille and Brave are worth more in my mind than the merchandise grab that was Cars 2. If you’ve got an amazing story that feels like a sequel, then so be it – Toy Story was the movie that introduced the world to Pixar and millions of people fell in love with Woody and Buzz, but are people really sitting around wondering what Sully and Mike Wazowski were like in college?

Or what it would be like for Nemo if his Dad lost him again in a display of child neglect eriely similar to the Home Alone sequel fiasco of the late 90s?!

Pixar is better than that, and they’ve got a catalog of 10 fantastically unique animated features to show for it. And I just hate to see them tarnish that amazing track record by living in the past instead of going out and finding new stories to tell us…

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