Becoming a Disney Pixar Addict

One thing I discovered not long after joining this site is that there was one genre that I had been seriously neglecting in my journey as a film viewer and that was animated films. Since it was the first animated film to receive a Best Picture nomination, I decided to start with Beauty and the Beast, which I thought was spectacular. After that, I watched The Lion King, Toy Story, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, Wreck it Ralph, Tangled, and the absolutely amazing Frozen. These moves are absolutely magical and honestly, I really don't understand the appeal these films have to children because they are witty, sophisticated, and extremely adult. There are things in these movies that I'm pretty sure children wouldn't understand, but I loved. These movies apply human sensibilities to animals and inanimate objects and are rich with flawed, funny, and believable characters. I've also noticed a lot of them have a linchpin of a terrible tragedy from which the story springs, which I find surprisingly adult. DIsney Pixar stories are also the only place I've seen the villain of the piece be a child, like the nasty kid in Toy Story, or Darla with the terrible teeth in Finding Nemo or Boo in Monsters Inc. And, as anyone who has seen these films can attest, the voice work is almost always flawless...the actors take these characters very seriously. I have gotten totally hooked on these movies and plan to watch at least one a week until I'm caught up. I've become totally addicted to these movies...anybody with me on this?

I'm with you!

Nope. Not at all. I can't stand animation.

__________________

I think Pixar and Disney do a great job bridging the gap and making most of there movies very appealing to adults. These movies are still made for kids though. They are very simple stories with frantic paces and humor that kids can easily grab onto. If you have ever watched one of these movies with a child and then talked about it with them afterwards you wouldn't dispute that. I love many of these films as well and will continue to see them. I don't think we have to pretend they are adult oriented to do that.

__________________
Letterboxd

I've always been a Pixar fan but I've also become a bigger fan of Disney researching the old classics, which I plan to continue to do. Classic Disney HOF anyone?

I would do it. Been a long time for a bunch.

I'd be in. Miss Vicky? Anyone else?

My Pixar fix has also piqued my interest in going back to classic Disney as well...I actually watched The Aristocats a couple of weeks ago...I enjoyed it, but it was nowhere near as entertaining as anything I've seen from the Pixar library.

I'm out.

I don't know you that well, but I would think the classic Disney movies would be more up your alley than the Pixar and more recent Disney stuff since most of them are musicals.

A fact that is precisely why I'm not a fan of most classic Disney.

I'm a fan of Pixar. Disney has been always a hit-or-miss thing to me, and this hasn't changed too much through the decades. From its current age I'd take Wreck-it-Ralph, a wonderful homage to videogames that manages to create a whole world of its own, and has some strange and interesting narrative devices (the main character is a villain, after all). I loved as well the detail put on the animation and how its style is adapted to each character, see for instance the wonderfully quirky animation of the 8-bit Nicelanders.

I love Disney and Pixar. For me, when they get it right, they create absolutely magnificent films. However, I find them quite hit and miss sometimes. Personally, I adore Studio Ghibli so so so so much more, their films are consistently masterful, and are always so striking and impacting, almost always without fail, and I'd even some of their films not only rank amongst the best animated films of all time, but the best films of all time regardless of whether it's animated or not. The only films from Disney and Pixar that I'd rank amongst them would be Beauty and the Beast and Up.

I love animated movies, and not just Disney and Pixar. You already know about most of the classic Disney movies, and the Pixar movies, but some additional animated movies that I would recommend are:

WALL-E (Watch this 1st!)

Despicable Me (1, 2, and the new Minions movie)
Anastasia
The Nightmare Before Christmas
Lilo & Stitch
Ice Age
Madagascar
Over the Hedge
The LEGO Movie

I disagree with Sid being the villain in Toy Story. Sure, he's the antagonist of the story in the sense that he blocks the main characters from achieving their goals, but he's just having fun with his toys in his own (destructive) way. That doesn't make him a bad person, it just makes him different. He thinks that smashing stuff and mixing them together is cool. Kids like that definitely exist, and I knew some growing up. I think that's an adult way of telling that story, it's mature charictarization to show kids that life doesn't have bad guys, just people on different sides of things.

I love Pixar and only like Disney, but when one company has 4 times as many movies it's fair to expect that they're more inconsistent. The one thing I don't love about either is the animation. There was a time when Pixar had the best animators in the country, and Tangled was brilliant, but Dreamworks has taken pretty dominant control of that crown with stuff like the Dragons series and Croods, and Disney seems pretty comfortable resting on their laurels (At least Pixar is giving good but not great animation in a unique way). As someone who has seen all 50 whatever movies Disney has made, Aristocats is probably the worst mid era one they put out. They made some bad ones around WW2 because animators were fighting wars, and they made some bad ones in the 2000s trying to be hip and edgy, but Aristocats was pretty bad even as a kid. I'd suggest you watch all of the 90s ones, but not at the same time (the greatest weakness of that era of Disney is that every movie they made between Little Mermaid and Hercules is structurally the same).

The Croods was horrible. I suppose the animation was decent. It was hard to tell because the story and the "jokes" were so terrible.

__________________
I may go back to hating you. It was more fun.

They make great movies, they rarely put out a bad movie.

I didn't like the Croods, and I thought the jokes were really unfunny, but the animation is beautiful. The shot where they're looking at the stars on top of the cliff about 50 minutes in might be the most gorgeous thing ever put on film. There's an awards show for just animated movies voted on by people in the animation industry (called the Annie's) with 3 categories for visual achievement, and Croods won all of them over Frozen. It's universally accepted by people who animate for a living that Dreamworks is by far the best at it.

I didn't think The Croods was all that bad.

And it's all for nothing, because the movie still sucked.

Well, it's not a genre. It's a medium, just like live action films. You can do anything in animation. Unless by genre you mean "American animated family films".

I was more interested in those movies several years ago. After I watched Miyazaki's Spirited Away, however, my bar for animated movies went higher and higher as the years went by. Though I still enjoy American animated films like How to Train Your Dragon, Rango and Frozen but I wouldn't rate them as high as I would have done in the past.