29 Pixar Movies Ranked (Elio, Toy Story 3)
The latest: Toy Story 3 celebrates its 15th anniversary! And Elio, currently #21 on this Pixar list, is out!
When Disney distributed Pixar’s Toy Story as an autumn alternative to traditional 2D animated features in 1995, could the studio have predicted that it would instead set the gold standard and template for theatrical cartoons for decades to come? After all, the slide from peak Disney Renaissance had only just begun (their releases that year were Pocahontas and A Goofy Movie) and Pixar was up to that point a studio that only made commercials and shorts; a feature-length 3D animated movie was a miracle in of itself, and they were not equipped to churn out quality yearly releases like Walt Disney Animation.
Pixar’s follow-up took three years to hit theaters, and though A Bug’s Life is looked back on in the canon as a minor Pixar effort, everyone in 1998 rushed out to see it, and it again ended up grossing more than Disney’s then recent works like Hercules and Mulan. 1999’s Toy Story 2 (which is celebrating its 25th this month) was a cultural event, and established Pixar as the one to take animation to the highest heights in the new century. What followed was a then-unprecedented run of Certified Fresh hits and box office smashes, from Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo to The Incredibles, WALL-E, and Up.
2011’s Cars 2 broke the streak with Pixar’s first Rotten film, and the studio has since spent the past decade oscillating between returning to the sequel well (Monsters University, Finding Dory) and pulling up original property (Coco, Inside Out), closing out with Toy Story 4. For 2020, Onward was pulled from theaters after two due to the pandemic, while Soul went straight to Disney+ in hopes of salvaging a year of chaos. Luca and Turning Red continue to expand the breadth and color of their stories.
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