Damn, I forgot Wall-E!

Definitely one of their best as well, such a wholesome and heartfelt film, bursting with charm and cleverness.

The incredibles. I have watched toy story but probably like 20 years ago so I cant remember

Wall-E hands down. Only one that comes somewhat close for me, and not even that close anyway, is The Incredibles.

I do have to rewatch some of their classics, though. Haven't seen Finding Nemo or Up since I was a kid. Haven't seen some of their more recent work either, but the last movie from them I genuinely enjoyed was Coco, and even that I thought was a little overrated.

Gotta be Toy Story.

You should see young people's faces when you tell them that Disney did not make, nor have anything to do, with Toy Story. lol

To be honest, throw the 1990s in there as well with their first 3 films.

I see Pixar Animation Studios having 3 eras so far for their feature films.

1. The Golden Age (1995-2010)

Toy Story through Toy Story 3

2. Sequel Era (2011-2019)

Cars 2 through Toy Story 4

3. Disney Plus Era (2020-present)

Onward to the present

Top 3: Wall-E, Inside Out, Incredibles.

Ratatouille and WALL-E

3. Incredibles
2. Inside Out
1. Coco

Remember me...

1. Up, such a great story and heartfelt movie
2. Ratatouille, great original movie
3. Coco, pure fun from beginning to end

I have a definite top three favorites when it comes to Pixar movies:

1. Inside Out
2. Wall-E
3. Soul

If we had to pick out a single most common theme featured in Pixar movies, it would surely be that of adaptation. The struggle to accept change lies at the center of all Toy Story movies (and the adjacent Lightyear picture as well) and a number of others. Both the Inside Out pictures in particular though, and the first of them especially, I think get the most directly to the heart of those struggles (if you will) by focusing directly on the protagonist's emotional life. Making emotions into actual characters that resemble aspects of the people in her life who display them the most, and doing so in a way that rings true and is also funny, soulful, and thought-provoking had to be no small challenge! But I cannot emphasize enough that, while a bit simplistic in its consigning one's emotional life to five basic feelings, the original movie really does have a core that rings true. Anyone who's ever moved from one place to another before, especially against their will, can testify to how much one loses in the process. I can testify from my own lived experience that when personal losses pile up too high, you can no longer see over the resultant mountain and all your memories -- even the fondest -- become sad ones because they're all connected to a sense of loss now. Losses, betrayals, these things make trust and reaching out to others for help more difficult. But what can happen to those feelings when you do choose to trust and find the support you need? ...Inside Out makes me cry, and laugh, and, perhaps more amazingly, smile every single time I see it. The scene where Sadness comforts Bing Bong and the film's concluding moments with the family in particular never fail to fill me with the richest and most resonant assortment of the feels. You don't have to be a tween to prize the film's message.

Wall-E, on the other hand, represents adaptation of a different kind. The importance of accepting change can feel like a bit of a convenient and self-serving message for a tech company (if one hasn't noticed, the most powerful variety of business corporation in today's world) to try and sell you on, given what they natural represent to our world, so honestly sometimes there's a part of me that views it, when presented by such an institution, through a lens of cynicism. To those ends, I found it a bit surprising and very refreshing that Pixar would make a picture centering on potential harms of technological progress and the merits of limiting our reliance on it. More compelling still that those potential harms are not framed in some Marxian or other overly familiar way (a tale simply of climate change or what have you), but rather as distinct critiques of consumerism itself that feel at many points all too believable. All the more amazing how evocative the emotional lives of two machines discovering the nature of feelings seem when their intertwined stories are told within that framework, sometimes with words and often more powerfully without, capitalizing on the greatest strength of motion picture medium.

Soul was quite frankly the perfect film for the living nightmare that was 2020 when we were all surrounded by a blanket of death and in many cases loss. It was at heart a serious movie about the subjects of mortality and fate and the question of purpose in life. The big stuff. If I'm being honest, the older I get, the more I find myself viewing life and the world through a deterministic lens. All life comes from the ocean and it often feels, as in an ocean, that the deepest parts of life are also the darkest. Soul is the kind of thoughtful and sensitive movie that validates concerns like that while finding a way to motivate you to lead a fuller life through an exploration of the origins of our personalities. I never fail to find it honest, moving, and motivating to watch.

An extended list of my Pixar favorites might look something like this:

4. Coco
5. Turning Red
6-9. The Toy Story movies (I refuse to order them;  they're all a delight).
10. Inside Out 2
11. Finding Dory
12. The Good Dinosaur
13. Monsters University
14. Up

Others beyond these get more subjective in placement for me. I suppose The Good Dinosaur would be the most controversial pick for a good Pixar movie. Well...I was a dinosaur-loving kid who grew up in rural Texas and that's all I'm going to say about my arguably misplaced affection for that particular movie and what some contend is its unseemly brutality for a kid's flick. As for Coco, those who know me very well know that music has long been a very important part of my life. Its healing powers I've found to be great. It helps energize me when I need motivation, helps calm me when I need calming, and gets rid of the clutter in my mind (and there's often a lot), enabling to me to regain focus. Coco ranks among the most beautiful stories about the power of music to heal and restore that I've ever seen before. And Turning Red...is to me just the all-around funniest of all the Pixar movies with its very distinctive manic energy, and also an honest and necessary tale about a certain aspect of the coming-of-age experience we've all had to contend with in our particular ways.

Perhaps the most controversial take I've got concerning Pixar films is my certain distaste for the more elitist entries like The Incredibles and Ratatouille that were clearly influenced by Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy that's always so fashionable over in Silicon Valley. They're each well-told stories in their own ways for sure, but they just feel condescending to me nonetheless. It also seems to surprise some that I'm not a superfan of Brave despite being a fairly staunch feminist sort who loved the Barbie movie, loved Wicked, loved Maleficent, loved Lady Bird, loved Mad Max: Fury Road, and loved some of the more somber variations on film feministing too (Wanda, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, etc.), to say nothing of my fair share of lesbian romances. It's hard to put my finger on what it is dislike about Brave, as I was clearly supposed to be part of that picture's target market and do indeed often go in for overt female empowerment stories and mother-daughter reconciliation tales. There's just something about much of the delivery, finding good concentration in its lazy, generic choice of title, that feels profoundly half-hearted and unmoving to me. Conversely, I find that Cars (the original anyway), or at least its core message about remembering those left behind by progress, holds up surprisingly well today, especially after a couple of Trump elections, even if it could stand a bit less reliance on certain cliches.

I think that covers the basis well enough.