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This past week was an odd one for Pixar. On one hand, the company scored a pretty sizable win in the first weekend of their new film “Hoppers,” which opened to $46 million domestically in the biggest opening for an original animated film in almost a decade. With healthy reviews and good word-of-mouth, the film will likely have decent legs and prove a sizable hit for the company, after a rocky post-COVID run where its non-franchise efforts have either taken time to find their footing in theaters (“Elemental”) or outright bombed (last year’s “Elio”). Overall, things should be looking up for Pixar.
This made the dour tone of the Wall Street Journal profile of the studio’s chief, Pete Docter, which was published this past Friday and got widely shared on social media, feel slightly surreal. With a focus on the studio’s upcoming projects, the profile paints a dispiriting portrait of the studio as one going through an identity crisis, which is causing it to leave behind much of what once made it special.
The central crux behind the piece is how, in an attempt to remain afloat and find a hit, Pixar — under Docter, who the reporter characterizes as a very reluctant leader who only took the job out of necessity — is focusing on “universal” stories as opposed to ones that are personal to the artists behind them. This has been reported before, but the WSJ story goes deeper into how Pandemic-era releases like “Soul,” “Luca,” and “Turning Red,” as well as recent films like “Elemental” and “Elio” are seen as failures internally by a company searching for a franchise to pin its future on.
According to the story, the belief is those films failed to take off because audiences struggled to relate to them: movies like “Turning Red” and “Elemental” came from Asian directors Domee Shi and Peter Sohn, both of whom drew from their childhoods and families while making the movies; “Luca” also drew from director Enrico Casarosa’s childhood in Italy. A central scene in the piece is Docter gathering Pixar staff in late 2023 for a meeting in which he bluntly told the staff to look for more broadly commercial hooks over “autobiographical stories.”
A chief focus is the mess that was the production of “Elio,” which was heavily affected by this new mandate. After test audiences didn’t respond well to the film, the movie was heavily overhauled, and director Adrian Molina departed the project. The retooling heavily excised queer elements from the story, including a scene where the main character daydreams about raising a child with his male crush.
In a quote that generated some controversy, Docter explained that parents don’t want to have conversations with kids about queerness, and that “We’re making a movie, not hundreds of millions of dollars of therapy.” It’s a depressing attitude, one that my co-worker Chris O’Falt wrote about in a piece unpacking the studio’s rocky history with LGBT representation. It’s also, bluntly, insane to hear coming from the man who made “Inside Out.”
The WSJ piece doesn’t really challenge whether or not this prevailing belief that “autobiographical” films are alienating to Pixar’s intended audiences is correct or not. But it’s worth noting that it skims over the fact that many of these movies didn’t get a chance in the first place. “Soul,” “Luca,” and “Turning Red,” were pandemic projects that were dumped on Disney+ without proper theatrical releases.
The films were all relatively well received (“Soul” won two Oscars!), but the circumstances of their releases prevented them from having full breakout moments. The piece also downplays the fact that “Elemental,” while not the biggest hit, ultimately grossed almost 2.5 times its budget and outperformed the 2022 “Toy Story” extension “Lightyear” — one of the studio’s biggest flops, and easily their most craven cash grab to date.
Yes, “Inside Out 2” was a big hit and sequels clearly have a place in keeping the lights on at Pixar, but the logic that impersonal equals profitable doesn’t quite track when you actually look at the citations.
I reviewed, and did not like, “Elio,” and in hindsight, it’s clear that the film was heavily hampered by the changes made by leadership to make it more universally appealing. It’s a film that with a giant hole at the center, lacking the oomph to give its alien space opera as a metaphor for social disconnection some much-needed weight; it tracks to learn the metaphor was once explicitly about queerness. I can’t say for certain whether “Elio” would have been a success had the changes not been made, but I did have a feeling the film would do poorly based on the marketing I saw beforehand, which was cute and utterly generic; completely representative of the movie itself.
The Wall Street Journal piece spends some time discussing upcoming Pixar projects, several of which have not yet been announced before this reporting. A lot of them are unsurprisingly sequels, most bafflingly a “Coco” follow-up, which is difficult to even conceive a plot for. The original films do seem interesting, from “Gatto” (about a feline thief), an Asian-myth inspired movie called “Ono Ghost Market,” and, most intriguingly, a musical from “Turning Red” director Shi.
But the project that got the most attention from the story was the canned “Be Fri,” a film that was intended to be based on the director’s adolescent experience with a friendship breakup. Animators who worked on it leaked some test footage and concept art, and it looked fascinating: a very down-to-earth and, yes, relatable story that took inspiration from sources like magical girl anime to set itself apart from the Pixar model.
What made Pixar special in its early history was its ability to offer audiences ideas that were new or unexpected, from the robots of “Wall-E” to the rat chefs of “Ratatouille.” And their best movies have always been very artist-first; what is “Incredibles” if not a direct reflection of Brad Bird’s love for mid-century science fiction?
I loved “Hoppers,” which similarly succeeds because, even if it isn’t explicitly “autobiographical,” it’s a film that was very clearly made with the clear point of view of its director, “We Bare Bears” creator Daniel Chong. Apparently, even that film wasn’t fully free from oversight, as the WSJ reported that some of its environmental themes were toned down, which might account for some of the film’s minor missteps.
What the best Pixar films prove is that people can relate to anything — from a goldfish to a talking toy — if they’re written as three-dimensional beings. That Pixar leadership now apparently thinks audiences can no longer relate to real human experiences? That train of thought is something that goes totally against the company’s history: it’s profoundly unimaginative.
Why ‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ is Miyazaki’s Most Relatable Movie
This past Tuesday, I attended a preview screening of the IMAX remaster of “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” which premieres in theaters this Friday. Obviously, all of Hayao Miyazaki’s films are special and gorgeous in their own ways, but I confess that “Kiki,” which was first released in June 1989, was never one of my favorites. I much preferred the Miyazaki and Ghibli films with a more fantasy epic scope growing up, such as “Spirited Away,” “Princess Mononoke,” and “Howl’s Moving Castle.” And if I wanted a “cozy” Ghibli movie, “My Neighbor Totoro” was always my preference.
But seeing the film in theaters for the first time, and after a good 10+ years since my last viewing, I had a lot more appreciation for the understated pleasures of the film, which really is one of Miyazaki’s best. In my memory (and thanks to all the merchandising), the film had been flattened into an aesthetic: the cute witch with a bright red ribbon, the chibi cat, the food porn (that bread still looks mouth-watering), and the vaguely defined but gorgeous European landscape. But what makes the film great is that, for all its pleasures as a low-key hangout comedy, it’s a story that brims with an undercurrent of anxiety over growing up and finding passion and meaning in the world.
Despite now being much older than Kiki, I found the 13-year-old witch and her quest to find her place in the town of Koriko more relatable and applicable to my life now than I ever did as a child. The moment that hit me the most was when Kiki, having lost her magic after sinking into a depression, tells a friend that “flying used to be fun until I started doing it for a living.” It made me wonder how much of the film can be read as an allegory for the movie-making process, the struggle artists face in still finding joy in their work after it becomes their living. Kiki ends the film in a good place, with new friends and a more secure place in town, but the film doesn’t present it as the end to her problems, either, more a good stretch in the endless journey people face in growing up and becoming their own person.
I’m also pleased to report that “Kiki’s Delivery Service” looks great in its new remaster from GKIDS. The colors pop all the brighter, and the moments when Kiki flies overhead are extra dazzling; the climactic blimp sequence particularly benefits from the extra scale. Even if you’ve seen the film a hundred times at home, it still offers new and unexpected pleasures on the big screen, so don’t miss it.
English (US) ·