But if Pixar’s movies had been merely successful, they wouldn’t be noteworthy. There are lots of film studios that have released extraordinarily successful pictures that no one remembers—or which no one wants to remember.
What sets Pixar apart is the quality of its movies: They’ve all been good.
Some were merely very good, like A Bug’s Life (1998) and Cars (2006). Several have been excellent, like Monsters, Inc. (2001), the three Toy Storys (1995, 1999, 2010), Finding Nemo (2003), Ratatouille (2007)
A few have transcended the medium of film altogether, and become art. I would argue (very good-naturedly) that The Incredibles (2004), Wall-E (2008), and Up (2009) all fit into the category of art. (As an aside—again, very subjectively—I would say that the most beautiful of all the Pixar movies was probably The Incredibles; it was certainly the best lit, with a painterly eye for composition and color that would have pleased Néstor Almendros or Gordon Willis.)
But even the Pixar movies that have been (relatively) so-so have had their transcendental moments. For instance, in Toy Story 2, there is the “When Somebody Loved Me” sequence, where Jesse the cowgirl doll tells the story of how her owner, Emily, outgrew her:
It is a remarkable sequence—remarkable in its simplicity, remarkable in its perfect execution, remarkable in its overwhelming power. I have watched this sequence many times, with small children as well as hardened adults: I have never seen anyone not be moved by this sequence, which captures something indescribable, yet universally human. Even small children who do not speak or understand English know exactly what the sequence is about—and are moved in exactly the same way.
There are several other such transcendental moments, in Pixar’s films: The opening ten minutes of Up, describing Carl and Ellie’s meeting, their 30-year marriage, and Ellie’s eventual death, in one effortless, heartbreaking miniature; the final few seconds of Monsters, Inc. when Sully goes to visit Boo; the routine of Wall-E’s average day on earth, now that all the people have left the planet.
These are just three sequences that I recall off the top of my head—there are literally dozens of other such moments, in these children’s films.
Because they are children’s films: Children are Pixar’s main audience. Yet adults love Pixar’s films just as much as children do, because—unlike other animated films—Pixar’s movies are never patronizing, never condescending, never too-cool-for-school.
This is important to recognize, and ought to be highlighted:
Unlike, say, DreamWorks Animation studio’s films, Pixar never tries to be “edgy”. It never makes movies that are putatively for children, yet filled with constant winks at the adults over the heads of the kids.
In DreamWorks’ Shrek franchise (I use that salesman’s word deliberately), there is a constant stream of references to other movies and cultural touchstones—many of them R-rated, and therefore unknown by the children the Shrek movies are aimed at—that are placed there for no other reason than to pander to the adults in the audience.
I personally can’t stand DreamWorks Animation films precisely for that constant wink-wink,-aren’t-we-clever references in their movies. That constant winking—that constant breaking of the suspension of disbelief—gives DWA films the feel of tawdry, brassy shiny trinkets that are being hawked by a shifty salesman.
Pixar doesn’t have that because, at bottom—and unlike the filmmakers at DreamWorks Animation—the filmmakers at Pixar believe in the story they’re telling. They’re not trying to sell anything—they’re trying to tell a good story, an honest story, and they never for a second think that the story they are telling is beneath them. And unlike DreamWorks, Pixar has the self-confidence to know that a good story appeals to every age, every demographic, and so there is no need to pander, or wink, or patronize.
That’s why Pixar’s movies are consistently successful at the box-office, whereas DreamWorks’ films are hit-or-miss. Snide twenty-somethings with no children are just as enthralled by Pixar’s movies as small children with their parents, or the middle-aged, or the elderly.
However—maybe precisely because Pixar films are so generous in spirit—few people seem to have noticed the incredible social satire going on, in Pixar’s movies.
What these pictures are offering is not “gentle satire”—Pixar movies offer the harshest social commentary of contemporary American society of anyone working today, in any medium that I can think of. It’s satire laced with acid, and it is incredibly powerful precisely because it is packed into something so seemingly gentle and sweet: Children’s movies.
At first, you don’t notice the acid-laced satire in Pixar’s movies, because all of them are swathed in such an immersive story-telling. The satire would be far more noticeable in a chintzy, “ironic” DreamWorks Animation production, precisely because of DreamWorks’ films’ constant wink-wink at the adult audience over the heads of the kids.
Pixar, on the other hand, never distracts its audience—child or adult—with anything extraneous to the story. That relentless engagement paradoxically renders the audience slightly myopic: You don’t really notice the satire Pixar is getting away with unless you take a step back.
I first started to notice this—both the acid-satire, and the slight myopia you get in a Pixar film that makes you blind to the satire—in 2005 with The Incredibles.
Thus the film very accurately captures the mistaken notion—so prevalent in the United States—that to be against elitism is the same as the denigration of excellence. It is a contemporary American attitude that not only foments the mediocre and the second-rate, but in fact celebrates the mediocre and the second rate.
For instance, early in the film, Dash, one of the Incredible’s children, complains that everyone at school is getting a medal. This promiscuous award-giving is quite common, in American schools. When Dash complains about this indiscriminate “celebration” of everyone’s “achievement”, he’s told that it’s because everyone is special—to which he replies, “If everyone is special, then no one is.”
That’s pretty much the essence of The Incredibles: The movie is really a defense of elitism, pointing out how the celebration of everyone’s achievements, equally, denigrates and denies true excellence, and that the denial of true excellence is the denial of the self in favor of the collective.
At the end of the picture, after the Incredibles family has had to use all their super-powers to stop the evil villain Syndrome (who has no innate superpowers, but who uses technology to essentially cheat his way to excellence and fool people into believing that he is super), the family of super-heroes goes back to living their conformist suburban existence—only now, their conformism is a self-conscious disguise, rather than a denial of their true selves, as it was at the start of the story.
The Syndrome character puts paid to any notion that this social satire is accidental, or unconscious: At one point near the end of the movie, Syndrome makes it clear that he will mass produce his super-power gadgets, so that everyone can have super-powers: “When everyone is super, no one will be.”
Truer words never spoken.
The main character of Cars, Lightning McQueen, an up-and-coming race car, is hell-bent on getting a sponsorship deal with a big company, presumably for more money. His pursuit is derailed when he lands in a small forgotten town, Radiator Springs, and is taught a lesson in humility and small-town, neighborly values.
The two key figures of Radiator Springs—and the two key figures in Lightning McQueen’s growth—are Doc Hudson, a former racing champion, and Sally Carrera, a former big-city lawyer. The one becomes Lightning’s mentor, the other his love interest.
What’s interesting is, both of these characters deliberately turned their backs on big-city corporatism—precisely what Lightning McQueen was chasing—and retreated to Radiator Springs in order to lead a simpler, more honest life. Both characters took a good long hard look at American corporate achievement—and rejected it, even though it was within their grasp.
Under the influence of these two characters, Lightning McQueen learns the value of living in Radiator Springs, and comes to recognize the empty values of the corporate, money-grubbing world he was pursuing, and which his nemesis, Chick Hicks, cannot get enough of, and is still blindly pursuing.
At the end of the movie, Lightning McQueen goes back to the big race, supported by his new-found small-town friends rather than corporate sponsors, and through an act of self-sacrifice done to save another car, deliberately loses the race to Chick Hicks (whose victory thus becomes hollow and meaningless, though he is too enthralled in his empty ambitions to realize this). Along the way, Lightning McQueen gains self-respect, and a sense of what is valuable, and what is not.
But Cars squandered its message. Much like Jerry Maguire, which in the end tried to eat its cake and have it too, Cars was clearly aiming for a denial of corporate capitalism and the empty perks of that life, in favor of the less ambitious but more fulfilling life of Radiator Springs—but in the end lost its nerve.
The film ends with Lightning McQueen both embracing corporate capitalism and small-town, individualistic values. Cars didn’t quite have the nerve to carry its message to the end, which would have been for Lightning McQueen to have followed the lessons of Doc Hudson and Sally Carrera, and completely rejected the glitzy but empty corporate world and its accoutrements, in favor of a smaller, more honest life in Radiator Springs.
Wall-E has no such failure of nerve: The most powerful Pixar critique of contemporary American culture was embodied in the 2008 hit Wall-E. Without question.
But along the way, Wall-E scores some rather stunning points—satire laced with acid that would make Oscar Wilde blanche.
First off, the reason the earth is uninhabitable is because of all the human trash that has suffocated the planet, trash that is the byproduct of a rampant consumerism brought about by a huge mega corporation called Buy N Large—an obvious dig at Wal-Mart, SuperValu, and all the other mega-retailers.
In the debris Wall-E is slowly compacting, we see clues to the sort of life the humans led: Materialistic, acquisitive, superficial, cheap and tawdry. As the name of the store implies, everything is super-sized.
Once EVE returns to the humans, Wall-E of course hitches a ride on her return spaceship and follows her back to the mothership—this is where all the human beings are living in ease and corporate comfort. The name of the mothership is actually the name of the corporation sponsoring the voyage: The Axiom.
On the Axiom, Wall-E discovers what has become of all the human beings that used to live on the earth:
They have become morbidly fat whales, covered in a layer of blubber, moving along in personal transportation devices eerily reminiscent of those electric carts so prevalent in contemporary American shopping malls, the carts provided by the shopping malls for free for people too fat and out of shape to walk to the stores in the mall.
Aside from being sickeningly fat, the humans on the Axion are perpetually glued to video monitors inches from their noses, obsessed with the endless stream of mindless audio-visual stimulation—while ignoring the reality going on around them.
They are all pleasant—not a single one of the sickeningly fat humans is mean, the way most villains are in movies. Worse than being mean, the villains in Wall-E are passive-aggresively bad: They use pleasantry to disguise their true natures, the idea of comfort and safety as the disguise to carry out their awful deeds.
Or actually, no, that’s not it: It’s not that the villains in Wall-E are evil, and disguise their evil behind the pretense of concern about comfort and safety. Rather, their psychotic concern about comfort and security leads the morbidly fat humans in Wall-E to do evil, villainous things.
They’re not evil—their fear makes them do evil.
Does this obsession with both comfort and safety remind anyone of anybody? To me, it reminds me of mainstream Americans: Of their willingness to sacrifice any and all rights—including habeas corpus—for the sake of comfort and safety. Of their willingness to allow their government to commit torture and murder, for the sake of security.
As to the morbidly fat people clogging the spaceship Axiom, every time I have a conversation with a foreigner about Americans, the issue of the fatness of the people inevitably, invariably comes up: The only people who aren’t shocked by the number of unwholesomely fat Americans are Americans.
I have so far discussed in superficial detail only three pictures, The Incredibles, Cars, and Wall-E. But similar critiques of American society can be found in most other Pixar films, to a degree that is completely absent in other animated films. Or even live-action films, for that matter. And let’s not even bother with contemporary American literature, which has become a playground for—at best—mediocre talent.
Pixar is producing the best art in America today—art with an edge.
Now, if these bits of sly social satire were embedded in only one, or even only two of their pictures, then it might be easy to dismiss it as a random thing.
But all of Pixar’s movies have this acid-laced social satire to one extent or another, a satire harsh enough—and visible enough—that it shouldn’t have escaped so many people’s attention. After all, millions upon millions of people have seen these pictures. More people—perhaps a majority of people—should have noticed what was going on. I mean, really, how many morbidly fat, lazy people obsessed with their Facebook page went to see Wall-E? And enjoyed the movie? Yet didn’t see themselves in it? And didn’t leave outraged at having been made fools of?
Most. If not all.
This goes to something really interesting: People are so enthralled by Pixar’s story-telling that they fail to see themselves in those stories. Just like those stupid wink-wink references I was deploring earlier, references that go over the heads of children, a lot of the social satire in Pixar’s movies sail on by, over the heads of its audience.
That’s the way you do satire. That’s the way you poke fun at your audience: You make a story so engrossing, the audience is never allowed to lean back, look askance at the screen, and say, “Wait a minute—are they they talking about me? Are they making fun of me?”
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