THE GOOD DINOSAUR

(Peter Sohn, 2015)

The Good Dinosaur plays almost like the Pixar equivalent of a b-movie. That is to say it is made with all the care and craft lavished on each Pixar film, but it feels like more of a genre piece than most. It is an adventure film for 6-year olds, basically a quest Western with dinosaurs following young Arlo as he seeks to find his way back home to his (Apatosaurus) family ranch after  being swept away in the nearby river. Along the way he encounters various oddball characters in the wilderness, including a family of T-Rexs led by Sam Elliott who ranch buffalo, some cultish hyena-like Pterodactyls (led by Steve Zahn) and a human boy who he names Spot. They bond as they go, of course. For a Pixar film, this is surprisingly light on gags. Instead, it focuses on visual spectacle, and a couple of scenes of appealing oddness - the "trip" sequence is something I never thought I'd see in a children's film. The action scenes are intense and exciting, with nature itself as the big bad. It is classy, beautiful, and it works.

INSIDE OUT

(Pete Docter, 2015)

Pixar returns with the first Pixar film to feel like the way we used to see Pixar films in an age. That is to say that Inside Out is beautiful, and incredibly cleverly-conceived and moving without ever once becoming cloying. Its a Pixar film, in other words.
It explores some profound ideas with an incredibly light touch, and manages to remain a fun and colourful adventure through the beautifully-realised landscape of a little girls mind while also addressing the importance of sadness to growth, the way we process the end of childhood, the difficulty of abstract concepts like "bittersweet" and "nostalgia" and what elements actually constitute our personality and how and when they change.
It is lovely; sweet, imaginative, touching, full of great ideas, brilliant gags and nicely-executed drama.

MONSTERS UNIVERSITY

(Dan Scanlon, 2013)

It's pretty good, Monsters University. It's funny, its characters are well-drawn and sympathetic, its plot is gripping, and it is chock-full of beautiful images and knockout set-pieces.
But this is Pixar, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that for Pixar, pretty good isn't good enough.
That is another way of saying that this might be the formerly infallible animation studio's safest, tamest, laziest film yet. Even the mostly-reviled Cars 2 took risks - it was an outright delirious rainbow-hued piece of toddler-bait, with fewer concessions to parental entertainment than any previous Pixar production.
But Monsters University feels somewhat painted by numbers. It has all of the requisite Pixar ingredients, but they never quite combine into the dazzling Pixar classic people have been awaiting since Toy Story 3 ended.
Underlining the fact that this film (just like Cars 2) is a blatant piece of advertisement, devised mostly to sell toys and merchandise, the story is a prequel, introducing us to Mike and Sully during their college years in the Scare School at Monsters University. They hate each other at first, but are forced together by circumstance, and the film then pits them against various other characters in a long intra-sorority competition, allowing it some of the suspense of a sports movie. As such I think it has more montages than any other film I've ever seen, each of them nicely scored by Randy Newman, lots of great sight-gags slipping by. The montages never hold up the sentimentality you always know is coming, and it comes in a double-barrelled climax, which, like every Pixar climax, somehow manages to be thrilling, beautifully choreographed, touching and funny.
But beyond that, that other dimension so often present in earlier Pixar work is absent, and this film, more than any other, makes me worry that its never coming back.

BRAVE

(Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman, 2012) Only a few years ago, Pixar appeared possessed of some sort of magic formula. Film after film rolled off the factory line there; each of them technically wondrous, splendidly entertaining for both adults and children, and yet almost mythically resonant and charged with an emotional power many narratives never quite access. The consistency was staggering, the breadth of vision - from the ecologically-minded dystopian sci-fi of Wall.E to a clever retelling of the Seven Samurai with insects in A Bugs Life to the epic comedy drams of the Toy Story films, each with profound thngs today about mortality, ageing and family - remarkable, and the ability to marry big laughs with pure thrills seemingly effortless. That has changed since the critical and commercial triumph of Toy Story 3. Last years Cars 2 was a fun kids film, but it had few pleasures for adult audiences, and Brave is perhaps the studios most generic, least distinctive film yet. Which isn't to say it's bad. Its good, solid family entertainment, telling the story of young Scottish Princess Merida (voiced by Kelly MacDonald), who lives in the Medievel Highlands and loves riding, archery and generally un-Princessly pursuits, and her battle with her mother the Queen (Emma Thompson), who wants her to follow custom and marry the heir of one of the other local clans. Desperate to keep doing the things she loves, Merida visits a witch (Julie Walters) in the forest, procures a spell to "change" her mother, then watches in horror as that literally happens, and the Queen is transformed into a huge bear. It just so happens that the King (Billy Connolly) is obsessed with killing bears, having lost a leg to one when Merida was a child.. All of that means a film with the traditionally Disney-ish themes of being true to yourself, learning to trust family etc. None of that and none of the emotional beats are remotely new or even particularly interesting. The design and visuals, however, are predictably excellent, albeit far darker, both visually and tonally, than in past Pixar productions. Indeed, the intensity of some of the scarier moments in the second half of the film may be a bit much for some children, and the comic elements are more muted (and, honestly, less funny) than in just about every other Pixar film. But then this is mostly a drama, following a female protagonist (another first for the company), with pronounced horror elements and a heavy use of voiceover. That is sometimes indicative of a film with problems with narrative clarity, which may be the case here - the first act is full of exposition and explanation, talky scenes establishing motivation and mythology, and the action doesn't really kick in until half an hour in, a stretch in a childrens film. The problem is probably one of expectation. Brave is a perfectly fine animated film for children, but it lacks that glow of inspiration that seemed to light previous Pixar triumphs from within. It even compares poorly with a recent production with similar themes and setting from a different company; How to Train Your Dragon was funnier, wittier, more exciting and looked just as impressive. A few years ago it would have been unthinkable to suggest that a Dreamworks Animation would be better than a Pixar Production. But that, unfortunately, is no longer true.

CARS 2

(John Lasseter, Brad Lewis, 2011)

We expect so much of Pixar. This is a company which primarily makes films for children, yet, such has been the success and popularity of those films, so transcendent have a handful been, telling tales which work equally well for adults, with great sophistication, wit and beauty, that we expect miracles with each and every release. We expect dazzling storytelling in the service of tales full of drama yet laced with comedy, we expect strong, simple characterisation with an underlying resonance and complexity, we expect an effortless visual splendour and a sort of mythic weight to the narrative and light, piercing cultural references and a warmth of sensibility, and massive, original action sequences, and movie stars giving voice performances without distracting us, and an emotional charge. We expect a lot of Pixar, in other words.
Cars was probably the least critically successful of the companies previous films. A breezy, old-fashioned Doc Hollywood retread, it is a nice little film. But those expectations mean that was never going to be enough. So Cars 2, the most outright Kid-friendly of all Pixars films, and a bright, poppy, thematically thin mix of spy farce and race movie, was always bound to take some critical flak.
It makes Mater, the major source of comic relief in the first film, the main character. He is a broad creation and the film takes its lead from him, with many fish-out-of-water gags as he cuts a swathe through Japan, Italy and England, mistaken for a US Secret Agent throughout and fluking his way through a couple of extended action set-pieces along the way. Some of the spy pastiche material - with Michael Caine slightly miscast as the legendary Britih Spy Fin McMasters - recalls the previous Pixar masterpiece The Incredibles, but here the target audience is firmly six years old, and Cars 2 does an impressive, whole-hearted job in wooing that audience, with lots of slapstick and sight gags, and a brighter, more simplified storytelling approach than ever before. Many of those expectations are fulfilled, sure, but Cars 2 simply isn't interested in being a "typical" Pixar film. It just wants to be fun for a five year old.