"Planes" isn't Pixar? But everywhere I go, I see Planes called "a spinoff of Cars". So Lightning McQueen and Dusty Crophopper could conceivably encounter each other, right?
Hmm. From Wikipedia:
"Despite not being produced by Pixar, the film was co-written and executive produced by Pixar and Disney Animation's chief creative officer John Lasseter, who directed the Cars films."
Okay, so yeah, different animation studio, but still -
IT'S A BYPRODUCT OF THE SUCCESS OF "CARS". IT'S UNORIGINAL.
Planes is a spinoff of
Cars, and Mater already visited Propwash Junction and got flying lessons from the Skipper and Sparky in a
Mater's Tall Tales short film, so yes they do live in the same universe and in theory, Lightning McQueen could meet Dusty Crophopper. Even so,
Planes still has little-to-no connection with Pixar -- it's a Disney product, through and through. If I remember right, it's only Disney that appears in the opening/closing credits -- no Luxo Jr. crushing the Pixar "i" to be seen. John Lasseter's connection to the film is when he's wearing his Mouse Ears, not the Woody cowboy hat. It's the same as when he's involved with the
Tinker Bell movies. I definitely don't think you can hold
Planes against Pixar's track record (though I'm also
one of the few people on the planet who liked it).
Also, I am pretty tired of stigmas against sequels. Yes, some are derivative and / or not good. Others are excellent. If you have a good idea and can do it well, then by God DO IT. Tell me an excellent story and I am there.
I agree with this in principle, but in practice I'd also say that it's much, much harder for a sequel to be anywhere near as original or satisfying as the original movie. There's extraordinarily few sequels that get held up in those "greatest movies" lists, and I don't think that's just a stigma about sequels. That said, one of the few sequels that's at least equal to and arguably better than the original movie is
Toy Story 2. As with many things, Pixar is the exception to the rule that a sequel is something to be eyed warily.
I also say this as
one of the very few people who liked Cars 2, though it's definitely not anywhere near the level of the top 5 movies out of Pixar. Combined with my affection for
Planes, I wonder sometimes if cool vehicles turn my critical faculties into those of a 5-to-9-year old boy running around with his arms out going, "Zoom!" a lot.
Despite everything I just said, though, I'd agree with the original basic premise that Disney is on a creative upswing while Pixar has been on a downswing, but I'd put the starting point of Pixar's decline much, much earlier than most do, and peg it specifically to the sudden and untimely passing of their longtime story guy Joe Ranft in 2005. The last film he worked on was
Cars, and while I still like most of the studio's output after that, I've also found many of the movies more problematic than the ones before it.
Ratatouille was the first movie where they had to replace the director very late in production, and while there are some wonderful moments in the movie, it's also still got lumps in it (mostly around Linguine). Both
WALL-E and
Up are startlingly, bracingly original, until they hit their third acts and become extremely conventional movies (and I was always amused by Pete Docter's bonus feature on the Up Blu-ray where he runs through about 4 or 5 different endings they tried with
Up, which suggests to me that they know the end of the movie has problems). I'm one of the few that really didn't like
Toy Story 3 all that much because I feel like it starts from an interesting premise, stalls for an hour so it can do a prison break movie, and then resolves the premise by totally kicking the can down the road (and because I believe the real question isn't about toys but about change when you grow up, and the real answer to that question is to break up the toys so some stay with Bonnie and some go to day care...but the movie dodges both of these questions entirely).
Cars 2 is derivative (and Ranft's influence on the original doesn't elevate it above the pre-
Incredibles Pixar films), and as much as I liked
Brave and
Monsters U, both of them are falling back on tried-and-true rather than pushing the boundaries the way earlier Pixar films did.
I'm not willing to pin all of the studio's successes on Joe Ranft, and I'm not saying that the movies after
Cars are bad -- I still maintain that an average Pixar film is better than the best output of many other studios. I just think it's a hell of a coincidence that there's such a difference in Pixar's films in the post-Joe period. Same as the kind of coincidence that the
Star Wars movies took a major nosedive in quality after Gary Kurtz stopped being the producer of the movies. In the end, I'd say Pixar has been "in decline" for nearly 10 years now, well before most people started saying they were.
And, with all THAT said, the stuff I'm hearing about
Inside Out is extraordinarily exciting. I'd also say that Disney's films lately have been very good, but I still wouldn't say the movies ranging from
Bolt (which is where the second Renaissance started, IMO) to
Frozen felt as innovative and original as stuff like
Toy Story or
The Incredibles. I don't want to belittle their successes, because they've all been very good movies that I enjoyed quite a lot, and they're also very much better than the dreck Disney was pushing in the late 90's and 00's. And if you can grandfather in the DTV efforts, the
Tinker Bell movies have been terrific across the board, which is another sign of their creative upswing.
I'd posted this back in 2016, over ten years ago!