FFAF: I Need to Rant About Pixar

Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

I’m mad at Pixar, I’m mad at Disney, and I just want to rant about it today. Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, I’m your host, Catholic Answer’s apologist Trent Horn. On Mondays and Wednesdays we talk apologetics and theology, how to explain and defend the Catholic faith, but on Friday, we talk about whatever I want to talk about. And today, I just want to rant about Pixar, and a little bit about Disney. These were companies that have provided pieces of not just entertainment, but I considered them works of art, that I enjoyed as a child. I also enjoyed sharing them with my own children. I think there’s a lot of people who feel a sense of sadness, it was something that they once enjoyed, they wanted to share with their kids, but, it’s just not the same company.

What’s amazing is that Disney, it’s gone completely woke, wants to actively promote LGBT to children. It makes me sad. I really wanted to take my kids to Disneyland recently, but then when I was seeing the video of the transgender, a guy, it’s a guy, he’s got a full mustache on, working at, there’s this thing called the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique where little girls go to dress up like a princess and do all the princess stuff. There’s a video, there’s the fairy godmother’s assistant, it’s a dude in a dress. It’s a dude in a dress with a mustache. I don’t want to have to explain that to my kids.

Now, I only have three boys, so we’re going to go straight to the Matterhorn, Big Thunder Mountain, Buzz Light’s Astro Blasters, but who knows? If you start there, you see it everywhere else and it’s just like, oh, man. Because I used to take my kids when we lived in San Diego and worked at Catholic Answers there, we had annual passes. We lived in San Diego. We would wake up, we set our alarms and we would wake up at 5:30 in the morning. We’d load the kids in the car while they were still asleep, drive from San Diego, book it to beat traffic in through LA. We could make it to Disneyland at around 7:00 AM, 7:15, which is perfect because then we would go, we would get in line, we’d be there right as the rope would drop.

This was back when Matthew and Thomas, I want to say, they were like three and one, maybe four and two. They were still toddlers, but we took them on rides and they had a blast. We would go from like 8:00 AM till about noon, go over to the other park, do the Toy Story ride. One of us would watch the kids, and the other would take the stroller and go to McDonald’s, and that’s the trick to beat the park. It’s super expensive and there’s not really that great food for kids in the park, or it’s overpriced. We would leave the park, take the stroller, go run to the McDonald’s across the street from Disneyland, buy a ton of nuggets. I would eat like two double cheeseburgers stacked together. Come back, do that, do a few more rides, leave at about 1:00 PM when the kids are starting to fall apart, be back at the house at 3:00, 3:30, in San Diego, and then just decompress for the rest of the day.

It was super fun, but I don’t know when I would ever take my kids again in the future, maybe I will give in at some point, but I don’t know. Odds are, outlook doesn’t look good, not good outlook from the old match game ball.

That’s sad to see that Disney has done that, and this has also bled over into Pixar. Pixar was an amazing company. When you think about Pixar films, like I say, what is your favorite Pixar animated film? I’ll bet you, for a lot of people, they’re going to mention the earlier works, not the later works of Pixar. Toy Story, Monsters Inc., the Incredibles, Ratatouille, Finding Nemo, WALL-E, Up. You notice that all of that is about 10 years ago, or more than 10 years ago, in some cases, nearly 30, almost 30 years ago, when they hit their high point. That was Toy Story that came out in 1995.

It’s sad for me to see the trajectory of Pixar, that it was once an independent company, and then acquired by Disney. There’s a whole story involved with that, but to go back to it though, Pixar was founded by John Lasseter, and Lasseter used to work at Disney. He went to work at Walt Disney Animation Studios back in the 1980s. I think he worked on Mickey’s Christmas Carol. He got really interested in the eighties in computer generated imagery. He looked at the, not the bicycle race, it’s the racing scene in Tron. Tron is just a classic movie right there. He thought that was really cool and he learned more about computer generated imagery. He was involved with creating the first photorealistic CGI character in film that was in the movie Young Sherlock Holmes, back in the eighties actually. It was a knight that comes alive out of a stained-glass window.

He got involved in that. And then later in the nineties, he went and left Disney and started Pixar, and then they released their first animated feature, Toy Story, November 22nd, 1995, and it blew people away. I remember because I was 10 years old when I saw Toy Story, and I was like Andy’s age in the film. My parents took me to, it was McDonald’s or Burger King, and you got a Happy Meal and it came with the toy, Woody, from Toy Story, the Cowboy. But it wasn’t like a crummy little plastic action figure, it was a real doll that you could play with, just like Andy did in the movie. And that’s still at my house, it’s still in the kids’ toy bin. They have other Toy Story toys from the past five years that I’ve gotten for them, but that one still holds up. It’s still in there. He doesn’t have his boots anymore. That’s the one thing, he lost his hat and he lost his boots, but he’s still there.

But man, Toy Story really holds up. You want to know what’s genius about Toy Story? This was when computer animation was really still in its infancy. You couldn’t render human beings very well. I mean, they just look like pieces of plastic, so it’s very good that their first computer generated film, first CGI film, it was full CGI characters, did not focus on humans or humanoid characters. They said, “Let’s make a movie about toys that come to life.”

Now, I remember, I cannot figure out what this movie is, I remember watching a movie as a kid, before Toy Story, about toys that come to life when people aren’t looking. If someone can leave a comment, or tell me or message me, I’ve got to figure out what movie this is. I know it was real. I did see it. In that film, a toy comes to life, if a human sees a toy alive, the toy instantly falls down and it dies, and it never comes alive again. That’s pretty grim, that is something obviously you don’t have in Toy Story because they can come to life and they terrorize Sid at the end of the film, even though Sid was not a bad guy, he was being very creative. He didn’t know the toys were alive.

But it worked, because in Toy Story, the only human character you see very much, you don’t see the mom, you barely see Andy, a lot of the shots of their ankles, their feet, or they’re running around in the background. They focus on the toys because you can render, CGI, at the time, they looked plastic. Well, why not do a movie about toys? They’re made of plastic anyways. And so, it still holds up. They look like toys because you have that plastic imagery there.

The only exception is Sid, the neighbor kid, who’s the villain of the film, and he looks positively creepy. He’s not very pleasing to look at, which is good because he’s the villain, so it worked. What’s great about Toy Story, by the way, is that there are so many themes baked into it. What made early Pixar so great was that it told really good stories, but it also explored really fundamental themes about life.

When you think about Toy Story, one of the themes really in it deals with parents and children. Kids watch it and they relate to playing with their toys. What makes the Toy Story trilogy amazing, and I hate everything after Toy Story 3, we’ll get to that soon, is that the Toy Story trilogy really talks about the dilemma of toys is that you have this bond with a child, but eventually the child will grow up and they won’t have that same bond with you anymore. Kids watch this and they just love everything with the toys, but parents really feel like, yeah, that’s how the toys… Because the toys see themselves as a parental role in the child’s life. Woody will say in the films, “Our job is to be there for Andy, even if he doesn’t need us anymore, we’re going to be there for him.” And that’s a parent’s role for their child, our job is to be there for them, and you feel that sadness when your child grows up and they go off in the world and they don’t need you to be there.

I’m going to cry. I’m such a softie now that I have kids. I just can’t do it anymore. It has that deep theme in it, and you see that in the other films as well, about parent relationships, like in Finding Nemo, about the importance of being able to let your child go and not to stifle them even if you’re afraid of what might happen.

There are other early Pixar films, it’s got a lot of great themes to it. The Incredibles. The Incredibles is basically Ayn Rand’s objectivism put into a film, and that’s amazing. You’d never have that made today, because Disney is completely woke now, but that is a libertarian, Ayn Rand objectivist movie that The Incredibles is about. Ayn Rand is a libertarian philosopher, wrote the book Atlas Shrugged, and it’s basically about, what if the government was so intrusive with its regulations and so overbearing, all the geniuses just went on strike, and you can’t build your fancy train? There, I saved you like dozens of hours of reading a book, some of which are just long extended radio speeches. It’s still a great book, Atlas Shrugged.

But, The Incredibles is about superheroes being made illegal because people sue them for being injured when they’re being saved, and superheroes are considered a menace. There is a great line in the film where the mom says to Dash, the super-fast son, that he’s not allowed to compete in track because he would beat everybody. She says, “Everybody’s special, Dash.” That’s just another way of saying nobody’s special. So this culture of mediocrity and equality is wrong when there are people who can really excel. That’s amazing, you have all of that theme stuffed into a kid’s movie that the kids like, and it’s got really cool action, and a good story with it. And also, another theme about midlife crises, growing old, understanding the role of family and what bonds family together.

Marvel has still not made a good Fantastic Four movie, nobody can do that. But The Incredibles is a Fantastic Four movie because the theme of Fantastic Four in the comics was about family. That’s what the Fantastic Four were about, they were family. So, when you look at the early Pixar, it’s great, Toy Story. I’ve got the list here was Toy Story, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story 2, one of the rare instances where the sequel goes beyond and gets better than the original in exploring, for example, Buzz. There’s always a little bit of a… I always wondered in the first Toy Story, Buzz thinks that he’s real. Why does he freeze when Andy’s around? Maybe he’s just acting like everybody else, acting like the natives. I don’t know.

So, a few plot holes here and there, but Toy Story 2 is a great, it goes beyond that well. I like Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo, then Incredibles, Cars. Oh yeah, A Bug’s Life back there, that’s great. Ratatouille? Ratatouille is a really fun one, I think Patton Oswalt is the voice of Ratatouille. I love Paris, French food, that has a great theme about friendship, comradery, giving people credit where it’s due.

Then you have on June 27th, 2008, WALL-E, that is just so creative. WALL-E is amazing because the beginning part of the movie tells a story essentially without dialogue. There’s some dialogue in the recording thing. WALL-E is about the little robot, left on a post apocalyptic earth, that’s just supposed to clean up, and obviously can’t really clean up anymore, but just does its little programming. Then ends up going on a spaceship with Eve, the new robot that shows up to see if there’s life on Earth, and then they go into space together and they try to help humans who are on a space colony because the world was polluted too much with trash, to help them. Now they’ve become overweight, and they’re lazy, to help them recover their true identities and return to the Earth.

Well, if anything, when I start to explain it to you, if you try to explain this in a boardroom meeting, it’s like, “That’s a bonkers idea,” but I love it. It’s creative, and you’ve got these characters, you’ve got a character that hardly has any dialogue. It speaks in boops and weeps, both Eva and Wally, just saying their own name, but they’re characters. You really identify with the character traits and personality of WALL-E.

Then the next year they had Up. This is a company, you go from 1995 to 2009, 2010, they are on a roll. Cannot fail. Can’t fail, people. I went with my aunt to see Up, in 2009, so I would’ve been 24 years old, I think, at that time. I went with my aunt, actually, before she passed away, and it was really nice to be able to go with her. I was staying with her because she lived on Coronado Island in San Diego, and it was always a fun place to go and visit. I took her to the movie, I said, “Let’s go see a movie.” I took her to see Up, and she loved it. She thought that was just so beautiful. It was just a great thing that I could take my aunt to, I could take my kids to, and Up has very poignant themes about life, and about regrets, and not having regrets, and the things that you value, and not becoming a curmudgeon, not allowing your heart to be hardened even when bad things happen to you.

And then in 2010, you have Toy Story 3, which perfectly ends the Toy Story arc. Previously, the last Toy Story was 10 years earlier, in 1999. And it’s genius, in 2010, Toy Story 3, the film takes place 10 years later. Toy Story 2 is 10 years earlier, 10 years later, Andy goes off to college, now he says goodbye to the toys, and it’s perfect. Ends right there. It closes, the last shot of Toy Story 3 are the clouds in the sky that mirror the first shot of Toy Story one, the clouds on Andy’s room. It’s perfect. Don’t do anything else, Pixar, and you did because you want money, and I hate it, and I’m so mad.

One of the last Pixar movies I took my kids to in theaters, I think the last Pixar movie I took them to in theaters was Toy Story 4, and I hated Toy Story 4. It just undid everything that was good in Toy Story 3. It was just about trying to put another pointless sequel involved, and it destroyed the friendship that Woody had with everyone else, and his understanding of his role as a toy. I just absolutely hated it.

But I think where Pixar stumbled, and they never really got their groove back after, was June 24th, 2011. Cars 2, trying to do the sequel to Cars. It was Pixar’s first failure. It was a bomb of a movie, everybody hated it, it was weird. The original Cars was a good film in 2006, though it’s kind of a ripoff of Doc Holiday with Michael J. Fox, but, it’s a great film. I mean, it’s not as great as the others. I’m sorry, it’s a good film, it’s not great. But it’s fun, it’s enjoyable, I like watching it with my kids, and it’s got a great theme about slowing down and taking in life, not always being in such a rush about things, and about learning from mentors and not being dismissive of them right off the bat. Don’t judge a book by its cover. It’s great, it’s a fun movie. I still watch it with my kids. A movie to me is good if I can watch it multiple times.

Cars 2 is a dumpster fire. Cars 2, if you didn’t see it, takes the side character, Mater. So, Car is about a cars universe, all the cars are alive, and Lightning McQueen’s a race car, Mater, his friend, is a tow truck. He goes on this European racing tour, but Mater gets enlisted to be a spy, it tries to be a spoof of spy movies and racing movies, and there’s this plot to use inferior fuels that cause cars to explode to have a monopoly on the fuel industry. The fact that I can’t explain to you, it shows how just awful it was. Even my three-year-old tried to watch it, and got up and left, because he hated it. It was so bad. It was a huge misfire for Pixar.

But then as you move forward, you start to see more things that are just mediocre. You have things like Brave, that was an okay movie. I liked Inside Out, Monsters University. They were starting to get their groove back. Inside Out is a great theme, I love the cast from The Office, and it deals with the family. She’s like, “I’ll watch Inside Out and Monsters University with my kids,” because once again, it’s about good characters, but a really driving theme. The theme of Inside Out of understanding you’re growing up and being able to manage your emotions, I think that that’s great.

I love Monsters University, by the way. As a prequel, it does a really good job, but I know I’m not explaining all the movies here. If you’re watching this Pixar Free for All Friday, I’m sure you’ve watched them, you know what I’m talking about. I love Monsters University, it talks about how Mike and Sully, the two main characters in the first film, how they got to work at Monsters Inc., and how they’re at Monsters University, and Mike, the little green single eyeball, Cyclops, goofy looking monster, he thinks he’s going to be the greatest scare of all time. I love in that film, and this came out in 2013, a different time, that he learns at the end of the film he’s not scary. No matter how hard he tries, he will never be scary. It’s an amazing lesson in a kid’s film to tell kids there are some things you will never be able to do.

For me, no matter how hard I try, I’ll never be able to play in the NBA. I just will not. I am not built for it. You have to be tall and lanky. There’s maybe, like Muggsy Bogues, there’s a few short guys, and I don’t mean short, but I mean short by NBA standards, who can play in the NBA. But I won’t. I can’t. I never will. There’s things I’ll never be able to do. And then Mike learns in the film, you will never be a scarer, but you’re really good at knowing how to scare so you can help someone like Sully, the really scary monster, no one’s scary in the film, but the one who actually can scare kids, you can help him to accomplish that goal, and that’s your role and you can do it really well. So for kids to learn it’s okay if there’s certain things you want to do that you can’t do, that happens to everyone in life, but there are things you are good at and you should embrace the gifts that you do have. Great theme. I love it.

And then in 2015, they do the Good Dinosaur. You remember The Good Dinosaur? No, you don’t, because it’s a bad Pixar film. And then, the films just start to really go down. Finding Dory, uninspired, I never watched it again with my kids. Cars 3, better than Cars 2, but still not great. I heard Coco was really good. I have not seen Coco yet, but I heard that one was good. It’s not like they’re all failures, but it’s on a downward trajectory, that the bad and mediocre films outweigh the good films now. Whereas before, the misfires were extremely rare. Now, a good one is less common.

That Coco is good, but then it goes right down, Incredibles 2 was a crummy sequel. I hate Toy Story 4. Didn’t see Onward, didn’t see Soul, didn’t see Luca, didn’t see Turning Red, didn’t see Lightyear, didn’t see Elemental, the one that’s most recently out. Because I know what the stories are about and I’m not interested. I don’t like them. And by the way, they’re all woke propaganda. They just are.

Luca was supposed to be an LGBT propaganda. It’s about two boys coming out in their identities, as Merr people, and this deep friendship between them. They’ve admitted there was supposed to be LGBT propaganda in Luca. Turning Red, I give Turning Red some credit, there’s some creative storytelling there, but dealing with themes like a girl getting her period and entering puberty. It’s like, wait, who? Is this? This is not for my kids? This is definitely, maybe, who did you make this for? For preteens now? For adults who remember being a preteen in the mid 2000s, where the story takes place because it’s about 2000s boy bands. Who is this for? What are these for? They just go full woke.

Light year, totally tanked there. You don’t bring Tim Allen back. It has no connection to Toy Story. You purposely insert an LGBT couple to get woke points. Guess what? You lost my ticket to the film. I don’t want to take my kids and explain to them why two women are kissing or are married. Not going to do it, don’t feel like it, and that’s your problem.

And then, Elemental has a non-binary character in it. Another reason I don’t like Elemental is that it clearly, not only does it have the non-binary character in it and stuff like that, it’s just rip off of earlier work, of Zootopia, which is not Pixar, that’s Disney. The Pixar/Disney animated features seem to fall into this predictable formula that once worked and now it’s gotten old.

What if X was alive? Which is good. They do that with Toys, they do it with WALL-E, they do it with your emotions in Inside Out, video game characters in Wreck-It Ralph. What if X were alive? Wouldn’t that be crazy? And Zootopia did what if X were alive, or people, what if X were people, and racism is bad. That’s Zootopia. That’s Zootopia. What if animals acted like people, but predators and prey had racist issues. They had prejudice, they had to deal with each other. Racism is bad. But that’s Elemental, it’s, what if the elements air, earth, water, and fire are alive, are people, and they’re prejudiced against each other. Water doesn’t like fire. It’s dangerous. Well, I don’t like your kind. I don’t like you people. Buddy, have we gone down this road like a million times already? Yeesh.

When you look at the most recent, not Pixar, but Disney animated features, that’s really hit or miss. I’ll give them Frozen and Wreck-It Ralph. Those are good. Zootopia, Moana are good. Honestly, it’s when they try to go to the sequel well. I’m just like, I can’t do it. I don’t show them to my kids. Frozen II, Ralph Breaks the Internet, and then they also go woke, the recent ones, like Encanto. Now, it seems like you can’t even have just a traditional bad guy in a film. It seems like, you look at Turning Red or Encanto, Lightyear, whatever, you can’t just have, here is a bad guy, he is bad. Even in Up, the explorer in Up, who is the bad guy, you understood why he was a bad guy, even though he was a kind of a twist villain, but not really, he’s great. You just can’t have a good bad guy anymore.

Now the bad guy has to be intergenerational trauma. My grandparents put too much pressure on my parents, they put too much pressure on me. Geez, Gen Z, we get it, you got a job at Pixar and Walt Disney Studios, you don’t have to whine to us through films like Turning Red and Encanto about your generational trauma.

Same with Strange World, I’m not going to take my kids to that because it has an openly gay character in it who is conveniently cut out of the film for the Chinese release. So it’s like, sorry, if you want to go down that route, it’s so sad to me. There was a time when Disney, in the nineties, was supposed to be popular, was when other animated features, other movie studios would make stuff not appropriate for kids, you would think, oh, well, I can just put on Disney, I know that’s okay for kids. Now, you can’t do that.

The last movies I’ve taken my kids to, kids movies, were not Disney or Pixar. I took them to see Across the Spider-Verse and the Super Mario Brothers movie. I checked, and they’re fine, maybe Across the Spider-Verse had one in joke for LGBT, I don’t know, but you couldn’t even notice it in the film. But Super Mario is great, it’s not woke, it’s not pushing LGBT propaganda. It’s not pushing girls are awesome and they’re the best, and they have to help the boys because the boys can’t get anything done. Yeah, so it is sad to see where now it is absolutely cratered, and I love taking my kids to the movies. You sit in the big seat, and you eat your popcorn. I like doing that with them, and so I will take them. If I see a movie like, yeah, that’s a good kid’s movie, I want to go, because I don’t know when another kid’s movie will come around. It was years, from Toy Story 4, I was burned by that. There was nothing else in theaters that I wanted to take my kids to, frankly.

And it’s sad, but hey, maybe we can get some more people to join. I would just hope these companies, here’s what’s crazy about these companies, by the way, is that they’re not greedy capitalists. They don’t just want to make money. If they wanted to make money, they would just make stuff that appeals to a broad base of the audience. Think about Top Gun Maverick, think about Across the Spider-Verse, Super Mario Movie. Broad appeal, not woke, makes money. If I was an executive, I’d say, “Let’s make money. We’re not doing LGBT anymore. We’re done.”

But they can’t do that because you’ve got people who work at these companies that are zealots. They’re basically religious zealots. They don’t care, they’ll burn those companies to the ground and let them go bankrupt. Some people who work at those companies, what they care about is spreading the gospel of woke and LGBT. They’ll use the company to do that and drive it into the ground. That’s crazy, they’re not about making money. It’s like a religion to them, and they just want to push that. Fine. You want to push your religion? Go right ahead. I’m not going to buy it. Sorry, not for sale here.

If you change your mind, and you go back to just wanting to make money by making art that’s a broad base, and is good, and has great themes, and a lot of thought was put into it, then I’ll come back. But until then, I’m out.

Well, thank you all, hope you enjoyed listening to my little rant here. If you have your thoughts on Disney or Pixar, definitely leave a comment at trenthornpodcast.com. Love seeing what people think about the episodes and Free For All Friday. And yeah, I just hope that you have a very blessed day.

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