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All 27 Pixar Movies, Ranked

On the occasion of Elemental’s release, here’s our ranking of every Pixar feature to date.

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All 27 Pixar Movies, Ranked
Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

With Elemental, Pixar’s infrastructure drama is here at last. Yes, there’s a Romeo and Juliet-inspired love story, a tale as old as time of immigrants fighting to sustain their hard-won stability, and a parable about accepting and celebrating human—or rather, atomic—differences packed into the film. But Elemental’s plot is really driven by a buddy quest to follow the pipes and repair the leak responsible for causing increasingly frequent flooding in Fire Town, on the outskirts of Elemental City, a metropolis inhabited by the natural elements. But it’s not in Elemental’s best interests that its characters—and thus, its basic concept—are so difficult to describe, though in the end that’s the least of its problems. On the occasion of its release, here’s a ranking of every Pixar feature. Dan Rubins

Editor’s Note: This articale was originally published on June 21, 2013.

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Cars 2

27. Cars 2 (2011)

The effect of the Toy Story films is practically primal. They appeal to anyone who’s ever cared about a toy—one they outgrew, gave away, or painfully left behind somewhere. These films, with scant manipulation and much visual and comic invention, thrive on giving toys a conscience and imagining what adventures they have when we turn our backs to them. Conversely, the effect of Cars and its infinitely worse sequel, toons about dudes-as-cars not quite coping with their enormous egos and their contentious bromances, is entirely craven in the way it humorlessly, unimaginatively, and uncritically enshrines the sort of capitalist-driven desires that Pixar’s youngest target audience is unable to relate to. Unless, that is, they had a douchebag older brother in the family who spent most of his childhood speaking in funny accents and hoarding his piggy-bank money to buy his first hot rod. Ed Gonzalez


Cars

26. Cars (2006)

Maybe it’s my general aversion to Nascar. Maybe it’s that Larry the Cable Guy’s Mater is the Jar Jar Binks of animated film. Or maybe it’s just that a routinely plotted movie about talking cars is miles beneath Pixar’s proven level of ingenuity, not to mention artistry (okay, we’ll give those handsome heartland vistas a pass). Cars is the first of Pixar’s films to feel like it’s not just catering, but kowtowing, to a specific demographic. Having undeservedly spawned more merchandising than a movie that’s literally about toys, Cars’s cold commercialism can still be felt today, with a just-launched theme park at Disneyland. And while CG people are hardly needed to give a Pixar film humanity, it’s perhaps telling that this, one of the animation house’s few fully anthropomorphic efforts, is also its least humane. R. Kurt Osenlund

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The Good Dinosaur

25. The Good Dinosaur (2015)

The Good Dinosaur has poignant moments, particularly when a human boy teaches Arlo, the titular protagonist, how to swim in a river, and there are funny allusions to how pitiless animals in the wild can be. But the film abounds in routine, featherweight episodes that allow the hero to predictably prove his salt to his family, resembling a cross between City Slickers and Finding Nemo. There’s barely a villain, little ambiguity, and essentially no stakes. There isn’t much of a hero either. Arlo is a collection of insecurities that have been calculatedly assembled so as to teach children the usual lessons about bravery, loyalty, and self-sufficiency. The Good Dinosaur is the sort of bland holiday time-killer that exhausted parents might describe as “cute” as a way of evading their indifference to it. Chuck Bowen


Lightyear

24. Lightyear (2022)

In theory, Lightyear’s premise is a clever route out of the nostalgia trap, for playing on our knowledge of and presumed affection for Buzz Lightyear, while allowing the filmmakers to craft something completely new. In practice, though, the film is one of Pixar’s least inspired releases to date, a slickly produced but soulless spectacle whose jokey banter and wall-to-wall space-opera action drowns out the story’s emotional beats. The overall look of the film is disappointingly unimaginative, a conglomeration of elements borrowed from the canon of science fiction cinema—the bug aliens from Starship Troopers here, the light trip from 2001: A Space Odyssey there, and set designs cribbed from Star Wars all over the place. And, sadly, the film’s plot and characters are no more distinctive than its visuals. Keith Watson

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Elemental

23. Elemental (2023)

Easter Eggs and sight gags are a cornerstone of the Pixar universe, and there are some small delights to be found throughout Elemental, even if it’s easy to imagine the writers checking off their elemental puns from some brainstorm-generated master list. But if toys helped kids understand their imaginations better, monsters aided them in excavating their fears, and emotions come to life allowed them to make sense of their feelings, it’s not quite evident what Elemental’s use of fire and water will illuminate. As much as all Pixar films may convey potent metaphorical messages for the human world, Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., and Inside Out wouldn’t work, respectively, without toys, monsters, and emotions. That’s the point. But there are plenty of ways to tell a “fire and water don’t mix” story without literalizing fire and water. Which is to say that Elemental doesn’t make enough of a case for its own existence. Rubins


Monsters University

22. Monsters University (2013)

It’s perfectly fair to walk away from Monsters University with a shrug, wondering what Toy Story 3 hath wrought, and lamenting the fact that even Pixar has fallen into Hollywood’s post-recession safe zone of sequel mania and brand identification. Still, Monsters University proves a vibrant and compassionate precursor to Monsters, Inc., the kid-friendly film that, to boot, helped to quell bedroom fears. Tracing Mike and Sulley’s paths from ill-matched peers to super scarers, Monsters University boasts the animation studio’s trademark attention to detail (right down to abstract modern sculptures on the quad), and it manages to bring freshness to the underdog tale, which is next to impossible these days. Osenlund

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Cars 3

21. Cars 3 (2017)

Cars 3 is content to explore the end of Lightning McQueen’s (Owen Wilson) career as a series of sports-film clichés: He’s an old dog trying to learn new tricks, struggling with a sport that seems to have passed him by, and facing, for the first time, a sense of vulnerability. The template turns out to be a natural fit for the Cars universe, rendering it with a visceral sense of speed, excitement, and struggle. Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonzo) is a plucky foil to McQueen and a three-dimensional presence in her own right. Cruz’s presence also allows the filmmakers to bring some social conscience to this sometimes backward-looking franchise, exploring the discouraging pressures placed on young female athletes while also nodding toward the historical exclusion of women and racial minorities from racing. Watson


Brave

20. Brave (2012)

In Brave, Merida (Kelly Macdonald) brings a curse upon her mother, Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson), and they have two days to figure out how to break the spell or Elinor will remain a bear forever, giving in to a savage nature which bubbles beneath the surface throughout the film as she tries to keep hold of her humanity—and keep herself from eating her daughter. The film flirts with commentary on the plight of women and responsibility, as well as on the struggle for balance in relationships between mothers and daughters. But ultimately it offers nothing more than a caricature of a well-worn conceit (a princess doesn’t fit into her shiny box, so she just breaks all the rules and does what she wants), neatly repackaged for another generation of young moviegoers who haven’t met Princess Jasmine from Aladdin and don’t realize that they’re eating yesterday’s leftovers. Richard Scott Larson

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Onward

19. Onward (2020)

Onward doesn’t have a distinctive visual style, but it does showcase Pixar’s mastery of depth, light, and shadow. As in Monsters University, the fanciful and the everyday are well harmonized. That’s still a neat trick, but it’s no more novel than Ian (Tom Holland) and Barley’s (Chris Pratt) experiences. Animated features often borrow from other films, in part to keep grown-ups interested, but the way Onward recalls at various points The Lord of the Rings, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Ghostbusters feels perfunctory. And it all leads to a moral that’s at least as hoary as that of The Wizard of Oz or Peter Pan. While Onward begins as a story of bereavement, it soon turns to celebrating the payoffs of positive thinking. That you can accomplish whatever you believe you can is a routine movie message, but it can feel magical when presented with more imagination than Onward ever musters. Mark Jenkins


Turning Red

18. Turning Red (2022)

The strongest point of Turning Red is the culturally specific and widely relatable relationship between 13-year-old Mei Lee (Rosalie Chiang) and her mother, Ming (Sandra Oh). But the film turns increasingly plodding as it progresses. The culture clash embodied in the mother-daughter tension leads, after some sitcom-esque “sneak out to party” hijinks, to a rather uninspired battle between giant pandas that seems like it could have been taken out of the latest Marvel extravaganza. The metaphor of adolescent change and rebellion was perhaps a bit overworked even before it culminates in an extended, high-energy climax at a boy band concert in which the action feels less motivated by the characters’ feelings than it does by heavy-handed symbolism and the commercial value of combat between super-beings. Pat Brown

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Luca

17. Luca (2021)

Possessing only a fraction of Pixar’s trademark emotiveness and none of the grandiose conceptualism of, say, Soul, Luca feels like a throwback to one of Mark Twain’s rollicking picaresque sagas, with Luca (Jacob Tremblay) and Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer) as fun-loving fish-monster equivalents of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The episodic, shaggy-dog quality to the plotting has a way of undercutting Luca’s emotional beats, but in the end, the luminous atmosphere of the film’s setting is more resonant than any particular thing that transpires there. The setting feels lived-in and thought-through, and one gets the sense that the animators know who inhabits every single house, what business occupies each storefront, and what every little side street looks like—even the ones that we never get to see. Watson


A Bug’s Life

16. A Bug’s Life (1998)

A Bug’s Life deals in a wealth of familiar themes and narratives, peddling the importance of community inherent to ant populations, positioning unlikely hero Flik (Dave Foley) as a fish out of water when he seeks help for the colony, and reinforcing the tyke-targeted notion that “being small isn’t so bad.” But when Flik, a “country bug,” goes searching for warriors to combat the ants’ oppressive grasshopper nemeses, and instead returns with a ragtag troupe of circus insects (think the gang from James and the Giant Peach performing amid the carnival debris of Charlotte’s Web), a more intriguing theme emerges. As the actors and acrobats help the ants to craft a massive bird (a salvation-bringing idol that will hopefully scare off the enemy), they also introduce art as an alternative to fear and violence, and A Bug’s Life presents entertainment as something not just diverting, but heroic. Osenlund

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Incredibles 2

15. Incredibles 2 (2018)

Incredibles 2 is a fleeter, funnier film than the original, and it gets considerable comedic mileage out of Jack-Jack’s wild capriciousness, as evidenced by the hilarious sequence in which the Parr family’s youngest uses his multifarious abilities to battle a feral raccoon just for the hell of it. Because superhero movies are still male-dominated, it’s refreshing to see a film such as this one place a female hero at the center of all its skirmishes. Unfortunately, pulling Helen (Holly Hunter) away from her family makes Incredibles 2’s plotting feel slightly mechanical. As it ping-pongs between displays of Elastigirl’s derring-do and the rest of her family’s domestic worries, the film becomes almost sitcom-like in the way its broken up into clear A and B storylines. It also doesn’t help that the story’s villain is so half-baked, as from the moment the Screenslaver (Bill Wise) shows up, it’s painfully obvious who’s pulling his strings. Watson


Soul

14. Soul (2020)

When Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) catches his big break auditioning to play with a pro quartet, Soul follows him into “the zone.” As pinks and purples swirl around Joe and as his fingers coax unexpected harmonies from the keyboard, the film gives itself over fully to his music. For these gloriously substantial few minutes, it’s jazz set to animation rather than the other way around. Walk away 15 minutes into Soul, at the end of what would make, on its own, a snazzy, sublime short, and you’ll have seen Pixar’s greatest, purest tribute to the arts. But Joe’s joy, and soon the film’s, is cut short when he plummets down an open manhole, and finds himself on the pathway to the Great Beyond. And it’s somewhere around here that Soul starts to veer down its own wrong path, abandoning its accessible storytelling, along with that vitalizing jazz soundtrack, for a confusing maze of pseudo-spiritual planes of existence. Dan Rubins

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Toy Story 4

13. Toy Story 4 (2019)

As well-told and emotionally effective as Toy Story 4 is, it’s difficult not to believe the third film would have functioned better as a send-off to these beloved characters. In fact, Toy Story 3 might as well have been a send-off for everybody but Woody (Tom Hanks), as the new and potentially final entry relegates the traditional supporting cast of the Toy Story films to the background. Even Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) is reduced to dopey comic relief, pressing the buttons on his chest to activate the pre-recorded messages that he now misunderstands as his “inner voice.” Toy Story 4 is very much a Woody story. His gradual acceptance of his new position in life and his reconnection with Bo Peep (Annie Potts) are moving, and it’s still remarkable how much Pixar can make us identify with a toy. But for the first time, a Toy Story film feels a bit like it’s resting on its plastic laurels. Brown


Finding Dory

12. Finding Dory (2016)

Partly due to its heady, somewhat devastating invocations of Dory’s (Ellen DeGeneres) distress, Finding Dory takes time to develop its comedic rhythm. Many of the original’s supporting characters reappear in a series of busy, lackluster callbacks, but a new school of secondary players add fresh life to another formulaic journey home. And though it suffers from some overly familiar caper antics, the film nobly embodies the “Rescue, Rehabilitation, and Release” motto of the Marine Institute where most of the story takes place. Dory’s short-term memory loss, a source of mostly comic relief in the original, is evoked with bracing seriousness after the blue tang recovers a sense of where she lost track of her family. Christopher Gray

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Inside Out

11. Inside Out (2015)

In Inside Out, director Pete Docter envisions the human mind as a sort of ongoing board meeting, where five primary emotions engage in the immediate tasks of impulse-governing and crisis-management in front of a vast backdrop of core values and archived memories, which constitute our consistent yet constantly evolving identities. The plot is little more than an excuse to tour this massive expanse of what turns out to be rigorously demarcated emotional terrain. As such, the film often feels both wonderfully complex and weirdly reductive at the same time. That formula, though, seems as sound an embodiment of the human brain as any other. Every step of this journey can feel, all at once, both on the nose and dazzlingly inventive. The best analogue for Riley’s mind is a Hollywood studio backlot, where rickety old sets crumble as more modern, complex new products are developed. Gray


Coco

10. Coco (2017)

Coco offers a festive, reverent, and wide-ranging pastiche of Mexican culture, touching on everything from Frida Kahlo to luchadores to the golden age of Mexican cinema. With the possible exception of WALL-E’s depiction of our planet as a depopulated trash heap, this is perhaps Pixar’s bleakest vision, a world in which one dies not once but twice, the second time from a collective disregard for a person’s very existence. But as the script begins to unravel the secrets of 12-year-old Miguel’s (Anthony Gonzalez) ancestors, the film gets bogged down in its over-plotted family melodrama. With so much information to plow through, the film too often bolts from one plot point to the next when it should be simply sitting back and enjoying the moment. Because when it turns down the volume on its cacophonous narrative and turns up the music, Coco achieves moments as powerful as anything in the Pixar canon. Watson

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Finding Nemo

9. Finding Nemo (2003)

Finding Nemo’s sea of details can offer new discoveries with each viewing (even the varying levels of sediment are staggeringly, gorgeously specific). The film targets the evils of packaging and captivity, juxtaposing the free-swimming fish of Australia’s coastal reefs with those contained for show in a dentist’s cold, sterile office. That same notion of the ills of constraint plays out on the micro level, as clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) needs to let go of his own confining fears, which he imposes on his missing son (Alexander Gould). Your favorite part of this enduring masterstroke might be the current-cruising sea turtles, the Bah-ston-accented crayfish, or Geoffrey Rush’s benevolent pelican, but odds are it’s Dory, Ellen Degeneres’s amnesiac regal blue tang, one of the greatest animated characters in history. Osenlund


Toy Story 2

8. Toy Story 2 (1999)

Toy Story 2 begins with an accidental tear of Woody’s fabric, the bust of a seam that renders the right arm of Andy’s beloved cowboy limp. Rarely—or, perhaps, never—has an animated film seen such an apparently minor wound produce such epic ripple effects. The rip prompts Andy to leave Woody behind when he departs for “Cowboy Camp,” which in turn leads to Woody accidentally ending up in the family’s yard sale, which then sees him shuffled off to evil Al’s Toy Barn, which introduces him to the rest of his hallowed “set,” as well as the notion that, like all toys, and all of us, he has a certain shelf life. To watch Toy Story 2 after having seen Toy Story 3 is to see the clues and feel the pangs of a brilliant, cohesive trilogy, which focuses, above all, on the universal, impossible need to claw for as much time as possible. Osenlund

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The Incredibles

7. The Incredibles (2004)

Throughout The Incredibles, Brad Bird toasts and critiques the best and worst elements of countless James Bond and superhero flicks to suggest that Middle America is above the lies Hollywood sells the public. When called to a Dr. Evil-esque island on a top-secret mission, the film’s main character, Bob Parr (Craig T. Nelson), a.k.a. Mr. Incredible, not only reclaims his lost identity, but he must also confront the effects a past transgression had on someone else’s sense of self. There’s plenty of soul-searching that goes on throughout The Incredibles, but the film is most successful as a defense of family: When Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) comes to her husband’s rescue, Bird gets considerable emotional mileage out of the character’s continued attempts to bend (here, literally and figuratively) in order to keep her family together. The Incredibles may fight to save the world, but they teach us to know thyself. Gonzalez


Toy Story 3

6. Toy Story 3 (2010)

The Toy Story films, with scant manipulation and much visual and comic invention, thrive on giving toys a conscience and imagining what adventures they have when we turn our backs to them. They address the way we emotionally invest in toys, sometimes (as in Toy Story 2) even throwing in a canny bit of air-tight commentary on consumerism as a bonus for the adults in the room. Such is Pixar’s unique gift that these stories about toys fighting to be played with become, for us, confrontations with our own mortality—from birth to rot and everything in between. Though Lee Unkrich’s Toy Story 3 sometimes indulges the snarkiness that completely dictates the world of DreamWorks’s inane Shrek movies, its powerhouse of an ending, proof of the company’s emotionally rich ability of telling tales that force us to grapple with our mortal coil, is so humane it disarms our qualms. Gonzalez

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WALL-E

5. WALL-E (2008)

WALL-E goes beyond inviting comparisons to E.T., Number 5, R2D2, even Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. The Waste Allocation Load Lifter relies on them, for writer-director Andrew Stanton understands this robot janitor as a study in memory and inheritance. The last surviving bot of a failed program meant to clean up after our bad habits, WALL-E learns about desire from a movie musical we left behind and bides his time creating buildings from our compacted trash—totems that give expression to his hunger for purpose in the same way the pyramids attest to the ancient Egyptian race’s human possibility. Throughhout WALL-E, the eponymous robot’s loneliness is palpable not only in those soulful eyes, one of which he has to replace after it incurs great injury, but in his dogged, workaday need to clean and assemble, no doubt hoping that one day someone might notice that WALL-E Was Here. Gonzalez


Toy Story

4. Toy Story (1995)

At the start, the power of John Lasseter’s Toy Story resides in the novelty of imagining what goes on when toys are left behind on their own—a thought that, clearly, introduces a vast, engaging world of possibility. The flagship Pixar film also thrives on its accessibility, and the near-universal recognition of so many of its elements, from Mr. Potato Head (Don Rickles) to the distinct childhood thrill of spending a night out at a bitchin’ place like Pizza Planet. But its grandest achievement, of course, is its triumphant riff on the boy-and-his-dog tale, which preaches the value of the symbolic bond between toy and owner, a bond reinforced by the humbling of Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), who learns that, by manufacture alone, he’s no one special, but to one kid, and one family, he’s someone very special indeed. Osenlund

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Monsters, Inc.

3. Monsters, Inc. (2001)

Pete Docter’s Monsters, Inc. set the bar very high for Hollywood escapism, not for the way it encourages detachment as an escape from routine, but how it cannily asks us to question why we walk away from the reality of our lives, though not always through cartoon doors. A celebration of realized childhood fears, abundant in subtle, cleverly deployed film references that never stoop to the easy snark that’s become the modus operandi of DreamWorks Animation, the film heartbreakingly attests to the way fear is intricately bound to childhood experience. A monster inadvertently makes a little girl cry, thus breaking the purity of their trust, and by film’s end, their reconciliation and subsequent separation becomes a humbling reminder of what it’s like to fear, imagine, and hope. Gonzalez


Ratatouille

2. Ratatouille (2007)

A testament to Pixar’s courage, Brad Bird’s Ratatouille might be the animated film with the bravest premise, daring to not only make a rodent an adorable protagonist, but to place him in the kitchen—the kitchen of one of the premiere restaurants in the foodie mecca of France. The title alone is a bit of brilliant punnery, and rat Remy’s puppet-like control of awkward restaurant heir Alfredo Linguini (Lou Romano)—an effortless employment of the man-behind-the-curtain and big-thing-in-small-package tropes—is as thrilling to watch as Remy’s zinging visualizations of tastes and flavor combinations. What will always make Ratatouille close to a critic’s heart, though, is the inclusion of the critic himself, a formidable figure whose disenchantment is lifted by evocative art that opens his heart wide. Osenlund

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Up

1. Up (2009)

Is Pete Docter’s Up the only Pixar creation where a character has spilled blood? But that’s not what makes the film so special. It’s the inspired sense of scale, thoughtful framing, and dreamlike interplays of colors and shapes, the simultaneous fear and joy roused by its nutty flights of fancy and suspense, and the fearless emotional affect its story never ceases to risk. A series of colorful vignettes on love, fidelity, and adventure, Up is emotionally and aesthetically hieratic, conflating, from its very first, Citizen Kane-referencing sequence, the act of watching movies with the ecstasies and banalities of living. Life, like going to the movies, is seen as a grand communal experience, a ride worth enduring even when it teeters toward and over the brink of nightmarish abysses. To the end, the film works out adult ideas about our notions of self, our sense of disappointment and complacency, and the hopes we’re always choosing to either look up or down to, and doing so in a language of sound and image so intense in its visual clarity and depth that it needs no translation at all. Gonzalez

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