John Lasseter, the co-founder of Pixar and chief creative officer of both Pixar and Walt Disney Animation took a leave from those companies over allegations of harassment and misconduct, including (as one anonymous source put it) “grabbing, kissing, [and] making comments about physical attributes” of women at…
Years ago, the magic of selective editing enraptured the internet when some genius edited Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining into a comedy. This kind of cinephilic manipulation subsequently flooded the web, but nobody is doing it quite as well as YouTube channel Editing Is Everything, which routinely edits a single,…
Regardless of whether they went to see Pixar’s Coco for its thoughtful, beautifully-rendered yet overdue look at Mexican culture, moviegoers were required to be more patient than usual ahead of their feature screening. In addition to the commercials and coming distractions, Disney tacked on a short film that not only…
Rashida Jones and her writing partner, Will McCormack, have issued a statement tonight denying an allegation made by The Hollywood Reporter earlier today, refuting the claim that they left the creative team for Toy Story 4 because of an “unwanted advance” from John Lasseter. Lasseter—the chief creative officer for…
John Lasseter, co-founder of Pixar and chief creative officer for Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, is the latest high-profile Hollywood power player to take a leave of absence amid charges of sexual harassment—or, as he puts it, “unwanted hugs.” Lasseter uses that very Disney-esque phrase in a memo to his employees …
The afterlife imagined by Pixar’s new animated film Coco is a labyrinthine, luminous necropolis crisscrossed by string lights and papeles picados, a place both strange and all too familiar. Its currency is memory; its exit visas are family photos, without which the skeletal dead can’t cross the orange marigold-petal…
At the end of The Incredibles, having already defeated Jason Lee’s angsty villain, Mr. Incredible and the rest of his super-family suited up to take on a Mole Man-esque villain called The Underminer. According to Pixar’s John Lasseter at the D23 conference, Brad Bird’s The Incredibles 2 will pick up immediately after…
Despite previous reports that he’d be co-directing the film (after taking the third installment off) Pixar leader John Lasseter won’t be in the director’s chair for Toy Story 4. Variety reports that Lasseter broke the news to fans at Disney’s D23 expo today, revealing that he’s leaving the franchise’s fourth…
Pixar has announced its latest “almost, but not quite, like the real world” setting, treating fans at Disney’s D23 expo today to news of a film set in a “Suburban Fantasy World” containing “elves, sprites and pretty much anything that would be on the side of a van in the ’70s.”
June belongs to Pixar, usually. Just about every year, right around the official first day of summer (as opposed to the start of the summer movie season, which most recognize as the first weekend of May, even though “summer movies” now open year-round), the house that Woody and Buzz built releases another zippy and…
For years people on the internet have tried to explain the Pixar universe, from breaking down a chronological timeline of all the movies to explaining the ramifications of crashing sentient, oxygen-breathing automobiles into walls in Cars. So far no one from Pixar has confirmed or denied these claims, likely because…
With Run The Series, The A.V. Club examines film franchises, studying how they change and evolve with each new installment.
If there’s a platonic ideal of all-ages entertainment, Pixar has hit it on multiple occasions. The animation house’s greatest triumphs, like WALL-E or the Toy Story movies or the recent Inside Out, tend to delight the young and old alike, because they locate a common ground, rather than trying to compartmentalize…
The first teaser for the new Pixar film Coco was basically a two-minute movie, telling a story about a boy who likes to play guitar and accidentally finds himself transported into the Land Of The Dead. This new trailer loses a bit of style points by resorting to a traditional narrator for the setup, but it does…
It’s hard to shake the marketing for Cars 3 from your mind, which dramatically suggested the death of series protagonist Lightning McQueen. A new video from the Film Theorists attempts to make that death much more visceral, suggesting that it is not a sentient machine that we will be watching die, but instead a living…
The first teaser for the upcoming Coco starts out on a small scale: A boy strums a guitar while watching footage of a star of yesteryear. But, as is the norm for Pixar, what seems like an intimate tale soon goes grand. By the time the hero—a Mexican boy named Miguel (Anthony Gonzalez)—is transported to the Land of the…
Pixar originally wanted Billy Crystal to voice Buzz Lightyear in its first feature, 1995’s Toy Story (Crystal turned it down and the part went to Tim Allen). The animation studio went so far as to put some When Harry Met Sally dialogue into a piece of custom-made animation, tailored to Crystal’s character freaking out…
As Star Wars: The Last Jedi recently proved, there’s a lot of nuance involved in translating a film for international audiences. (While the English version of The Last Jedi is vague, the modified adjectives of the French, German, and Spanish translations reveal the term “Jedi” is plural.) This new video from the…
In his collection Movies R Fun!: A Collection Of Cinematic Classics For The Pre-(Film) School Cinephile, Pixar story supervisor Josh Cooley reimagined iconic moments from R-rated classics in the style of a children’s book. Now, Reddit has compiled a gallery of some of the book’s drawings, which feature scenes from the…
Given the money-driven, cynical nature of the film industry, it’s really no surprise that with every financial success story comes a gaggle of pretenders ripping off the idea in order to grab their own piece of the box-office pie. These so-called “mockbusters” are essentially cheaply made movies that capitalize on the…
