Flow (2024)
[9] Flow, one of the most cinematic and meaningful animated films ever made, takes place in an unknown world and unknown time, where a cat must learn to trust animals of other species in order to survive a great flood.…
Rango (2011)
[7] A pet chameleon named Rango (voiced by Johnny Depp) gets lost in the desert where he stumbles upon a drought-stricken town in need of a sheriff. He fakes his way into the job and enjoys playing the part until…
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
[7] New York teenager Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) is bitten by a radioactive spider and begins developing powers just like Spider-Man. He meets the real Spider-Man (Chris Pine) during an encounter with a villain named Kingpin (Liev Schreiber), who is…
Coco (2017)
[9] Coco is a lively and emotionally fulfilling film that stands proudly among the many accomplishments of Pixar Animation. Anthony Gonzalez plays the role of 12-year-old Miguel, a boy with a deep passion for music, despite his family's strict prohibition…
Toy Story 3 (2010)
[8] It's been 11 years since Toy Story 2, and the same amount of time has passed in Buzz and Woody's world. Andy is now heading off to college and the toys' fates are up in the air. Will they…
Inside Out (2015)
[5] Pixar usually moves me with some genuine human emotion, but Inside Out is a little more sentimental and pandering than many of their other films. The big cry moment is a cheap, low blow, is what I mean to…
Frozen (2013)
[8]
Disney’s Frozen borrows ideas from Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen and follows closely in the footsteps of Tangled before it, but it’s also a bit more. For one thing, there’s an interesting sister dynamic at play here. One royal daughter, Anna (voiced by Kristen Bell), is the care-free sort, while the older daughter Elsa (Wicked‘s Idina Menzel) is born with a curse – the power to turn things into ice. After a childhood display of her magical powers nearly kills Anna, Elsa hides herself away for fear of hurting anyone. That’s all prelude. The story proper takes off when Anna inadvertently upsets Elsa on her coronation day. When the citizens of Arendelle discover their queen is a sorceress, they freak, she freaks, and a hard snow comes to fall. Elsa flees the kingdom and builds an ice castle for herself on the side of a mountain, leaving it up to little sister to later beg her for a return to warmer times.
WALL-E (2008)
[9]
My favorite Pixar film features two robots who say little more than each others’ names, but somehow, as if by magic, WALL-E manages to convey more emotion than films that try twice as hard to do so. There’s a charming purity in the characters of WALL-E and EVE, who to differing degrees struggle against their ‘directives’ to form a bond. The fact that these two odd ‘bots end up protecting the last sliver of life on Earth — a tiny plant — could have been cloying, but Pixar knows how to handle the material. When WALL-E finds the fragile vine, he simply collects it in an old shoe and places it on a shelf with other artifacts of a bygone era. 