All 26 Pixar Movies, Ranked From ‘Cars 2’ to the Best
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First, a little history.
Pixar’s 27-year feature-length movie arc spans roughly three distinct eras. The first, between 1995 and 2004 (Toy Story to The Incredibles), might be called Pixar’s Golden Age. These first films began after a $26 million deal between Pixar and Disney to produce three computer-animated films. (Each film pushed animation into new spaces, including character design, hair and textures, along with elements like fire and water.) Pixar and Disney would make six films under this partnership, which soon became tenuous when Pixar began shopping for a new distribution partner. In 2006, a deal was reached, and Disney acquired Pixar, with Pixar chief John Lasseter taking over.
Between 2004 and 2006, however, Pixar and Disney almost parted ways, leading Pixar’s creative team to begin making films that intentionally broke from the Disney mold. These films would populate Pixar’s second era, lasting until 2010 (and including more ambitious movies like WALL-E, Up, and Ratatouille.)
After Toy Story 3 in 2010, Pixar entered its current era, which, creatively, could be cleaved into two subcategories: the sequels and the experimental new properties. The latter category included films like Coco and Inside Out, storylines that featured more abstract world-building and internalist philosophies. This category includes films that showcase conflicts of identity and purpose, with attempts to visualize things like anxiety (Inside Out), memory (Coco) and puberty (Turning Red).
Turning Red, a concept that in previous eras would have been scrapped or widened in its scope, instead attempts something more culturally and sexually specific. Regardless of the payoff (and it’s hard separating coded from genuine criticism for this one), Turning Red, and this era of Pixar, certainly doesn’t lack ambition. It does, however, seem to slip more often than it soars. (With films like Lightyear and Luca folding into the Played It Too Safe box and its many attempted non-Toy-Story sequels fading even from Miguel's memory.)
Which brings us to Elemental, Pixar’s 27th feature-length film. Does the movie suggest movement into a new era for Pixar? Probably not. For better or worse, Pixar still seems to be searching for its next crop of innovative stories and storytellers.
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Until we get to that new era, here’s an attempted ranking of all Pixar’s films thus far.
Cars 2 (2011)
Pixar's third era kicked off with a masterpiece and proceeded into a swamp of misfit sequels. The Cars franchise seems to have suffered the most from these attempts. They aren't bad films, necessarily. (Pixar doesn't really make bad bad movies.) It's just unneeded.
Cars 3 (2017)
Somehow, like the Fast and the Furious franchise this movie poster seems to parody, Cars just kept plowing ahead with another sequel. The animation is fantastic. But it's just another highway we could have skipped in this life.
The Good Dinosaur (2015)
Its creationism implication aside, The Good Dinosaur hits all the cross species friendship notes at which Pixar excels. It's a fun movie. It's cute. We're sure it sold a lot of dino merch.
Lightyear (2022)
For one thing, Lightyear looks amazing. If this is the future of Pixar animation, we're big fans. It's just that the storyline ended up being kind of ... boring? It lacks so much of the ambition that made Pixar's previous work so compelling. We think it's time Pixar put the toys on the shelf for good.
Monsters University (2013)
The movie carries much of the charm of the first film, but, as with Lightyear and the Cars sequels, we can't help feeling a little oversold on the Monster world. A better addition to the Pixar library, but more proof that Pixar hasn't quite figured out prequel directions.
Finding Dory (2016)
It's strong competition between the next two sequel movies. Both, however, totally escape our memories. (No irony here intended.) Finding Dory works more as a companion piece to the first than a standalone film. Nevertheless, it's one of Pixar's better story continuations of its Golden Age work.
Incredibles 2 (2018)
The longest wait for a sequel leads to maybe Pixar's strongest follow-up. While it spends a bit too much time with the family fragmented (we want team action!), Incredibles 2 still feels like a worthy sequel. Its only shortcoming is having to compete with one of the best Pixar movies ever.
Onward (2020)
Okay, we've made it out of the (non Toy Story) sequel era. The next couple movies, despite their overly-treaded storylines and themes, nevertheless signal attempts at new content. (And so we're putting them a bit lower than Dory; deal with it.) If nothing else, Onward is a fun addition to the Pixar catalogue.
Luca (2021)
There's absolutely nothing wrong with Luca. While cannibalizing concepts from already-successful Disney/Pixar movies, the film hits all the right notes. And while it leads to a completely expected conclusion, the story remains fun—and the animation looks amazing. Again, not the most ambitious, but still a great ride.
Toy Story 4 (2018)
Back to some sequels. In many ways, Toy Story is the only franchise Pixar has been able to spin into new and interesting directions after its first entry (and the only franchise to make improvements, which maybe isn't so hard considering it was their very first franchise). Toy Story 4 is maybe not as strong as its earlier installments, but, hey, it's probably one of the best movies with a "4" in the title.
Toy Story 2 (1999)
Toy Story's first follow up appeared just four years after the original, putting it squarely within that first Pixar era of animation innovation. Which makes it one of the studio's classics and paves the way for what's maybe one of Pixar's best movies of all time.
Brave (2012)
Brave, or: if Pixar decided to make a Disney princess movie. The result: a fun, empowering, and impressively animated work of action adventure. It makes us want Pixar to step on Disney's narrative turf a bit more often.
Cars (2006)
We spent a lot of time dunking on the sequels, so let's give the first Cars movie a little love. When Cars first appeared, it represented maybe the farthest step from human-like character design for the studio. And they nailed it. Cars is as fun, ambitious, and memorable as any of Pixar's Golden Age films.
A Bug's Life (1998)
Back to the classic era. Maybe it's a movie about friendship and teamwork. Maybe it's about collective labor organization and anti-fascist resistance. Whatever it is, A Bug's Life truly takes us back, and still stands up to the dozens of animated works from any studio since.
Turning Red (2022)
Pixar’s most recent era of animation is defined by a kind of philosophical internalsim—that is, an interest in those motivations, desires, fears, anxieties that make us all do what we do. Turning Red attempts to visualize a specific bundle of those tensions called, well, puberty. (While the film isn’t necessarily explicitly about puberty, it’s also not not explicitly about puberty.) And the film’s choice to explore these things within a more specific story about filial and cultural expectations make Turning Red one of Pixar’s more ambitious films, even if it wasn’t one everyone loved.
Monsters, Inc. (2001)
Every Pixar movie is somehow about the anxieties of childhood, but Monsters Inc. goes for a very particular anxiety of childhood—and that’s nighttime fear. Which is a pretty ambitious approach to begin with. But the movie goes even farther. It takes the under-the-bed fright of childhood and constructs a whole world in order to explain that fright. And then it crafts a story inside this world. Truly one of the best children’s movies ever made.
WALL·E (2008)
Written during Pixar's transition era and featuring one of Pixar's greatest animation challenges—anchoring a story with a minimally-expressive, non-verbal trash robot—WALL·E is an absolute knockout of storytelling and character design. (It's also, thematically, the most relevant Pixar movie to date.) We could put this one a bit farther down, but there are just too many damn classics to ignore.
Ratatouille (2007)
Another transition era masterpiece: Ratatouille. Whereas WALL·E had the challenge of making a robot expressive, Ratatouille needed to make a rat in the kitchen both cute and also, somehow, desirable. The result is a no-doubt weird, but totally original movie that has a lot of surprisingly deep things to say about talent, art, and partnership.
Finding Nemo (2003)
As far as we’re concerned, the next three films can be shuffled in whatever order one sees fit. They represent something like the peak of Pixar’s original storytelling. First, Finding Nemo, which took the studio underwater and began swimming around some pretty hardcore themes, like death and separation and parental overbearingness. (It’s also one of the few Pixar films based around the story’s parental figure.) One of the studio’s best.
The Incredibles (2004)
The Incredibles precedes, by quite a few years, cinema’s superhero mania. Which might make the film feel dated. Instead, it’s still one of the best of the genre. In fact, The Incredibles, Pixar’s first film to be anchored by human characters, seems to represent that golden moment of animation where every frame, every character movement, reinforces its story. It’s a masterpiece from start to finish.
Toy Story (1995)
Toy Story deserves the praise not just for being the studio’s first film and, therefore, the story that made all other stories possible. (Which it did.) It deserves recognition, also, because Toy Story is the perfect of first stories. While the animation may dip into the uncanny valley by today’s standards, the storyline introduces all those platonic feelings that first separated Pixar from Disney and charted a path for decades of animated innovation. It also sets up a clever way for Pixar to teach us how to say goodbye. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Coco (2017)
At a certain moment in Pixar’s history, it became somewhat obvious that the narratives needed to expand a bit culturally. While Coco still retains the underlying monomythic structure of all Pixar properties, its design, metaphysics, and driving narrative engine are all inspired by Mexican culture and festivity. The result is maybe the most visually-striking and emotionally-mature works in the studio’s catalogue.
Inside Out (2015)
The movie at the heart (or, rather, brain) of Pixar’s current era of storytelling is Inside Out, a story about all those things that have been driving Pixar stories since they were uncanny toys on the shelf. We’re talking about feelings. While Turning Red explores this externally, Inside Out goes within its characters to explain those external behaviors. (So maybe it should have been called Outside In?) The result is a film that we think more or less set the course for Pixar’s current era, one we’d love to see continue shooting for this kind of ambitious storytelling.
Up (2009)
Yes, yes that opening sequence—storyboard magic. But Up, another outside-the-box transitional Pixar product, should get a bit more credit for its story than just this initial beat. Whereas so many other films on this list focus on family, and mostly of the nuclear kind, Up is driven by a kind of parental surrogacy. It’s about the families that are chosen, and the connections made despite age, species, and grumpy dispositions.
Soul (2020)
Soul is without a doubt the best of Pixar's current era of films. In the most reductionist of descriptions, the movie is about death, which makes it just as ambitious as any on this list. But the film doesn't overthink, nor does it stray from Pixar's core formula of feel-good animated adventure. Soul is exactly the kind of life-affirming, art-affirming work of storytelling we come to Pixar year after year to inject into our cold, cynical adult veins. The high has never felt so good.
Toy Story 3 (2010)
After dunking on all the sequels, we’re happy to admit that at least one really earned its keep. While it wouldn’t be the last of the franchise, Toy Story 3 acts as something of a curtain call, both for Pixar’s early era of animation, as well as its original characters. It packages all of Pixar’s most Pixar of themes—including family’s labors of love, the enduring bonds of friendship, and the anxieties of change and maturation—and teaches us that some things, like toys, like childhood, like a particular animation era, must be left behind.
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