In a recent Bloomberg article, Pixar’s chief creative officer Pete Docter stated that the company will be shifting its focus away from semi-autobiographical films that draw strong influence from their directors’ lives. This change comes largely as a response to the financial failures of 2021’s Luca and 2022’s Turning Red (grossing only $51.1 million and $21.8 million respectively) and the initially shaky financial performance of 2023’s Elemental. (It should be noted though that after an extended summer 2023 theatrical run, Elemental did go on to gross $469.4 million). Going forward, Pixar will be favoring the production of films with mass appeal as well as sequels.
And this, I have to say, is quite a travesty. Turning Red is easily one of my favorite animated films from the past few years. Meanwhile, some of Pixar’s mass appeal, safe sequels such as Finding Dory and The Incredibles 2 thoroughly disappointed me. A future of sequels and focus tested films douses my excitement for any films that Pixar has in the pipeline.
Autobiographical films will never be 100% relatable to viewers, that is true. But no piece of media is ever 100% relatable to its audience. What matters is that the ultra-specific details of a film rest on a foundation of core ideas and emotions that ARE relatable to the audience. Take Turning Red for example. Mei’s duties to her family’s shrine and her obsession with 4Town are quite specific. However, they are spawned from the unifying themes of entering young adulthood, of developing your own identity that is not just an extension of your parents’, and of you discovering ideals and interests that may actively clash with those of your parents. I may not have spent my teen years doing obligatory upkeep of a family relic or obsessing over a boyband that my mother despised, but I DID spend my teen years dedicating myself to the piano to keep my mother happy while also burying my face in videogames that my family thought were frivolous. (Now, I did go on to develop a great love for piano that I still hold to this day, but that is beside the point).
Similarly, Luca’s titular protagonist alongside his friend Alberto find themselves staying in an Italian town that despises sea monsters. They are sea monsters. They are, quite naturally, extremely nervous about being in this town. Nobody in the audience is a sea monster, of course. And only a small fraction of the audience lives in Genoa or a similar town. But everybody can relate to a fear that being different will lead to their ostracization. Everyone can understand the act of hiding something about themselves from others, worried that revealing the truth would lead to retaliation or shame. I mean, come on, this type of phenomenon is part of the human condition. I sure felt it before telling my family that I’m gay. We’ve all felt it for one reason or another. And there’s no way you can tell me that the Italian setting and the sea monsters make it impossible to relate to Luca and Alberto. Docter and other Pixar staff are vastly underestimating the intelligence of audiences. It’s absurd and insulting.
On the other hand, chasing mass-appeal often creates a slurry that may be semi-palatable to many but never truly endearing. When you spend your time trying to check off as many audience demographics or story tropes as you can from a list, you muddle the heart and soul of whatever it is you are creating. It is impossible for a genuinely incredible piece of art to be appealing to everyone. Artistic and storytelling tastes are just too diverse- changing a work to accommodate one will inevitably make the work worse for another taste. There is NO point in attempting it. Quite simply, if you attempt to appeal to everyone, you will appeal to no one. It’s the same fate that many large video game franchises suffer: games are focus tested into oblivion to make sure they have something for everyone and hit on all the popular mechanical and logistical features. When they are released, they are painfully bland and mediocre, their bold ideas and unique features having been whittled away out of fear that some players won’t enjoy them.
In addition to all this discussion of storytelling, I don’t think that Luca and Turning Red are being judged fairly. Yes, they are financial flops. They grossed only fractions of not just Pixar’s most financially successful films, but even of other films that Pixar considers to be financial failures in and of themselves (see The Good Dinosaur’s $332.2 million). However, they were thrown onto losing battlefields with the odds stacked against them. Due to the COVID pandemic, both films were denied proper theatrical runs and instead released directly to Disney+. They went without the excitement and “officialness” that films receive when debuting in theaters. They went without the benefit of an eager child dragging their whole familiar to the theater and leading them to purchase multiple tickets. They went without groups of Disney adults meeting up at the theater to watch them. They went without the bundles of ticket sales that result from birthday parties at movie theaters.
Instead, they were unceremoniously dumped into an ocean of preexisting content in which they had to fight just to keep their heads above water. And of course, they had to contend with the stench of being direct-to-streaming movies. Regardless of a film’s actual quality, it’s hard to deny that being released directly-to-streaming reeks of cheapness and mediocrity. Disney spent a good chunk of the late 90s and early to mid 2000s releasing subpar, direct-to-video sequels such as Mulan II, Cinderella II: Dreams Come True, and Kronk’s New Groove. The films left a bitter taste in many kids’ mouths and these kids, now grown adults, no doubt remembered those negative experiences when seeing that Pixar was releasing films straight to Disney+.
I can’t emphasize enough how backwards of a direction I think this is for Pixar. The studio is blaming recent films’ poor financial performances on factors that are completely unrelated to the quality of said films. Meanwhile, they are ignoring the true reason for their failure. Pixar set up Luca and Turning Red to fail. It’s almost like they made them specifically to create excuses to slack off.
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