In Laman's Terms: The Visual Stagnancy of Modern-Day PIXAR Fare

The Good Dinosaur has helped to establish a style of animation that dominates too many modern-day PIXAR films. Curse you Arlo!

In Laman's Terms is a weekly editorial column where Douglas Laman rambles on about certain topics or ideas that have been on his mind lately. Sometimes he's got serious subjects to discuss, other times he's just got some silly stuff to shoot the breeze about. Either way, you know he's gonna talk about something In Laman's Terms!

Did you see the trailer for Sony Pictures Animation's new release Connected? It actually looks good! No bathroom humor, surprisingly natural voice turns from Abbi Jacobson and Danny McBride and, best of all, a unique animation style. The characters don't just look like they wandered off an assembly line, they're using hand-drawn animation to accentuate the emotions of the protagonist and I like how the sleek robotic antagonists are meant to contrast with the scrappier stop-motion-esque appearance of the human leads. Following Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and even Hotel Transylvania 3 (yes, really), Connected looks like another example of Sony Pictures Animation trying their hand at utilizing a different animation style for each of their new projects.


It's a bold visual approach that makes me yearn for PIXAR Animation Studios to try their hand at embracing a greater level of visual versatility across their individual projects. In recent years, PIXAR's default animation approach has been to simply have extremely stylized characters inhabit ultra-realistic environments. PIXAR's always loved their highly believable computer-animated worlds through projects like WALL-E but this specific mixture of stylized protganists with realistic environments was pioneered with the 2013 short film The Blue Umbrella before being an integral part of The Good Dinosaur. Since then, it's quietly become the de facto visual approach for all of PIXAR's movies, save for the occasional Coco and its vibrantly colorful land of the dead. 

Even Onward, an alternate version of Earth inhabited by fantasy creatures, frequently utilized realistically-rendered urban locales you could find across the street from your home. Such locations are impressive on a technical level, certainly, and there are stories, like last years I Lost My Body, that call for an animation style that juxtaposes realism with cartoony elements. However, PIXAR relying almost exclusively on this approach is a problem for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it feels antithetical to the point of animation as a whole. Whether we're talking about The Fabulous Baron Munchausen or Osmosis Jones, animation has always been used to create environments and characters you couldn't replicate in the real world.

Meanwhile, recent PIXAR fare has too often leaned on uber-realism for their backgrounds that don't really say much about the distinct identity and themes of the movie they inhabit. Heck, I must ask, do they really offer much more than a nifty modern-day tech demo when compared to older animation techniques? There's a scene in Cars 3 where the two lead characters, Lightning McQueen (Owen Wilson) and Cruz Ramirez (Cristela Alonso), engage in a race on a beach. All over the internet, you can find quotes from the behind-the-scenes team on Cars 3 bragging about how they made each particle of the sand in an effort to make this locale as realistic as possible.

That's cool but what does it actually add to the sequence? All of that detail and it doesn't add anything new to the characters, the story or the themes of Cars 3. You could have just incorporated the far more simplified hand-drawn beach backgrounds of Ali Baba Bunny and gotten the same effect. PIXAR is constantly chasing realism in its background animation at the expense of embracing the more stylized artistic tendencies that tend to make animated filmmaking so interesting. To boot, applying this practice to the majority of their recent output ensures that there isn't as much visual variety as there should be from one PIXAR movie to the next. That's an issue that compounds already-existing issues regarding the lack of visual variety in PIXAR fare stemming from the studios' recent emphasis on sequels.

Follow-ups like Finding Dory and Toy Story 4 can't deviate from the visual sensibilities from their predecessors beyond making textures look smoother than they did in 2010. Through relying so heavily on sequels in the last decade, PIXAR has eschewed the chance for new approaches to computer-animation to emerge in their works. Instead, a sense of visual stagnancy has taken hold in the studios' recent output that even extends to their original works like Onward. That film actually has a lot of great visual flourishes stemming from embracing the fantastical possibilities of its fantasy world. There's also some extremely well-executed pieces of subtle body langauge that help to sell its two primary lead characters as dramatically engaging figures.

However, even here, Onward can't help but have derivative character designs (much has already been made about how Tom Holland's elf character Ian Lightfoot looks like a purple-skinned Linguini) as well as their go-to method of ultra-realistic environments housing cartoony looking characters. It's an aspect of Onward that reflects a lack of bold choices made in the visuals of so many recent PIXAR productions. That's especially disappointing given that glimpses of more audacious visual decisions made in a handful of recent PIXAR efforts. The aforementioned Inside Out and Coco embraced stylized visual choices that made each production totally feel like their own thing. Meanwhile, short films like Sanjay's Super Team and Kitbull have seen PIXAR artists not only go for heightened visuals but even embrace entire other mediums of animation like hand-drawn animation. If the likes of Sanjay and Kitbull could be the guiding star for the visuals seen in PIXAR movies in the future, maybe the studio could start taking as bold of visual risks as the most recent Sony Pictures Animation titles.

Me advising PIXAR to take some cues from the studio responsible for The Emoji Movie...who would have ever imagined that happening?